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.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 2K digital restoration of Freaks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- 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
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme
FREAKS/ THE UNKNOWN/ THE MYSTIC : TOD BROWNING'S SIDESHOW SHOCKERS is released to UK BD 23rd of October as part of The Criterion UK Collection, from Spirit Entertainment.
Pre-order the UK BD from Amazon.co.uk
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