A teenager from a prominent Baptist family in Louisville, Kentucky, whose uncle inspired the Louisville Slugger bat, walked out of a respectable Victorian home at 16 to join a traveling sideshow, where he was billed as the living hypnotic corpse and buried alive with a hidden breathing tube. This deep dive traces how Charles Albert Browning Jr. became Tod Browning, the director of the 1931 Dracula and the notorious Freaks, and why he is remembered as the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema. Working as a roustabout, contortionist, clown and barker, he learned audience manipulation firsthand and developed a lifelong empathy for performers society dismissed as freaks.

The episode covers his early career as a slapstick film actor under D.W. Griffith, the 1915 drunk-driving collision with a train that killed fellow actor Elmer Booth and shattered Browning ...