Review: 'Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning' (revised edition)

Tod Browning is not usually considered among the great directors. Although he made over sixty films, only a half dozen or so are regarded by film historians, and the public at large are mostly familiar with two. But they're both doozies. However, although Dracula is among the most iconic films ever made, it's also often dismissed as lazily directed. The other big Browning film, Freaks, is widely considered potent, but it's use of actual circus performers, many of whom are differently abled (a term that really applies here... anyone who'd call Prince Radian disabled couldn't have been paying attention to the film), has been attracting controversy for over ninety years. 

Dracula and Freaks are important enough that Browning would be deserving of a biography for them alone, but his worth as a bio-subject goes well beyond those pictures, or even his work as a filmmaker. Browning could be insufferable, he could be uncontrollable, he could even be dangerous, as when his drunken speeding caused the death of an actor from one of his early films, but he was also an almost unfailingly fascinating character. Browning's attraction to subjects like Freaks was clearly a consequence of his own days as a carny. He'd perform geek acts and get buried alive and pick up sleight-of-hand and sleight-of-tongue stunts that he still practiced even after he began his Hollywood career. He was known to pickpocket co-workers or cheat commissary cashiers with double-speak, most likely for nothing more than the thrill of it. As a young man in a boarding house, he witnessed an outlandishly horrific murder. 

A good deal of the details in Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning were not easy to come by. Browning never gave a retrospective interview. But David J Skal and Elias Savada performed the old-fashioned leg work necessary to pen a rich biography in 1995, and gleaned enough extra information upon the discovery of Browning's personal scrapbooks and photo archives to further expand Dark Carnival much more recently. I've long intended to but hadn't read their book until now, so I can't speak to how much it has been expanded, but it seems seamlessly integrated. The final chapter, which explores Browning's legacy, is most obviously home to a lot of new material, as it discusses Freaks homages in American Horror Story and the Broadway musical Side Show, neither of which existed when Dark Carnival was first published.

Dark Carnival is an excellent, consistently riveting biography full of strange surprises (strangest: Browning's uncle was one of the greatest baseball hitters of all time and the Louisville Slugger was custom-made just for him!). However, this revised edition's biggest revelation is a sad one. David J. Skal wrote some of my favorite books on horror movies, such as The Monster Show, Hollywood Gothic, and Screams of Reason, and I've always found him to be a charming presence in documentaries on his favorite topic. So I was really saddened to learn from co-author Savada's new prologue that Skal died last year in a car accident. So this revised edition of Dark Carnival also feels like a final gift from a beloved writer.