Freaks (1932): Why It Was Banned, What Was Cut, and Who the Cast Really Were

In January 1932, MGM previewed a new horror film to a test audience in San Diego. Halfway through, people started running for the exits. Not walking. Running.

The film was Freaks (1932). It was cut by a third before release, pulled from cinemas before it finished its run, banned in Britain until 1963 and sold off to a carnival exploitation distributor for $50,000. It ended the career of the man who had made Dracula the year before.

Ninety years later it is on the National Film Registry and Rotten Tomatoes has it at 95%. Here is what happened, what was lost, and who the people on screen really were.

• Release Date: 12 February 1932
• Director: Tod Browning
• Stars: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, and around 20 sideshow performers
• Box Office: $341,000 worldwide against a budget of over $300,000. MGM booked a $164,000 loss
• Runtime: 64 minutes (cut from 90 minutes)
• Awards: National Film Registry (1994)
• Based on: “Spurs,” a 1923 short story by Tod Robbins. MGM paid $8,000 for it
• Fun Fact: The Ramones’ “Pinhead” and Bill Griffith’s comic strip Zippy the Pinhead were both inspired by Schlitzie, one of the film’s performers

Why was Freaks (1932) banned?

Freaks was not banned by the Hays Office. It was made two years before the Production Code was enforced, in the period now called Pre-Code Hollywood. The censorship came from everywhere else.

MGM censored it first. After the San Diego preview, studio boss Irving Thalberg cut 26 minutes without telling Browning. One woman at the preview threatened to sue, claiming the film had caused a miscarriage.

Then the cities. Atlanta pulled it after complaints. MGM held the New York opening back until July. Canada’s censors called it “brutal and grotesque.” After the New York run ended in the summer of 1932, MGM withdrew the film entirely. It is the only MGM film ever pulled from release before it finished its domestic bookings.

Then Britain. The British Board of Film Censors refused a certificate outright in 1932. The film was not shown legally in the UK until August 1963, when it received an X. Thirty-one years.

The reason in every case was the same. Not violence, exactly. The film asked audiences to spend an hour with people they had only ever seen behind a rope at a carnival, then side with them. In 1932 that was more than most audiences could take.

What was cut from Freaks?

Browning’s cut ran about 90 minutes. The release version runs 64. Almost everything removed is lost.

What went:

• Most of the attack on Cleopatra. In the release version the performers crawl through the mud towards her with knives and the film cuts away. In the original, the attack happens under a lightning-struck tree and goes on much longer.
• Hercules’s castration. The strongman is caught by the performers and castrated. In Browning’s epilogue, he is shown singing falsetto in a sideshow.
• The original ending. Hercules sings, and beside him Cleopatra, mutilated into a “human duck,” quacks.
• Comedy scenes. Several sequences of the performers’ daily life were removed to shorten the film.

What was added to pad the runtime back out:

• A carnival barker prologue, in which a showman warns the crowd about what they are about to see.
• A new epilogue, in which Hans, now rich and ashamed, is visited by Frieda and reconciles with her. It is the only scene in the film that feels like it came from a different movie, because it did.

The cut footage was never archived. It is one of the most sought-after lost sequences in horror.

The story, including the ending

Hans, a performer with dwarfism, is engaged to Frieda, another performer. He falls for Cleopatra, the circus’s trapeze artist. Cleopatra finds him ridiculous until she learns he has inherited a fortune. She marries him.

At the wedding banquet the performers welcome her with a chant. She is drunk, disgusted, and kissing Hercules the strongman in front of her new husband. She calls the performers “dirty, slimy freaks.” Hans is humiliated.

Cleopatra and Hercules start poisoning Hans. He gets sicker. The performers notice. On a rainy night, as the caravans move on, they act. Hercules is chased down. Cleopatra runs into the woods and the performers follow with knives.

The ending. Cleopatra is shown in a sideshow pit. Her legs are gone, one eye is out, her hands have been turned into something like webbed feet, and her body is covered in feathers. The barker calls her the human duck. She quacks. Then the added epilogue: Hans in a mansion, Frieda at the door, an embrace.

The film never shows what the performers did to her. That is the point. Browning lets the audience imagine it, then shows the result.

Is Freaks a disturbing movie?

Yes, and not in the way the title suggests.

There is almost no blood. The violence happens off screen. What disturbs is the reversal. For an hour the film shows the performers doing ordinary things: a wedding, a birth, a proposal, a family argument, a man lighting a cigarette. It shows the beautiful trapeze artist and the muscular strongman as the monsters.

Then it asks you to cheer when the performers take revenge, and to feel what you feel when you see what they did.

Mark Kermode wrote in 2015 that “if there are ‘freaks’ on display here, they are not the versatile performers to whom the title seems to allude.” Andrew Sarris called it “one of the most compassionate films ever made.” Both are right, and the film is still hard to watch. Those things are not in conflict.

“One of us, gooble gobble”: the famous line

At the wedding banquet, the performers pass a loving cup around the table and chant as Cleopatra drinks:

“We accept her, we accept her. One of us, one of us. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble.”

It is the most quoted scene in the film and the one that has travelled furthest. The Ramones turned “gooble gobble” into “Gabba gabba hey” for their 1977 song “Pinhead.” The chant has been quoted in The Simpsons, South Park, The Wolf of Wall Street and Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Freak Show.

The scene works because the audience is being tested at the same time as Cleopatra. She fails. Most first-time viewers, if they are honest, feel some of what she feels. The rest of the film is about whose side you end up on.

Why do they chant “one of us” in The Wolf of Wall Street?

The “one of us, gooble gobble” chant in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is a direct quote of the wedding banquet in Freaks (1932). It comes in the conference-room scene where Jordan Belfort and his team plan the office party, Jordan tells the room to treat the hired little people with respect, and the brokers pound the table and chant the Freaks line back at him.

Scorsese knows exactly what he is quoting. In Freaks the chant is the most generous moment in the film, a room full of outsiders welcoming a stranger in. In The Wolf of Wall Street it comes out of the mouths of men who are planning to throw dwarfs at a Velcro target for sport. Same words, opposite meaning. That is the joke, and it is a nasty one on purpose.

There is a second layer most people miss. Paramount made a film called The Wolf of Wall Street in 1929, about a trader who corners the copper market and ruins everyone around him. Its female lead was Olga Baclanova, who played Cleopatra in Freaks three years later. The 1929 film is lost. Whether Scorsese had that in mind when he put the Freaks chant in his version, I cannot say, but I would bet on it.

Who the cast really were

Every performer in Freaks (1932) was working in sideshows and circuses when Browning cast them. Most had careers that lasted decades. Here are the people behind the billing.

I want to be careful here, and I would ask you to be too. Every name below belonged to a working professional who was better at their job than most actors in Hollywood. The easy way to write about the cast of Freaks is the way the 1932 poster did. I have tried not to. Real names, real careers, real dates, because that is what a cast list is for.

Harry and Daisy Earles (Hans and Frieda)

Brother and sister, born Kurt and Hilda Schneider in Stolpen, Germany. They were two of four siblings with dwarfism who performed as the Doll Family. Harry had worked with Browning before, in The Unholy Three (1925), and it was Harry who brought Browning the short story that became Freaks.

Both went on to play Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. All four siblings spent three decades with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, retired in 1958, and bought a house together in Sarasota, Florida. The last of them, Tiny, died in 2004.

Daisy and Violet Hilton (the Siamese twins)

Born in Brighton, England, in 1908, joined at the hip. Their mother’s employer took custody and put them on stage at the age of three. They toured Britain, Germany and Australia before reaching the US in 1916, and later shared vaudeville bills with Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin.

The year before Freaks, they sued their managers, won their freedom and $100,000 in damages, and set up their own revue. They made one more film, Chained for Life (1952). Their last performance was in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1961. A local grocery store hired them, on two full salaries, and built them a checkout station. They died of the Hong Kong flu in January 1969.

Johnny Eck (the Half-Boy)

Born in Baltimore in 1911 with sacral agenesis, which means his body ended at the ribcage. He weighed two pounds at birth. His twin brother Robert was born without the condition and spent his life as Johnny’s partner and manager.

Eck joined a magician’s sideshow at 12 and became famous for a one-armed handstand. He played a bird creature in three Tarzan films, conducted a 12-piece orchestra, and worked with the illusionist Rajah Raboid on a sawing-in-half act in which Johnny’s torso ran off the stage while the “legs” (a dwarf in trousers) chased it. Audiences screamed.

He and Robert retired to their Baltimore rowhouse, ran a penny arcade, and Johnny became a screen painter in the Baltimore folk tradition. A robbery in 1987 drove him out of public life. He died in 1991, aged 79.

Prince Randian (the Living Torso)

Born in British Guiana in 1871 without arms or legs. P.T. Barnum brought him to the US in 1889. He performed for more than 40 years, most of them at Coney Island.

His scene in Freaks is the one people remember from the daily-life sequences: he rolls a cigarette, strikes a match and lights it, using only his mouth. He could also paint, write and shave. He married, had five children, and settled the family in Paterson, New Jersey. He died in December 1934 after a performance in New York.

Schlitzie (himself)

Possibly born Simon Metz in 1901, though nobody is certain. He had microcephaly, stood about four feet tall, and had the cognitive development of a young child. He worked for Ringling Brothers and Clyde Beatty among others, often billed as “The Last of the Aztecs” and, in a dress for practical reasons, as “The Monkey Girl.”

His scenes in Freaks are among the film’s gentlest. In 1965 his guardian died and he was committed to a Los Angeles hospital. A sword swallower named Bill Unks, working at the hospital, recognised him, saw how unhappy he was, and got him released back into sideshow work. He performed until 1968 and died in 1971.

He is the source of the Ramones’ “Pinhead,” Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, a 2019 graphic novel, and a character in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The rest of the troupe

Angelo Rossitto, who leads the wedding chant, went on to a 50-year screen career and played the Master in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Frances O’Connor and Martha Morris, the “armless wonders,” performed everyday tasks with their feet. Peter Robinson was billed as the Human Skeleton. Olga Roderick was the Bearded Lady. Josephine Joseph was billed as Half Woman-Half Man. Koo Koo the Bird Girl, who dances on the wedding table, had a rare form of dwarfism. Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow, billed as Pip and Zip, had microcephaly like Schlitzie.

How Freaks (1932) was made

Thalberg had wanted a horror film to compete with Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, and Browning had directed Dracula. Browning wanted to make Freaks. Thalberg gave him a budget of $209,000, which grew past $300,000.

Stars were considered: Myrna Loy as Cleopatra, Jean Harlow as Venus, Victor McLaglen as Hercules. Thalberg decided against names and cast the Russian actress Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra instead.

Shooting ran 24 days in November and December 1931 on the MGM lot in Culver City. The studio did not cope well. MGM staff complained about sharing the commissary with the performers, and the studio put most of the cast in a separate tent so that, in the words of one account, “people could get to eat in the commissary without throwing up.” Only the Hilton sisters and the Earles were allowed in the main lot.

MGM’s own tagline when the film opened was defensive: “What about abnormal people? They have their lives, too!”

What happened to Tod Browning

Freaks ended Tod Browning’s career as a major director. He made four more films after it and retired in 1939.

Browning had made ten films with Lon Chaney and had just delivered Dracula, MGM’s rival’s biggest hit. He died in 1962, the year Freaks was shown at the Venice Film Festival and the reappraisal began. He did not live to see it.

Louis B. Mayer, who had never wanted the film, sold the distribution rights to Dwain Esper for $50,000 for 25 years. Esper was an exploitation showman who toured the film through carnivals and grindhouses under new titles: The Monster Story, Forbidden Love, Nature’s Mistakes. For three decades that was the only way to see it.

The reappraisal

The reviews in 1932 were brutal. Harrison’s Reports said anyone who considered the film entertainment “should be placed in the pathological ward in some hospital.” The Kansas City Star said “there is no excuse for this picture.” The Hollywood Reporter called it an “outrageous onslaught upon the feelings, the senses, the brains and the stomachs.”

A few dissented. The New Yorker’s John Mosher called it “a little gem” that gave the performers “their own lives and vanities and passions.” The New York Times found it “excellent at times and horrible.”

The turn came in Europe. Venice screened it in 1962. French critics, who had rediscovered Browning as an American Poe, championed it. Britain finally passed it in 1963. Through the 1970s it became a midnight movie in the US, and in 1994 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.

The scholarly reading now is that Freaks is an anti-eugenics film made at the height of the eugenics movement. It shows disabled people marrying, having children, arguing, celebrating, and working, and it makes the able-bodied characters the villains. In 1932 that was a provocation. It still is.

I side with Sarris. Freaks (1932) is a compassionate film with a cruel last five minutes, and the cruelty is a point Browning is making about the audience, not about the performers. If you only remember the human duck, you watched the wrong hour of the film.

Where to watch Freaks (1932)

Freaks (1932) is available on Blu-ray and 4K from the Criterion Collection, released in 2023 as part of the set Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers, alongside The Unknown and The Mystic. It appears periodically on the Criterion Channel and on TCM. Warner Bros. also issued a DVD.

The 64-minute release version is the only version that exists. Any listing that promises a longer cut is wrong.

Using this article in your classroom?

Teachers assign this one. If you are using it, here is a free two-page classroom pack:

Download: The Hays Code Classroom Pack (PDF)

It has the Production Code’s rules in plain language, a timeline from 1922 to 1968, three myths corrected, five discussion questions, and a worksheet comparing a Pre-Code film with a Code film. Freaks works well as the Pre-Code half of that comparison. Link to this page rather than copying it, so your students always get the current version.

FAQs about Freaks (1932)

The Final Cut on Freaks (1932)

The word in the title was MGM’s. Browning’s film spends an hour arguing against it.

Watch it for the daily-life scenes, not the ending. Prince Randian lighting a cigarette. The Hilton sisters fielding a marriage proposal. Schlitzie in a new dress. These are not horror scenes. They are the reason the horror works.

Then read about what was cut, and ask what kind of film ran people out of a cinema in 1932. The answer is not the one the poster promised.

For the wider story of what Hollywood could show before the censors arrived, start with our guide to Pre-Code Hollywood.