I was gonna go on about similarities between Gordon/Mamet’s Edmond and Freaks, but I guess that doesn’t make much sense.
Katy is hung up on how the freaks turned the wicked trapeze artist into a chicken lady, but it is a “horror” movie, so we’ll just say the Human Torso has transformative magical powers.
Wallace Ford (Phroso the clown) was in tons more movies, incl. Anthony Mann’s Man From Laramie and Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
Good-girl beauty Leila Hyams was in Buster Keaton’s Spite Marriage, Browning’s 13th Chair, Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap, then she never acted after 1936.
Evil trapeze girl Olga Baclanova was in The Docks of New York and not many sound films because she moved to Broadway for a decade before retiring.
Hercules Henry Victor got huge in the 40’s playing evil nazis in every Hollywood movie that would take him before dying of a brain tumor in ’45.
Short couple Hans and Frieda were actually siblings. He was in Browning’s Unholy Three and both of them were munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
Those twins actually were conjoined.
The human torso was sixty-one when the film was made!
One of the greatest weird movies everywhere. Rob Zombie loves it.