Since it re-surfaced in the sixties, after a long period of suppression, Tod Browning's Freaks has become an underground classic on the rep-house circuit; the chant of the carnival performers, "We accept you, we accept you, one of us, one of us" was even used as a leitmotiv by Devo. But unlike most "midnight movies," Freaks continues to unnerve even sophisticated audiences; it is profoundly disturbing, but not, as we shall see, entirely for the reasons one would think. The film's thesis-that "freakishness" is only skin deep, and that differently formed people have all the feelings, intelligence and humor of "normal" folks-is almost immediately established and digested by the viewer, our sensibilities very quickly attuned to their everyday humanity (not to mention their prosaic emotional lives). (The plot, a femme fatale marrying a gullible man for his money, is age-old; here, it involves a man of small stature and a taller woman.) Nor can one call them disabled; the Siamese Twins, the Boy with Half a Torso, the Bearded Lady, the Hindu Living Torso, the Pin Heads, the Half-Woman Half-Man (to use the names cited in the credit roll), all playing themselves and quite naturally, are able indeed. What keeps Freaks "freakish" is rather the duality of Browning's own intention. Despite being one of the few films that, mutatis mutandis, treats the Other as "one of us"; and despite purporting in the original prologue to be an exposé of the exploitation of "nature's mutants," Freaks is guilty of the crime it denounces. By virtue of its bizarre revenge plot, the film traps its characters (and thus its actors) in a horror mode. More disruptive yet is Browning's style, which interrupts the crude melodrama for dreamlike sequences whose lyricism voyeuristically peers into, as it celebrates, the "other world" of these carnival performers.