Freaks
Fresh off the massive success of Dracula (1931), director Tod Browning was tasked by MGM’s production chief, Irving Thalberg, to create a movie that would out-terrify Universal Studios’ booming monster franchise. He chose to adapt ‘Spurs’, a short story by Tod Robbins that was first published in the February 1923 issue of Munsey’s Magazine. It was a property Browning had convinced MGM to buy the rights for in 1925, but the project stalled. Browning temporarily left MGM to film Dracula for Universal Pictures, and watching Universal print money with their horror output, MGM’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, called upon Browning to make a film that would “out horror Frankenstein”. Browning dusted off the script for ‘Spurs.’ and when Thalberg read the treatment, he lamented: “Well, I asked for something horrible, and I guess I got it.” Despite his reservations, Thalberg greenlit the project, and Browning used real life sideshow performers, sending talent scouts across the US to hire human oddities. The result was Freaks (1932) and the resulting controversy was immediate. Test screenings were a disaster with people reportedly running from the theater. In a state of panic, MGM drastically slashed the film’s runtime from 90 minutes down to a disjointed 64 minutes, permanently destroying the excised footage to appease the censors.
Speaker Bio:
Johnny Mains has been writing a book on Freaks for the past decade, collecting as much information as he can about every aspect of the making of the film. For his talk, he opens up his archive to reveal three different versions of the script, talks through everything that was cut, dives deep into the shady world of Hollywood finances, revealing the film actually made more money than anyone expected, and the lengths he has gone to in trying to track down the ‘missing’ footage.
Johnny Mains is an editor, author and genre researcher. He currently works with the British Library, editing books for their Gilded Nightmare series.
You can find him at @johnnymains.co.uk over on Bluesky.
Hosted & Curated By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
