Commissioned by the Portuguese quarterly Electra for its fall 2025 issue, devoted to Fear.
In their original forms as novels, Mary Shelley’s sophisticated novel of ideas, Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s simpler and pulpier Dracula (1897) were published almost eighty years apart. Although only the second of these appeared during the Victorian era (1837-1901), it doesn’t seem like a stretch to associate both novels with the repressions and displacements of what we regard today as Victorian.
By contrast, the releases of the movie adaptations of these novels made at Universal studios in 1931 were only a little over eight months apart. An earlier, unauthorized film adaptation of Dracula called Nosferatu (1922) is also worth mentioning, as are other early silent German features that belong to the horror genre (e.g., The Golem in 1915 and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920). But the commercial successes of Dracula and Frankenstein, both of which drew on elements from silent German films, were arguably what established horror as an ongoing international genre, working with both repression and its subsequent unleashing and/or explosive consequences. At least since the 1950s in the U.S., when teenagers were first identified as a social class and a market, horror movies have been commonly viewed as the ideal “date” movies for teenagers, largely because the fear they provoke can draw couples closer together for mutual comfort and assurance. And maybe because fear is often associated with a lack of assurance, it can paradoxically serve as a helpful tool for both serious artists and remorselessly manipulative demagogues. Distinguishing art from demagoguery, moreover, is sometimes less easy than it might initially appear to be, as the title of Donald Trump’s best-selling and ghostwritten book, The Art of the Deal, suggests.
My own personal introduction to the horror genre occurred at the tender age of seven when I saw another early talkie, Freaks (1932), directed by the same man who directed Dracula. Tod Browning, who ran away from home when he was sixteen to join a circus, where the public’s fear of trapeze artists falling and sword swallowers choking is as common as its fear of physical freaks, used circus settings in some of his most disturbing pictures, such as The Unknown (1927) and Freaks.
I went to see the latter movie specifically because my father–a movie theater exhibitor, one of whose local theaters in Florence, Alabama was showing the movie—told me not to see it because he correctly surmised that it would upset me. But thanks to my stirred-up curiosity, combined with my father not being in town that day, I went to see it with two of my brothers, aged nine and five. Neither of them was much affected by the film, but I was devastated.
The film opens with the presentation of an offscreen freak in a circus sideshow that causes audience members to shriek, followed by a flashback comprising most of the film’s running time, explaining what produced the unseen freak. It or she is seen only in the movie’s final shot: a woman’s head with a scarred face squawking and cawing on top of what looks like a legless hen’s body. But during most of the flashback, the other circus freaks that we meet—described as a game warden as “horrible, twisted things”— are treated warmly and sympathetically by both the film and the French lady who runs the circus, who passionately defends them, drawing some of them into her arms’ maternal shelter as she cries, “These are children in my circus….That’s what most of them are–children.”
One of the most (physically) childlike of the freaks is Hans, an adult midget played by Harry Earles and the character I most identified with. He falls in love with the beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), whom he prefers to his midget partner Frieda (played by Earles’ sister Daisy). Cleopatra secretly despises Hans and all the other circus freaks, but in cahoots with the circus strong man Hercules (Henry Victor), her lover, she accepts Hans’ marriage proposal and then proceeds to poison him to inherit his bank account. It’s only after the freaks get wind of this nasty plot that they pursue the couple with knives during a heavy rain and thunderstorm, creeping and crawling through the mud like monsters in order to turn them both into mutilated freaks. (In Browning’s original cut, now lost, they castrated Hercules, who subsequently appeared with Cleopatra in the final shot singing or perhaps screaming in a falsetto voice.)
I was so traumatized by the movie that a few years later, when my family attended a circus where Harry Earles was in the sideshow, and my family stepped over to converse with him, I refused to join them. For my father, encountering the real Harry Earles proved that Freaks was “only a movie”, but for me it irrationally proved that the film was somehow “real”. The combining of Freaks’ documentary elements showing many real-life freaks with the fantasy concoction of the final shot was as terrifying as the conversion of the real freaks from ordinary people into vengeful monsters.
Yet the part of the movie that upset me the most was its final shot of Cleopatra. I still remember how I took in this frightening, uncanny image—by tightly covering my face with my hands and then surreptitiously peeking at the screen between my fingers. Arguably, this extreme ambivalence on my part remains the classic Victorian and Puritanical response to what we call horror, based simultaneously on self-censorship and its equally energized defiance. It applies to the fear currently produced by war-waging dictators like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, plus both the disgust and the pornographic and voyeuristic obsession of the public and media with the pederastic exploits of the late Jeffrey Epstein and other dubious and criminal activities enjoyed by the rich and famous—disgust and fascination that are so closely linked and intertwined that it often becomes impossible to tell them apart. The fact that both Republicans and Democrats participate in this lurid activity—Republicans wanting to expose Democrats as sex criminals, Democrats wanting to expose Republicans, and both wanting as many physical details about the sex crimes as possible —testifies to its universal appeal, complicated by the fact that Trump was a Democrat when he befriended Epstein before he denied this friendship as a Republican.
I would argue further that this volatile dialectic between pornography and censorship also helps to explain the very strange contemporary habit to view serial killers as holy figures in such hit movies as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and No Country for Old Men (2007). I’ve noted elsewhere that these features’ fascination for killers without any compunctions appeared when the U.S. was killing a good many innocent people in the Middle East without any compunctions.
Furthermore, I believe that it accounts for a significant part of the popularity of The Mummy (1932), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), The Island of Lost Souls (1933), King Kong (1933), The Black Cat (1934), The Thing (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Psycho (1960), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and Halloween (1978) and their countless spinoffs, as well as the hysterical fantasy stoked and spread by Trump that Jamaican immigrants in the U.S. were stealing and devouring some of their neighbors’ pet cats and dogs. Such a fantasy clarifies the degrees to which racism and xenophobia are provoked and intensified by fear, not to mention the extent to which Trump’s politics are both determined and inflected by his show biz tactics.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” I won’t quote his follow-up sentence, which spoils the flashy effect with banality.
But the first sentence still speaks volumes if one takes it to mean, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to remain uncertain, even if one risks being rejected by one’s society (i.e., ignored) as a result.” And being able to remain uncertain entails recognizing and accepting one’s areas of ignorance. The basic question is whether one finds despair or euphoria in this uncertainty. Maybe one can find both. Whatever one decides and wherever one lands, whether this is in Dante’s inferno or John Cage’s backyard, there are many potential dangers and fears to be anticipated, dismissed, and/or negotiated. Which is another way of saying that fear is currently our daily bread, for us to buy, bake, and eat as well as sell to others. Sometimes the profit motive triumphs, because fear always sells, and it appears to be for sale everywhere. During some moments of the Civil Rights Movement, I felt it viscerally. Today it’s closer to a spiritual wound inflicted by widespread nihilist stupidity. Fortunately, a few aren’t buying this fear, but I may be too provincially urban and starry-eyed to join them.