Freaks

"Gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us!"

Freaks is a 1932 film about sideshow performers directed by Tod Browning.

Browning took the brilliant step of casting real people with deformities as the sideshow "freaks", rather than using costumes and makeup. As such it stands as an amazing, one of a kind documentary of these historical turn of the century mutants.

Much of the film was drawn from Director Browning personal experiences as a member of a traveling circus. He intended to portray the classic moral of how beauty on the outside does not necessarily equate to beauty on the inside. In the film, the physically deformed "freaks" are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the "normal" members of the circus who conspire to murder Hans in order to obtain his large inheritance.

Among the characters featured as "freaks" were the Hilton twins, a pair of female conjoined twins. There were several microcephalics who were referred to in the film as "pinheads". The most notable of these was Schlitze, who wore a dress mainly to make it easier to use the bathroom, but who was in fact a male named Simon Metz. Other microcephalics were Zip and Pip (Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow, the inspiration for Zippy the Pinhead). Also featured were the hermaphrodite Josephine Joseph, with her left/right divided hair; Johnny Eck, the legless man; and the completely limbless Prince Randian also known as a torso, who, in a notable scene, lights a cigarette with his mouth.

But don't take my word for it see it yourself.