Film: This collection of essays exhaustively details the bizarre and often alarming themes that obsessed one of the US's strangest, most secretive film-makers. When he died in 1962, Tod Browning left the world no letters or diaries.
He'd given no press interviews during a 23-year retirement and became angry if anyone tried to engage him in conversation about his work. "When I quit a thing, I quit," he told a friend. "I wouldn't walk across the street now to see a movie."
It was a last disappearing trick from a master magician. Cinema began as a sideshow attraction at the turn of the last century, with snippets of film shown in tents at carnivals and state fairs, so it's appropriate that one of the medium's darkest and most perverse talents was an ex-carny. Born in Kentucky in 1880, he left home at 16 and joined a travelling circus as a roustabout and sideshow "talker", later performing as a clown, contortionist and illusionist. He enjoyed great success, he claimed, with a carnival scam where he was billed as The Living Hypnotic Corpse, buried alive in a ventilated coffin.
He worked for DW Griffith in 1913 and became intrigued by the potential of film, but as a director he never really left the sideshow behind: in a series of grotesque melodramas starring Lon Chaney in the 1920s he explored the abnormal and the deformed, society's fear of the outsider and the illusory nature of the medium itself. It has been hinted that Browning's unwholesome obsessions stemmed from a car accident in 1915 in which he was mutilated in some way.
Browning was well-served by his star, both men sharing a fondness for outlandish plots and extreme morbidity. In The Unknown (1927) Chaney plays a circus contortionist who falls in love with a girl who suffers from a psychological fear of being embraced, so he has his arms amputated to try and win her over. In The Unholy Three (1925) he's a burglar who commits his crimes dressed as a little old woman, assisted by a retarded giant and a dwarf impersonating a baby. As well as his astounding disguises - "Don't step on it; it might be Lon Chaney!" was a catchphrase of the time - the actor brought to the screen a unique kind of ecstatic emotional intensity, and his death in 1930 ended speculation that he would play the lead in Browning's planned film of Dracula the following year. Instead, Bela Lugosi got the part, and an enduring icon was created.
Dracula made a fortune for Universal, and Browning's old studio, MGM, wanted another hit from him. What they got was Freaks (1932) a highly moralistic circus-set fable involving a beautiful trapeze artist marrying a midget and then poisoning him for his money. Instead of using actors wearing prosthetics, Browning went back to his beloved sideshows and hired an extraordinary cast of real conjoined twins, a caterpillar man, "pinheads" and bearded ladies, a half-boy and a human skeleton. The preview was a disaster. People ran screaming from the cinema and one woman tried to sue MGM, claiming the film had induced a miscarriage.
Freaks was banned in the UK for 30 years, but now enjoys cult status, though it still makes for uneasy viewing. As the book states, modern film-makers whose work has been influenced by this oddly charming but totally crazed masterpiece include David Cronenberg, Tim Burton and David Lynch, and you could add Neil Jordan and Terry Gilliam to the list.
Browning never really recovered from the appalled reception Freaks received. His career was also blighted by alcoholism, and after a few more films, including the startling The Devil Doll (1936), he retired in 1939. In assessing his work, a psychiatric report would seem as appropriate as a critical assessment, and there are elements of this in The Films of Tod Browning, which sometimes suffers from a touch of psychobabble and is more suited to the academic than the horror fan or collector of Hollywood anecdotes. Browning was a fascinating film-maker whose imagery lives on, and he fully deserves the thoughtful treatment provided by editor Herzogenrath and his team, though most contributors' names are unfamiliar to me and credentials aren't included. Standout essays are an examination by Stefanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knorer of the debt Browning owed to Grand Guignol, and another by Matthew Sweney on Browning's fine remake of his own London After Midnight (1927), the underrated Mark of the Vampire (1935).
Stephen Dixon is a journalist and artist
The Films of Tod Browning Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath Black Dog Publishing, 238pp. £29.95