AHS: Freak Show (2014)

Why do these screams matter?

Echoing Tod Browning’s controversial Freaks (1932), AHS: Freak Show (2014-2015) blends sideshow history, carnival lore, and more than a touch of the macabre to render an affecting portrait of people with disabilities working in a traveling circus in 1952. Led by the ambitious Elsa (Jessica Lange), the circus troupe experiences a cacophony of violence and microaggressions, both on-stage and off, as they attempt to navigate a world predicated upon rigid norms and expectations. Through its entwining narrative structure, the show subtly reveals how the cultural obsession with averageness frequently resulted in people with disabilities experiencing systemic discrimination, especially evident in limited employment prospects. Like its cinematic predecessor, the series explores how the veneer of normalcy enables monsters to walk freely, while those who challenge those norms must endlessly battle suspicion.

As a site of transgression within horror, the freak show elucidates the genre’s complex relationship with disability by offering spectacle to stimulate audience response while simultaneously subverting the cultural norms that create that response. In Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Robert Bogdan writes, “Exhibiting people, although often treated as an educational and scientific pursuit, was always first and foremost a for-profit activity” (8-9). These consumer spaces functioned in response to cultural standards that used as its benchmark for normality white, physically-fit bodies and cast anything outside of that framework as different. By positioning non-normative bodies as “curiosities,” freak shows helped to codify disability as a marginal, monstrous state. But these sideshows also functioned as spaces of community by giving marginalized performers spaces of kinship and affording them an opportunity to earn money and live independently (35). All of these tensions are explored in AHS: Freak Show with an added layer of grisly horror.

But to understand how the show is interacting with horror’s problematic treatment of people with disabilities, we need to place it on a continuum with Freaks, arguably still the best rendering of freak shows as concurrent oppressive and liberating spaces. Despite its initial lukewarm reception, the film remains controversial for its casting of real-life carnival performers with physical disabilities. Freaks centers on Hans, a little person who falls in love with the diabolical and average-sized Cleopatra. Because Browning expected the audience to have a reaction to seeing non-normative physical bodies, he was careful to never show the characters on stage. This downplay of performative spectacle, coupled with a series of vignettes of everyday life wherein the characters simply go about their daily activities, realigns audience understanding of which characters are actually the film’s monstrous Others. In Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, Rachel Adams notes, “These episodes aim to acclimate the viewer to seeing the freaks as multidimensional, as individuals who have accommodated their disabilities by developing other ways of performing everyday activities. Their interests extend beyond the contours of their own extraordinary bodies, and they require neither pity nor assistance from their more conventionally formed peers” (69). The film pushes back on horror’s framing of difference by insisting that bodily variance is not always meant to code monstrous intent. Here, the bodies of the performers are categorically different but not abnormal. This is an important distinction because it depicts freak shows as a site of deviation without pathologizing those differences. The end result is a narrative that restores autonomy to people with disabilities by creating a space where they have the power to determine when, where, and how their bodies will be used as spectacle (Thomson 46-47). 

But it is not until AHS: Freakshow that we see horror specifically use the freak show environment to challenge the connection of physical disability and monstrosity without also including a nod to some other type of discernible difference to help the audience understand who is the source of the narrative’s evil. Although the majority of the disabled characters in the series engage in immoral behavior to varying degrees, these acts are tempered by painful backstories that create empathy for the performers. But there is no such empathy building for the show’s able-bodied characters whose sinister acts are the source of the narrative’s horror. This framing becomes especially clear in the murder of Ma Petite (Jyoti Amge).

In the episode “Test of Strength,”  Ma Petite has been kidnapped by fellow performer Dell (Michael Chiklis) whose desperation to keep his homosexuality hidden results in him handing Ma Petite over to Stanley for certain death. Here, Ma Petite, trapped in exhibition glass, screams as Stanley drowns her in formalin.

The anguish in Ma Petite’s voice as she screams for someone to help her is brutal to watch, especially when one considers that her heartbreaking fate is sadly not just the stuff of fiction. As the first addition to the American Morbidity Museum, Ma Petite represents how people with physical disabilities are often denied autonomy. Throughout history, museums and exhibitions have often treated the bodies of people of color as objects of curiosity, dehumanizing them to reinforce racist beliefs (Stringer 21). These exhibits transmitted ethnocentric views that affirmed the superiority of Western societies, reinforcing systemic racism, ableism and colonial exploitation (Teslow 17). Ma Petite’s screams give a literal voice to those experiences and remind viewers of the abuses that have been perpetrated in the name of science and entertainment. 

The death of Ma Petite at Stanley’s hands illustrates a problem horror films have long had when it comes to depicting monstrosity in relation to people with disabilities. Those with covert disability, such as psychosis, are able to escape suspicion because their difference is cloaked by an able-body, while those with overt disability receive suspicion for no other reason than their appearance is not the expected. Unlike Ma Petite who stands out due to her size, Stanley is quintessentially average which allows him to use the cultural expectations tied to “normality” to obscure his evil nature. Leveraging the aesthetic appeal and/or averageness of Stanley, Ma Petite’s screams invite the audience to engage with their own biases with regard to non-normative bodies and to consider what gets positioned as spectacle and why.

Stanley’s disaffected demeanor as he murders Ma Petite speaks to how completely he has dehumanized her, something the show is careful to underscore is not exclusive to Stanley. Though Ma Petite is clearly a favorite within the carnival community, she is repeatedly objectified. From being treated as a literal pet on a chain to a wealthy Maharaja to being purchased by Elsa to be a de facto child for another performer who wants to “play” mother, Ma Petite’s agency is compromised by those around her, all of whom are never fully able to view her completely as an independent woman (Tyrrell 77). Her death here is an extension of this treatment in which the horror of the moment is felt not just in her physical vulnerability but in the oppressive silence surrounding her life.

That the events surrounding her murder are facilitated by a fellow carnival performer highlights the intersectional silences Ma Petite’s screams counter. As a closeted gay man, Dell exists in his own space of silence (Schottmiller 114). To keep his secret, Dell immobilizes Ma Petite by using his strength to hug Ma Petite to the point of breaking her bones. Ma Petite’s screams in the scene are muffled and reflect the parallel silences that frame both of their lives. But the screams that precede her murder return agency to Ma Petite because they are the one time in the series that she is given space to articulate her needs. She is demanding a visibility that has been denied her as a woman of color with a disability who grew up in a caste system as a Dalit and reminds the audience of the insidious ways silence gets embedded within marginalizing structures. 

 

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Works Cited

Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Schottmiller, Carl. “‘Wir sind alle freaks’: Elevating White Gay Male Oppression Through Representations of Disability.” Reading American Horror Story: Essays on the Television Franchise, edited by Rebecca Janicker, McFarland & Company, 2017, pp. 104-25.

Stringer, Katie. “Disability, the Sideshow, and Modern Museum Practices.” Scientia et Humanitas, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 15-28.

Teslow, Tracy. “A Troubled Legacy: Making and Unmaking Race in the Museum.” Museums & Social Issues, vol. 2, no. 1, 2007, pp. 11-44.

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body and Freak Inheritance. NYU Press, 1996.

Tyrrell, Brenda. “A World Turned Upside Down: Hop-Frog, Freak Shows, and Representations of Dwarfism.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2020, pp. 171-186.