Artist's Choice Screening: Dundead presents Freaks

Andrew Gannon has selected Freaks as his Artist's Choice Screening for We Contain Multitudes . He says - 

Tod Browning's Freaks, a film set in the world of a travelling sideshow, was banned by the BBFC until 1963, and is often thought of as an early example of the body shock horror genre. It was banned simply because it showed disabled bodies, disabled actors in disabled roles. The majority of the cast in fact are disabled, something we haven't really seen on screen since. 

While the depiction of disabled people is enough for the film to be categorized as horror, what is notable is within the story it is the non-disabled characters who are horrific. The film depicts the non-stop ableism the "freaks" endure. Worth noting again that cinema has since codified disability in such ways to be synonymous with evil or villainy etc. What is also important is that by the end of Freaks not a single person has "triumphed" over the "tragedy" of their disability. Perhaps this is the film's most shocking aspect, that its largely disabled cast of characters are happy in who they are.