Recently arrived: a dvd of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), now a cult horror classic (which I’d previously seen on tv as a late-night movie). Cover art:
From the Wikipedia page on the movie:
Director Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow “freaks,” rather than using costumes and makeup.
… In the film, the physically deformed “freaks” are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the “normal” members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance.
And the freaks exact their revenge.
Among the freaks is a microcephalic called Schlitzie, in the center in the cover art, and in a photo here:
Schlitzie was possibly born Simon Metz, in the 1890s or early 1900s, and died (then under the name Schlitzie Surtees) in 1971. His parents hid him from the world in shame until they could sell him to a traveling sideshow, and he spent most of his life in sideshows, circuses, funhouses, and carnivals, exhibited in a muumuu and presented as a female (or left androgynous), and billed variously as a Pinhead, The Missing Link, the Last of the Aztecs, the Monkey Girl, or What Is It? In Freaks, Schlitzie and two other microcephalics are referred to as pinheads. (The connection to Zippy the Pinhead is pretty clear.)
Schlitzie’s complex life story is summarized in his Wikipedia entry. Child-like and affectionate (sometimes described as a charming three-year-old), he found a home for himself in the circus.
