ABSTRACT
For half a century, the field of film studies has contributed to explorations of how society is visually represented in culture. In the 1930s, the Museum of Modern Art founded a film library for the 'preservation, circulation, and appreciation of movies', which made it possible for film studies to build a substantial place in the American academy by the early 1960s. The combination of disability studies and film studies emphasises the importance of the social context of Tod Browning's Freaks. Many tutors and students engaged with Cultural Disability Studies in Education (CDSE) are likely to agree with critics who condemn Freaks on the grounds that it 'perpetuates the stereotypical image' of disabled people as 'psychotic killers seeking revenge for their disempowerment'. An important point for CDSE discourse is that the revenge sequence illustrates how the community of disabled characters is rendered monstrous, which is a key aspect of their horrification.
