Director Tod Browning was manner forward of his time in depicting sideshow acts as totally fleshed-out, sympathetic characters for many of “Freaks.” Nonetheless, within the movie’s climax, he depends on the extra sensationalist preconceptions of the freaks of the title, the place they take their revenge on the couple who’ve been poisoning certainly one of their group.
The homicide of circus strongman Hercules is maybe essentially the most controversial scene, because the vengeful performers pursue him by means of the rain, brandishing knives and straight razors. Within the movie’s current kind, he’s killed offscreen, however within the authentic reduce, his destiny is even nastier. Deleted scenes, now misplaced eternally, closely implied that he was castrated, as evidenced by a scene exhibiting him now singing in a chilling falsetto.
The movie in its authentic reduce was so controversial that an viewers member at a check screening threatened to sue MGM for inflicting her miscarriage. It was eviscerated by critics, with one reviewer predicting the oncoming manufacturing code in his evaluation, saying: “In Freaks the flicks make their nice step towards nationwide censorship. In the event that they get it, they’ll have nobody accountable however themselves.”
As a pre-code movie, “Freaks” might get away with nastier scenes than these made within the Golden Age. Nonetheless, it nonetheless confronted censorship and was banned in some areas, together with the UK, the place it solely turned accessible in 1963. It had ramifications as effectively for Browning, whose profession by no means recovered.