Todd Browning directed this film called Freaks. He's always been fascinated with carnivals and I believe made some silent movies about them with Lon Chaney. But much of Chaney's film work is gone, because the practice in the day was for Hollywood to recycle the film, and reuse it rather than archive movies.

Todd Browning, of course, was the official director of the 1931 Dracula with Béla Lugosi, with whom he worked earlier in a film based on a popular mystery thriller play called The 13th Chair, with Lugosi as a police inspector. Many felt Karl Freund really directed the best parts Dracula. Helen Chandler remembered getting a lot of direction from the German chief camera man. Freund did later direct the Mummy with Boris Karloff, and Mad Love with Peter Lorre in his first starring role in an American film. Later Freund was called out of retirement by a very insistent Desi Arnez to be in charge of the cameras for I Love Lucy, where they required three mobile cameras, several sets, and a studio audience, rather than the one fixed camera on simple and closed sets of regular TV at the time.

Of course Dracula type-casted Lugosi, David Manners who played the hero (he was on loan from Paramount Studios) eventually left Hollywood to run a hotel for stars, and later became a popular writer of mysticism, felt he had to leave Hollywood because he was an active gay man. Dwight Frye (Renfield), died in his late 40's, in front of his young son, on a city bus. He had just landed a major part after a long dry spell and it wasn't horror. But the press said he was a mechanic in his obituary, since that was how he supported himself. Garrett Fort who adapted the film from the play written by Hamilton Deane, and later John Balderston became an occultist, but ended up committing suicide. Job offers dried up for Helen Chandler, although she was only twenty, she went through a series of marriages, alcoholism, and eventually died in 1965, on the operating table, and she was only fifty nine. To this day her cremated ashes have never been claimed.

But Dracula was made at Universal, then at some point Browning went back to MGM (where he worked with Chaney) to make Freaks.

Harry Earles who played the cuckolded midget of the movie Freaks, was actually responsible for coming up with much of the story. The movie had been banned in much of the world until the last 20 years or so.

What disturbed people was, Browning used real freaks. The story presented them as sympathetic, likable people whose world was intruded upon by the "normal" people. It put the audience in the awkward position of liking the freaks, but gawking at them too, like the rubes in the carnival. This vicarious identification was too much. The ending was considered too ruthless as the freaks got their revenge. But it paved the way for later British horror typified by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), which was also banned, at least in English territories. When the ban was lifted twenty years later some felt it didn't compare to Psycho, which also came out in 1960 but later in the year, or to the splatter movies than current. The spatter movies were by then also using the camera as the killer's point of view so the audience could easily imagine themselves slaughtering young teens in the woods, but was by then a cliche.