What is the common definition of a horror film? There is the "classic" female victim screaming her head off while running down a dark alley horror film, there is the suspenseful jump-scare style horror film, or just another gory horror film with stabbings and shootings as far as the eye can see. The film Freaks is a horror film that is horrific in context. As a viewer of the 1930s, seeing a film that spotlighted the acts of a circus that were simply used for entertainment, being viewed as real socialites who experience the same intrinsic feelings that "normal people" do, would be quite unnerving and uncomfortable. In scene where the "freaks" are avenging Hans from being poisoned by Cleopatra and Hercules, they are crawling through the mud making themselves seem like the creatures that the audience is comfortable characterizing them as, rendering them as horrific as they have initially believed before empathizing with their feelings during the first half of the film.
Although the film was very...unusual and hard to understand at some points I enjoyed the variety and difference in the nature of the horror that was portrayed. Profoundly unusual.
I agree with what you are saying Andy. I also wrote about the same idea as that now we wouldn't even think of categorizing this as a horror film but back in the 30's things were defiantly different and people didn't even know what actual horror could end up looking like, which is now what we are used to seeing. Gory, brutal happenings. Yeah, at the end the viewer finally saw these "freaks" in the light that they had always wanted to see them in, or lack of light anyways. Which good, they deserved to act that way after all the horrible ways they had been treated their whole life dealing with people like Cleo.
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