Freaks

The cinema grew out of the fairground and its sideshows. Throughout history, freaks were commonly put on show in travelling fairs - giants and dwarfs, thin men and fat ladies, Siamese twins and people with two heads, man-beasts and fish-women. When Melies first developed the cinema of magic with outsize heads that exploded, monsters at the North Pole, and gigantic Devils, the early cinema seemed just another novelty, a superior sideshow. Many of the early cinema distributors in America were fairground people, looking out for the extraordinary to pull in the crowds. Out of this tradition grew the Cinema of the Bizarre. For by cutting and close-up, distorted lens and optical tricks, the cinema could make far more grotesque freaks than men ever could.

From *The Phantom of the Opera* to *The Hunchback ofNotre Dame*, from *The Man Who Laughs* to that masterpiece of the Cinema of the Bizarre - Tod Browning’s little-seen *Freaks*, movies were made that used the human obsession to see the deformed and the unusual. It was this tradition that became a staple of the cinema in the monster movie, that could so easily make a Cyclops on the screen or a Living Doll. The atomic age, of course, made man-monsters the product of radio-active mutation, but they were really still the old sideshow attractions, that have thrilled every adventurous child - and his father too.