THE MAN WHO LAUGHS 1928
A Smile Carved by Shadows: The Mask That Weeps: Gothic Wounds and the Poetry of Pain – Beauty, Suffering, and Spectacle in Leni’s Masterwork
The Man Who Laughs (1928), directed by German Expressionist visionary Paul Leni, (he directed Waxworks ‘Das Wachsfigurenkabinett 1924’: the influential German Expressionist anthology film featuring fantastical tales centered around wax museum figures and the landmark Old Dark House mystery The Cat and the Canary in 1927) is a film that bleeds tragedy from its very pores—a silent symphony of shadow and light, anchored by Conrad Veidt’s iconic, surgically grotesque grin.
Adapted from Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel L’Homme Qui Rit, the story is a Gothic parable of societal cruelty, where the human body becomes both spectacle and prison. Set in 17th-century England, the film opens with a chilling act of aristocratic vengeance: King James II, played with reptilian malice by Sam De Grasse, condemns Lord Clancharlie to the iron maiden and orders his young son, Gwynplaine, to be mutilated by Comprachicos—roving child traffickers who disfigure children to sell as carnival attractions. The Comprachicos, drawn from Hugo’s lore, were said to reshape infants through bone-breaking restraints, facial muzzles, and surgical alterations, creating living grotesques for profit.
This historical horror—echoing real freak show practices —grounds the film’s surreal nightmare in the soil of human exploitation. It draws from a mix of folklore, moral panic, and the real exploitation of people with physical differences, but the specific practice of intentionally mutilating children for freak shows is largely a product of Hugo’s imagination rather than documented historical fact.
It’s a chilling reminder that the grotesqueries onscreen are not merely the stuff of Gothic fantasy, to realize that the horrors at the heart of the film aren’t just the stuff of dark fiction—But they are rooted in a history where real bodies, especially children, who were twisted and broken were offered up for the curious gaze of others, their suffering transformed into spectacle and commerce. In the shadowed corners of old carnivals and sideshows, children who were shaped into living oddities by fate and exploited by human hands eager to profit from pain, turning innocence into a commodity and cruelty into entertainment. It makes the nightmare even more surreal and disturbing that the uncorrupted, unguarded spirit of children could be sold at the altar of spectacle and fascination.
Cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton (whose filmography extends across more than 150 films, showcasing his versatility from major studio productions to atmospheric B-movies and television throughout his six-decade career) bathes the film in Expressionist chiaroscuro: jagged shadows claw at castle walls, while mist-laden moors and cavernous interiors amplify the sense of existential isolation. Charles D. Hall’s sets—spires tilting like broken teeth, labyrinths of staircases—mirror Gwynplaine – the deeply tragic and sympathetic victim of extraordinary cruelty, whose emotional core remains remarkably intact and resilient throughout the story. Gwynplaine’s kindness, loyalty, and capacity for love are unwavering, and he consistently demonstrates empathy and moral clarity, especially in his relationships with Dea and Ursus.
The film’s most haunting image is Veidt himself, his face frozen in a rictus grin by makeup artist Jack Pierce (later famed for Universal’s Frankenstein 1931). Veidt’s eyes, however, betray the torment beneath: wide, liquid pools of sorrow that ripple with every stifled sob. His performance is a tour de force in silent acting, where the body screams what the mouth cannot.
We cannot forget Veidt’s legendary portrayal of Cesare, the somnambulist, in Robert Wiene’s seminal German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 1920. Cesare is a sleepwalker kept in a coffin-like box by the sinister Dr. Caligari, and under Caligari’s hypnotic control, he becomes an instrument of murder and terror in a twisted, dreamlike town. Veidt’s performance is haunting: his gaunt, spectral appearance and fluid, unnatural movements embody the film’s nightmarish atmosphere. Cesare is both victim and threat—a tragic figure robbed of agency, whose silent suffering and eerie presence have become archetypes in horror cinema. Veidt’s work in this role is mesmerizing, making Cesare one of the most enduring images of silent horror cinema and cementing Veidt’s reputation as a master of physical and psychological nuance. He also played the tormented pianist, Paul Orlac, in The Hands of Orlac 1924.
Opposite him, Mary Philbin (of Phantom of the Opera fame) plays Dea, the blind orphan Gwynplaine rescues from a frozen corpse. Her ethereal beauty and unseeing gaze—paired with a tremulous vulnerability—make her the film’s moral compass, her love for Gwynplaine a fragile light in the gloom.
The narrative unfolds like a nightmare mosaic, after years touring as “The Laughing Man” in a carnival run by the philosophical showman Ursus (Cesare Gravina), Gwynplaine’s life fractures when his noble lineage is unearthed. The decadent Duchess Josiana (Olga Baclanova – who played the the manipulative, seductive, cruel, and calculating Cleopatra in Tod Browning’s Freaks), both aroused and repelled by his deformity, lures him into a gilded trap of erotic manipulation, while the court jester Barkilphedro (Brandon Hurst) schemes to weaponize his identity. Key scenes sear themselves into my memory:
Gwynplaine’s first unmasking before a jeering crowd, his face illuminated by a single spotlight as the audience’s laughter twists into horror; the Duchess’s seduction in her opulent chamber, where she traces his scarred mouth with a mix of fascination and revulsion; the climactic speech to the House of Lords, where Gwynplaine—robed in aristocratic finery—rages against the nobility’s moral rot, his words drowned out by their mocking guffaws. Each frame throbs with Leni’s operatic vision, blending Grand Guignol theatrics with aching pathos.
There’s something unforgettable about the moment Gwynplaine is revealed to the crowd for the first time—he stands alone, his face caught in the harsh clarity of a single spotlight. At first, the audience erupts in laughter, treating him as little more than a grotesque spectacle. But as the light lingers and his tragic smile refuses to fade, that laughter begins to shift, almost imperceptibly, into a sense of discomfort and then outright repulsion It’s as if the crowd suddenly realizes the depth of his suffering, and the joke is no longer funny; they’re confronted with the humanity behind the mask, and the mood in the room turns into something much darker.
Then there’s the charged encounter with the Duchess in her lavish private chamber—a scene as intimate as it is unsettling. She’s drawn to Gwynplaine’s disfigurement, unable to resist tracing the lines of his scarred mouth, her touch hovering somewhere between fascination and revulsion. The tension in the air reaches out from the screen; it’s not just a seduction, but a strange dance of power and vulnerability, where desire is tangled up with fear and curiosity. The scene lingers because it refuses to offer easy answers about attraction or disgust—it’s all there, mingling in the Duchess’s gaze and Gwynplaine’s silent endurance.
Finally, the film builds to that remarkable speech in the House of Lords. Gwynplaine, now dressed in the finery of his birthright, stands before the very people who once destroyed his life. He tries to speak truth to power, exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty of the aristocracy. But his words are quickly drowned out by the jeers and laughter of the lords, who refuse to see him as anything more than a sideshow curiosity. It’s a devastating moment—he’s given a platform, but not a voice, and the system that scarred him refuses to hear what he has to say.
The film’s legacy is as paradoxical as its protagonist. Though marketed as a horror curio (Universal’s follow-up to The Phantom of the Opera), it is, at heart, a romantic tragedy—a cry against the exploitation of human suffering.
Hugo’s novel, written in exile as a critique of France’s ruling class, finds eerie resonance in Leni’s Weimar-era sensibilities, where the scars of war and economic collapse mirrored Gwynplaine’s disfigurement. The Comprachicos, though fictionalized, evoke the very real 19th-century freak shows where “human curiosities” like Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man) were displayed as living myths. By framing Gwynplaine’s mutilation as both literal and metaphorical—a wound inflicted by power, perpetuated by spectacle—the film becomes a hall of mirrors, reflecting back to us the complicity and power of our gaze.
In its final moments, ‘The Man Who Laughs’ retreats from the cold grandeur of the court’s cruelty to the desolate, lonely stretch of shore where Gwynplaine, having renounced his title and claim to nobility, holds Dea in his arms as she slips away.
As waves swallow their silhouettes, slowly erasing them from view, the camera lingers on Veidt’s face: that famously tragic smile now softened by grief and heartbreak, a silent scream against the void. It is a quietly devastating ending. And in a way, it feels like a final fitting epitaph for Paul Leni himself, who passed away before the film ever reached audiences.
Like laughter in the dark: art, exploitation, and the ghosts of the grotesque, at its haunted heart, somehow, the film manages to immortalize all that pain and strangeness into something hauntingly beautiful—a reminder of just how powerful art can be when it dares to look unflinchingly at the grotesque and still finds humanity there.
THE UNKNOWN 1927
Few films from the silent era throb with the feverish intensity and psychological perversity of Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927), a carnival of obsession and mutilation that remains as unsettling today as it was nearly a century ago. Having revisited The Unknown recently, I find that its unsettling power remains undiminished; the film’s ability to disturb and provoke is as potent to me now as it was at first viewing.
Directed by Browning, a master of the macabre whose fascination with sideshow outcasts would later culminate in Freaks (1932), and starring the inimitable Lon Chaney, the film showcases both men’s shared preoccupation with suffering, deception, and the spectacle of the abnormal.
The story, conceived by Browning and brought to the screen with titles by Joseph W. Farnham and a scenario by Waldemar Young, unfolds beneath the canvas of a Spanish gypsy circus. Here, Alonzo the Armless (Chaney) dazzles crowds as a knife-thrower and marksman, performing miraculous feats with only his feet—eating, drinking, lighting cigarettes, and, most impressively, hurling blades at his lovely assistant, Nanon, played by a luminous, young Joan Crawford in one of her earliest and most formative roles.
Yet the act is a deception: Alonzo is not truly armless but binds his arms in a corset to conceal a criminal past, his left hand marked by a double thumb—a secret that, if revealed, would spell his ruin.
Browning’s camera, guided by cinematographer Merritt B. Gerstad, lingers on the grotesque and the intimate alike: the flicker of Chaney’s eyes as he contemplates Nanon, the sinuous movements of his feet as they perform the impossible, the claustrophobic interiors of the circus wagons where secrets fester. The sets, designed by Richard Day and Cedric Gibbons, conjure a world at once earthy and phantasmagoric, a liminal space where the boundaries between performance and reality dissolve.
The heart of the narrative is a triangle of longing and repression. Nanon, traumatized by the unwanted advances of men, suffers from a pathological fear of being touched by male hands. Alonzo, believing himself the only man she can trust, becomes obsessed with her, his love twisted by the knowledge that his hidden arms—his very humanity—are the barrier to her affection. The strongman Malabar (Norman Kerry), all open strength and straightforward desire, emerges as Alonzo’s rival, embodying everything Alonzo can never be.
In a sequence as shocking as anything in silent cinema, Alonzo, desperate to win Nanon and to erase the evidence of his crime, blackmails a doctor into amputating his arms for real. The horror here is not just physical but existential: a man so consumed by love and guilt that he mutilates himself, only to discover, upon his return, that Nanon has been cured of her phobia and has fallen for Malabar. The final act spirals into madness and violence, culminating in a bravura set-piece where Alonzo, in a fit of jealous rage, attempts to murder Malabar during a circus performance, only to meet his own tragic end in the chaos of stampeding horses.
What gives The Unknown its enduring power is not just the extremity of its plot but the raw emotional force of Chaney’s performance. Eschewing the elaborate makeup that made him famous, Chaney relies here on physical discipline and expressive subtlety, using his body as both mask and confession. His Alonzo is by turns pitiable, monstrous, and heartbreakingly human—a figure whose suffering is both spectacle and indictment.
The film’s backdrop is steeped in the real and imagined history of freak shows and circus exploitation. During the Golden Age of the American circus (1870-1920), so-called “freak performers”—people with physical differences—were displayed as living curiosities, their bodies commodified for profit and spectacle. While the circus could offer community and agency for some, it was more often a space of exclusion and marginalization, where the boundaries of the “normal” were defined by the public rejection of the abnormal.
Browning’s own fascination with these liminal figures is evident in every frame; the circus is not merely a backdrop but a crucible in which the pain of otherness is both inflicted and performed.
The Unknown is a film of unforgettable images: Alonzo lighting a cigarette with his toes, the slow unstrapping of his corset to reveal the truth beneath, the haunted gaze of Crawford’s Nanon as she moves from fear to desire to horror. It is a story prefaced as a circus legend, but its resonance is universal—a meditation on the lengths to which we will go to be loved, and the monstrousness that can arise when love is twisted by secrecy and shame. In the end, it is not Alonzo’s deformity that destroys him, but the world’s inability to accept what is different, and his own inability to accept himself.
In Browning and Chaney’s hands, The Unknown becomes more than a tale of sideshow grotesquerie; it is a dark, poetic fable about the human need for connection, the violence of exclusion, and the tragic cost of hiding one’s true self.
“No matter what roles I play, I can’t get Caligari out of my system”-Conrad Veidt
