IT WOULD be unthinkable for a film like Tod Browning’s 1932 cult shocker ‘Freaks’ to be made today. After disastrous test screenings (where one audience member tried to sue MGM on the grounds that the movie had caused her to have a miscarriage), it was censored down from the full 90 minutes to a supposedly more palatable 64-minute version. And yet, the public outcry on its general release was still enough to end Browning’s career overnight.
The fact that his film (which vividly portrayed the lives of a group of carnival sideshow performers) has now been recognised as an indictment of a corrupt, exploitative system has come decades too late, and is of no use to Browning, who never managed to re-emerge from the shadow of his disgrace.
He made the film in a period known as ‘pre-Code Hollywood’, which refers to the years between silent and talking movies, when the guidelines for certification and censorship had not yet been established.
Before the dragnet tightened, all kinds of pre-Code films were released, and some, like ‘Freaks’, went on to be banned (in the case of the UK) for many years.
Anyway, the point is that, whether we accept their merits now or not, many of these movies offer an interesting insight into what did and didn’t sit well with the public conscience at the time.
And one thing that evidently didn’t was Browning’s provocative depiction of people with physical disabilities. It wasn’t just his more-is-more directorial style that prompted uproar, it was the perceived immorality of it.
One critic simply said: ‘There is no excuse for this picture’ – and (while misguided in Browning’s case) that is a sentiment that has stood the test of time.
Hollywood is now in apparent unanimous agreement that, whatever your intention, there is no end that justifies the means of exploiting vulnerable people.
So why am I bringing this up now?
Because I had a bit of a Damascene moment the other day when I was thinking about ‘Halloween’ – the film, not the celebration.
Like lots of people, I am looking forward to seeing the new 40th-anniversary reboot of John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece.
But it did also dawn on me that films like ‘Halloween’ are surely guilty of demonising mentally ill people in precisely the same kind of way that Browning was accused of doing with his cast in ‘Freaks’.
Carpenter’s plot, for those who don’t know it, revolves around Michael Myers, a man who escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital, puts on a scary mask and knifes a bunch of people to death, while making Jamie Lee Curtis scream a lot – almost as much, in fact, as Shelley Duvall in ‘The Shining’, which is another of the genre’s highly accomplished offenders in this area.
And why does Michael do these things? Because he’s ‘insane’, of course.
At various points in the franchise he’s diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychopathy and stupor.
Oh, and as Donald Pleasance (who played Myers’ psychiatrist in the original movies) also points out: ‘An hour ago, I stood up and fired six shots into him and he just got up and walked away.’
So we can add indestructibility to the patient’s chart too.
Now, I’m not saying that this doesn’t make for spine-tingling cinema, because it does. It’s awesome. But is it really helpful?
It seems that everyone (me included) simply accepts the fact that the ‘criminally insane’ trope is fine for horror movies. So much so, in fact, that we scarcely even notice it.
And yet, when I watched Lars Von Trier’s ‘The Idiots’, for example (which is a decidedly non-horror, satirical movie about a group of people who, for their own nihilistic, subversive reasons, pretend to be developmentally disabled), my gut reaction was that he and his entire film crew should be nuked from space.
So why is one so repellent and not the other?
I can’t really explain that contradiction, except to say that there are clearly some areas of life in which the negative imagery associated with mental illness are still so ingrained that we barely even register them.
Obviously, I’m not saying we should start censoring horror films, like they did with Browning’s ‘Freaks’. I’m simply pointing out that, if the world of cinema can be taken as a barometer for how we view certain issues, then, when it comes to mental health, we clearly still have a long way to go.
As was evident on World Mental Health Day the other week, the stigma associated with psychiatric disorders remains a significant barrier to many people, in their work and social lives.
And yet, according to the latest stats from the charity Mind, one in four of us will, at some point, experience a mental health problem.
Perhaps then, when we’re not paying for the privilege of being scared out of our wits in the cinema, we should be doing all we can to remind ourselves that real mental health issues are, in fact, something to be greeted with open minds and compassion.
And, above all, they’re nothing to be frightened of.
