Further Details

Title: Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers (The Criterion Collection)
Format: DVD
Condition: New
Number Of Discs: 2
Actors: Aileen Pringle, Lon Chaney, Johnny Eck, Olga Baclanova, Joan Crawford
Director: Tod Browning
Region Code: DVD: 1 (US, Canada...)
Studio: The Criterion Collection
Certificate: MPAA Not Rated
Description: 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 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 reconstruction and restoration of The Unknown by the George Eastman Museum, with a new score by composer Philip Carli
* New 2K digital restoration of The Mystic, with a new score by composer Dean Hurley
* 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
* Episode from 2019 of critic Kristen Lopez’s podcast Ticklish Business about disability representation in Freaks
* Reading by Skal 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

DVDs ARE REGION 1 UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED

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