Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers (DVD)

The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. 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.

TWO-DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration of Freaks
• New 2K digital restoration of The Mystic, with a new score by composer Dean Hurley
• New 2K digital reconstruction and restoration of The Unknown by the George Eastman Museum, with a new score by composer Philip Carli
• 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
• Reading 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