Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre (Web Exclusive)
by David J. Skal and Elias Savada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025. 388 pp., illus. Paperback: $19.95.

Reviewed by Mitchell Abidor

In his still invaluable book, American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, Andrew Sarris ranks Tod Browning among those auteurs he calls “Subjects for Further Research.” David J. Skal and Elias Savada cite this categorization in Dark Carnival, the newly updated edition of their 1995 biography of Browning that provides the further research Sarris called for. It is an exhaustive, sympathetic, and critical account of the life and work of a director who—if being an auteur means having a consistent and recognizable style, a set of recurring themes and values, and a clear worldview—easily earns the right to that title. Unlike many directors deemed to be auteurs, Browning was deeply involved with his films from the point of conception, providing the stories that would be turned into screenplays by others, when he didn’t write the screenplays himself. He frequently used the same company of actors, most notably Lon Chaney, who starred in eight of Browning’s films, as well as the ever-sneering Priscilla Dean in some of his best silent films. The performances of all his actors conveyed elements consistent throughout Browning’s career, and his shadow-filled mise en scène regularly characterizes his films. 

Skal, the principal author of Dark Carnival (who died on January 1, 2024, before this edition appeared, the victim of a traffic accident in which a drunk driver collided head-on with his car), produced an exemplary film biography, the result of his research into studio archives and press accounts of every one of Browning’s films, supplemented by interviews conducted with Browning’s friends and collaborators. Unsurprisingly, the accounts of Browning the man and director vary widely. We are told, depending on the interview subject, that he was standoffish but also friendly, deeply involved in his shoots or an invisible presence on the set. (See also Robert Cashill’s review of The Criterion Collection’s box set, “Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers, in Cineaste, Summer 2024). 

What is certain is that Browning, who worked during his youth in a traveling carnival, applied the vision and mindset of a carny to his films, a world of outsiders and sideshow characters. His two most lasting films revolve around one or the other of these elements: Dracula (who could be more of an outsider than a foreign vampire on the loose in England?) and Freaks, the summation of his career. 

But these themes and settings appear in all of Browning’s best films. If The Unholy Three (1925) and The Unknown (1927), both with Chaney, are less celebrated than Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932), they stand up every bit as well as the later films in their utter and uncompromising strangeness, bordering on perversion. Where, other than in a W. C. Fields film, was a child kicked on screen, as midget actor Harry Earles does in The Unholy Three? Where else has the protagonist submitted to self-disfigurement because of unrequited love, as Lon Chaney does in The Unknown by having his arms amputated? Browning’s delight in showing humanity’s most unwatchable aspects is a key part of his uniqueness and undeniable genius.

Browning established himself as a successful commercial director in the silent film years and further burnished his reputation in the early sound era. He had favorite themes to which he regularly returned and on which he worked variations. In Browning’s eyes, as the authors write, “We are animals, con men, thieves, and vampires, Browning tells us in film after film, driven by overpowering primitive emotions—beyond any real freedom, much less dignity.” Frustrated sexual desire is a near constant in his films, as was cruelty, both as an overarching theme and in the performances of the actors, who are often deformed, either through artifice or by nature. His visual sense was not a spectacular one, but it was accomplished, and his storytelling was extraordinarily economical, recounting even the most complex plots in around an hour. Above all, a Browning film was never dull. If Browning had made no other films than Dracula and Freaks, his name would still be one to conjure with in film history. Skal’s accounts of the making of these two films are thorough, illuminating the background of these masterpieces of not only horror, but also of American cinema. While Freaks came closest to being a pure distillation of the Browning style, both are marked by his genius. 

Obtaining the rights to Dracula from author Bram Stoker’s widow was a testy process, made worse by the earlier pirating of the story by F. W. Murnau for Nosferatu (1922). So furious was Stoker’s widow at that film that she insisted on the destruction of every copy. They weren’t, thankfully, and it’s certain that Browning and his cinematographer, Karl Freund, had seen it, modeling several shots in Dracula on those in Nosferatu, which Skal and Savada illustrate with well-chosen images. But the influence shouldn’t be overrated: Lugosi, slickly seductive, is at antipodes from Max Schreck in Nosferatu. The film would have been even more different from Nosferatu had Browning’s original plan—with Lon Chaney in frightening makeup in the lead—been implemented. Chaney’s death in August 1930 put paid to that.

The film was made for Universal Studios, which was struggling financially following the stock market crash. This led to script changes that, as Skal shows, helped to tighten the tale. Browning, as was always the case on his films, had enormous input into the final story and screenplay, although, along with a half-dozen other writers, he was uncredited. The actual shoot was widely considered to be shambolic, with one of the stars telling Skal that he didn’t even know the film had a director, instead assuming it was being supervised by cinematographer Freund. As brilliant as the cinematography in Dracula is, Browning demonstrates great mastery in something Skal sees as Browning’s specialty: silence. Early in the film, when John Harker (David Manners) arrives at Castle Dracula, he is escorted up the stairs to his bedroom by the count. There is no music or dialogue, so all we hear at one point is the clump, clump, clump of his steps. The effect is chilling, a brilliant use of quietude in the early sound era.

There were complications before, during, and after the shoot. Studio head Carl Laemmle was opposed to Dracula attacking men, with its hints of bisexuality. The film was a huge box office hit, and posterity has been more than kind to it. Things would be different with Browning’s next film, Freaks, which was his death knell as a director.

Released in early 1932, the film was in the works from at least 1927. Skal, in his chapter on the film, spends less time analyzing its cinematic virtues and vices and more on a fascinating account of the film’s production, particularly its cast. Browning was intimately familiar with the freak show milieu, and had built one of his best films, The Unholy Three, around the German midget Harry Earles. Earles played the romantic lead in Freaks and his first love in the film, a fellow little person, was played by Daisy Earles, his actual sister. Skal’s research reveals that there was a wide variety of freak show performers who applied for but did not get jobs on the film. As for those who appeared in the film, Skal’s interviews provide us with insights into their personalities. We are told that Johnny Eck, who had no body below his waist, “went Hollywood” during the shoot, going around in a pair of dark glasses, like any good movie star. Already bloated egos grew more bloated, but Schlitze the pin head was most beloved. He—who for hygienic reasons wore a dress and so appeared to be a woman—came to the set even on days he wasn’t in a scene.

The rest of the studio’s employees were less enthusiastic than Browning about the cast. They were banned from the commissary and had to dine outdoors, away from the rest of the studio staff. Skal reports that one person particularly unhappy with the freaks was F. Scott Fitzgerald, then working for Irving Thalberg as a scriptwriter. We are told that he vomited upon seeing the Siamese twins at lunch. 

Skal’s excursions into psychology throughout Dark Carnival are its weakest points, and none is weaker than his speculation about Browning’s sexual interest in physical anomalies. The slenderest of threads, like a photo of a female freak with a “come hither look” found in Browning’s papers, is used to advance the thesis. The accusation of sadism, made by many who knew and worked with Browning, perhaps has more of a basis. But we should content ourselves with calling him cruel and not pathologizing a man we’ve never met.  

Freaks, though much loved now, was viewed at the time as an affront to the public and was a miserable failure, financially and critically. Browning was undeterred and produced two more films after that disaster, including one of his strangest films, The Devil Doll (1936), a film in which he took his affection for the odd to the extreme by dramatizing a crazed criminal’s experiments in shrinking humans as a way of achieving revenge. Browning’s time had passed, though, and after a youth spent imbibing hard liquor, he lived out his final twenty years drinking beer supplied free of charge by the Coors brewing company. While Browning’s films have been revived in retrospectives over the past few years and digitally restored for home video release, Skal and Savada’s marvelous biography will confirm Browning’s place in the auteurist pantheon.

Mitchell Abidor is an author and translator whose new biography of Victor Serge, a Belgian-born, French language writer, historian, and Marxist revolutionary, will be published in 2025 by Pluto Press.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 2