In 1931, Tod Browning had just handed Universal a genre-defining hit with Dracula and was given a blank check. Instead of another safe blockbuster, he turned down a prestige John Barrymore project at MGM and made Freaks, a film cast with real sideshow performers including conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Schlitzie, Prince Randian, and Johnny Eck. This episode explains why Browning, who ran away from a wealthy Kentucky family at 16 to work carnivals as a barker, contortionist, and living corpse act, was returning to his roots rather than exploiting strangers, and how Irving Thalberg's desire to out-horror Frankenstein got the picture greenlit.

We cover the segregation of the cast into a separate dining tent on the MGM lot, the disastrous 1932 San Diego test screening where audiences fled and one woman threatened to sue, and the studi ...