Dark Carnival

The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre

David J. Skal, Elias Savada

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781452972503
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The definitive biography of Hollywood horror legend Tod Browning—now revised and expanded with new material

One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time, Tod Browning (1880–1962) began his career buried alive in a carnival sideshow and saw his Hollywood reputation crash with the box office disaster–turned–cult classic Freaks. Penetrating the secret world of “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema,” Dark Carnival excavates the story of this complicated, fiercely private man. In this newly revised and expanded edition of their biography first published in 1995, David J. Skal and Elias Savada researched Browning’s recently unearthed scrapbooks and photography archives to add further nuance and depth to their previous portrait of this enigmatic artist.

Skal and Savada chronicle Browning’s turn-of-the-century flight from an eccentric Louisville family into the realm of carnivals and vaudeville, his disastrous first marriage, his rapid climb to riches in the burgeoning silent film industry, and the alcoholism that would plague him throughout his life. They offer a close look at Browning’s legendary collaborations with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi as well as the studio politics that brought his remarkable run to an inglorious conclusion. With a revised prologue, epilogue, filmography, and new text and illustrations throughout, Dark Carnival is an unparalleled account of a singular filmmaker and an illuminating depiction of the evolution of horror and the early film industry.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• Prologue : The Director Vanishes
• Chapter 1: Certified Public Spectacles
• Chapter 2: Shadows of Babylon
• Chapter 3: “Murderous Midgets, Crippled Thieves, and Poisonous Reptiles, All Sinister and Deadly in a Murky Atmosphere of Blackness and Unholy Doom”
• Chapter 4: Requiem for a Scream
• Chapter 5: Transylvania
• Chapter 6: “Offend One and You Offend Them All”
• Chapter 7: Twilight of the Tod
• Epilogue: “One of Us”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Filmography
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Author Biographies