The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of pre-Code curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society’s most downtrodden.

TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

New 2K digital restoration of Freaks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
New 2K digital reconstruction and restoration of The Unknown by the George Eastman Museum, with a new score by composer Philip Carli
New 2K digital restoration of The Mystic, with a new score by composer Dean Hurley
Audio commentaries on Freaks and The Unknown and an introduction to The Mystic by film scholar David J. Skal
New interview with author Megan Abbott about director Tod Browning and pre-Code horror
Archival documentary on Freaks
Episode from 2019 of critic Kristen Lopez’s podcast Ticklish Business about disability representation in Freaks
Reading by Skal of “Spurs,” the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks is based
Prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film in 1947
Program on the alternate endings to Freaks
Video gallery of portraits from Freaks
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
YEAR: 1925–1932
RATING: NR
B&W
RUN TIME: 204 MINUTES

PLUS: An essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme"

Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers

Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers: Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)