Underground Counterculture Cult Film: “Freaks” (1932) 16mm/Sound | Berkeley

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Underground Film Night: Obscure Super 8 & 16mm Movies | Berkeley

The Berkeley Underground Film Society (BUFS) is an all ages club for collectors, researchers, and film enthusiasts in the East Bay and San Francisco area.

Their goal is to review and share a selective film history of movies on film.

Every Sunday, they screen buried, rarely projected, or otherwise obscure 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm prints from their collection.

Sunday, June 2, 2013
Freaks (1932) 16mm/Sound | Underground Film Night: Obscure Super 8 & 16mm Movies | Berkeley

A beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Director Tod Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow “freaks,” rather than using costumes and makeup. Browning had been a member of a traveling circus in his early years, and much of the film was drawn from his personal experiences.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Freaks was rediscovered as a counterculture cult film, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the film was regularly shown at midnight movie screenings at several movie theaters in the United States. In 1994, Freaks was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Director: Tod Browning
Writer: Clarence Aaron ‘Tod’ Robbins (story)
Stars: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams and Olga Baclanova

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