"It's a blessed condition, believe me": Images of African Americans in horror cinema #5.

Throughout February, ANTSS will be running images that reflect - for better or worse - the image of African Americans in horror cinema.

Prince Randian from Freaks, 1932.

Movies: Praise Tod.

If you are in the NYC area and can get yourself to the Film Forum, you will be rewarded with a Tod Browning film series.

Today's double feature is the Browning classic Freaks - the now cult classic that brought Browning's fantastic post-Dracula popularity to a crashing end – and his silent era landmark The Unholy Three. The latter, which was called the "source for all that is best in the horror movie," will be shown with live musical accompaniment.

The series will also include the bizarre horror flicks The Devil Doll and The Unknown. Browning fans should also try to catch his 1928 flick West of Zanzibar. This sleazy revenge drama, a fave of indie director-hero Guy Maddin, was not only labeled "an outpouring of the cesspools of Hollywood" on its release, but it contains the first use of the "chicken-human" shot that would Browning would repurpose for Freaks.

For pro-am horror historians, the series also includes Mark of the Vampire, Browning's remake of his now vanished London After Midnight. The remake was notable in that it parodies the horror conventions that Browning, with his Dracula just four years previous, had helped cement. One of early satires of the horror genre, Bride of Frankenstein beat it to theaters by just three days.

If that wasn't reason enough to get there, the Forum is also hosting a series of prison films. This brilliant series includes double feature of Pre-Code women's prison picks: Ladies They Talk About, featuring Barbara Stanwyck, and Ladies of the Big House, a melodrama written by an actual convict.

Good times.

Movies: An intelligent carrot? The mind boggles.

The Freakmaker (it also skulks around the dollar-bin under the name The Mutations) was the last directorial effort of Academy Award winning cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Cardiff deserves some sort of lifetime achievement award just for sticking around. He worked on his first film as an actor in 1918. It was a British silent melodrama called My Son, My Son. The last film he was on was the 2005 Pinewood Studios short Lights2. During this heroically long lived career, he worked behind the camera on everything from Hitchcock's Under Capricon and the classic The African Queen to Conan the Destroyer and Rambo: First Blood Part II. From 1953 to 1974, Cardiff directed about twenty flicks. Most notably, he helmed the Oscar winning adaptation of Sons and Lovers. This, however, strikes me as a bit of an outlier. Most of his flicks were genre cheapies or pseudo-exploitation swinging 60s flicks like Girl on a Motorcycle (aka Naked Under Leather) and, the subject of this review, The Freakmaker.

As far as cheese horror goes, I actually enjoyed The Freakmaker. The plot is wonderfully goofy. Donald "Loomis" Pleasance plays a mad scientist who is convinced that he can induce mutations that will produce a new race of man that will combine the best qualities of the plants and human. "A plant that can move and think," he says, describing his vision to his obligatory malformed lab assistant (Tom Baker, the 1980s Dr. Who). "And a human that can put down roots." Now, to me, this sounds like a formula for a carrot man who walks around in circles. But that's why he's the mad scientist and I'm just some guy who blogs about horror stuff.

As you might guess, making human plants (humants or plamen, depending on you point of view) is a real trick proposition. It requires human subject – healthy and good looking, the doctor is always careful to specify – and you're going to get a lot of duds before hitting on just the right mix of human and Venus flytrap. But where will Dr. Greenjeans get his subjects and how will he dispose of the failed hybrids? That's where his faithful, horribly mutilated lab assistant comes in. The doctor employs a deformed heavy from a local carnival to kidnap his victims. Those subjects who don't make the cut get deposited in the carnival's freakshow.

The movie actually unfolds as two interconnected parallel plots. First, we get the mad doctor's experiments and their effects. This is a pretty standard, B-grade plot with slight nods to the post-60s context with lectures about how we're all mutants, man. The other, and more interesting plot, is an extended homage to the Tod Browning's superlative Freaks. This second story centers on the deformed lab assistant's self-loathing as a freak. He was, we find out, once a freakshow attraction. On finding the doctor could cure him of his deformity, he agreed to do to the doctor's dirty work. But the other freaks, all played by genuine sideshow performers, resent the brutal behavior of the assistant. He hates them because they remind him of his own freakish existence. Not only do we get real human oddities (including the fascinating "pretzel man," who suffers from a condition in which the bones grow in twisted, melted-wax like formations), we get a freak party scene, a toast to "one of us," and a final scene that involves freaks tossing knives at their enemy. As a huge fan f the Browning flick, I have a special fondness for this sort of thing.

Is the movie worth it for viewers not pitifully over-enamored of Freaks? That's going to depend on your cinema cheese threshold. With it less than special effects, clunky acting, and goofy plot, I suspect the cinematically lactose intolerant will find little to like here. But, it midnight movie absurdity is your cup of tea, then this might deserve a spot on your queue. Using the internationally recognized Communes of the Canton of Thorigny-sur-Marne Film Rating System, I'm giving The Freakmaker a fine Dampmart rating. But then I might just be some sort of Freaks freak.

Books: A two-for-one deal.

Though the famed conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton, only appear in Todd Browning's Freaks for about five minutes, they have one of the most memorable scenes. Violet (if you were facing the twins, Violet would have been on your left) is being romanced by the circus owner. Unfortunately, the footage that informed viewers that he's the circus owner was cut from the film. Consequently, his character just appears ex nihilo, giving the impression that he's some sort of fly-by-night lothario aiming to get something he can only chase when the circus is in town. As Violet and the owner pitch the woo, Daisy, whose character is married to a stuttering carnie who fights incessantly with her twin sister, ignores the couple and reads a book. Eventually, the owner moves in for a kiss and he and Violet commence to smootchin'. Daisy, without looking at her sister, suddenly looks up from her book and sits up straight. Then she closes her eyes and arches her back slightly. It is an uncanny but unmistakable image of carnal pleasure.

In a movie full of surreal, unusual, and often brutal imagery, that scene has always stuck out for me. Partially this is because the scene is one of the best moments of acting in a film filled with second-rate and non-professional film actors. Another reason it sticks out is that it is a typical auteur moment for Browning. The director liked to insert brief, evocative moments in his films where, for only a few seconds, the film completely focuses on a side character. Think of that strange hanging moment when Dwight Frye, as Renfield, crawls towards the fainted nurse in Dracula. That moment, a throwaway scene that is never even resolved, is one of the most frightening parts of that film. Finally, however, the main reason the scene sticks out in my mind is that the twins were one of the few "freak" performers who genuinely lit up the screen. Many of the freakish performers existed entirely as the embodiment of their freakishness. For example, Prince Randian, the armless and legless "Living Torso," is really a non-character. He exists in the film only to shock you with what he is. Randian is amazing, but the connection is shallow, immediate, and passing. It is this reductive gaze that critics of the film pick up on. There is something to the claim the film traffics in voyeuristic cruelty. However, the warm life the twins bring to the film shows the movie's approach to its title characters is more complicated than critics would suggest. The twins come off as stars. The film attempts to embrace their full and complex humanity. Unlike the Living Torso, we can imagine that they have lives, loves, and existence independent of the short scenes that grace.

Thanks to journalist Dean Jensen, we don't have to imagine their lives any longer. Jensen's Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins is the first full-length biography of these two unusual stars.

Named after a highly fictionalized memoir the twins produced late in their lives, Jensen's story begins with their birth in Brighton, England. The off-spring of a single woman and a married man, the twins were left in the care of a barkeep and midwife who immediately began to display them to bar patrons. After tours in England and Australia, the twins came to America and made it big on the vaudeville circuit. Mercifully for the twins, they were produced as a genuine "act." The sisters were trained to dance, act, and play instruments. Though it was impossible to completely shake off the uncanny impact Daisy and Violet had on viewers, the fact that they were performing artists of no small talent helped elevate their act above the sideshow and make them respectable names on the vaudeville stage. As to twins rose in popularity, their "adoptive caretaker" sold them to a couple how kept the twins as virtual slaves. Fearing that unscheduled public appearances would diminish the twins' draw, they were confined to circus train cars or the vast estate their owners built out of the twins' earnings. All external communications were closely watched. Daisy and Violet were held as prisoners. Ultimately, their owners made a mistake and allowed the twins access to a lawyer. In a celebrated court case that grabbed national headlines, Daisy and Violet were emancipated.

Unfortunately, in many ways, their best years as a box office draw were behind them. Though they still toured and performed, the death of vaudeville and the increasing public distaste of "freak" acts took a heavy toll on the twins' popularity. They appeared in Freaks only to have that film become a legendary bomb. While Daisy and Violet actually agreed with many of the film's critics, the backlash against the film was an indication that their time as performers was passing. They went from lavish vaudeville settings to county fairs. From county fairs to drive-in movie theaters. What little of their fortune was left was blown on producing the truly horrible Chained for Life, a curious z-grade flick that Daisy and Violet delusionally believed would revive their careers. Finally, having squandered their hard-earned fortune and being unable to land gigs, they took a job in a grocery store. They couldn't even keep that gig: the often ill-tempered Violet insulted a customer and they were canned. A local church offered them rent-free housing, and it is in that house that the sisters died. Daisy went first. They think Violet might have held on for a couple of days, refusing to get help, determined to die still connected to her sister.

Jensen's book is a solid, well-researched work. The style is clean and lively in parts, but it never rises to the level of something you'd read for its own sake. Daisy and Violet are the draw here and it is the sheer tragic and frustrating oddity of their story that makes the book compelling. A good read for those interested in the twins, the vaudeville era, or in that strange jewel in the Universal monster-flick crown: Browning's Freaks.

Jensen's book is published by Ten Speed Press and is scheduled for release in November.