By Hank Reineke

The ever-crowding field of horror film scholarship lost a very important contributor when author David J. Skal was killed, New Year’s Day 2024, in an automobile collision. According to his literary agent, Skal, riding in the passenger seat of his partner’s automobile, was killed when a car traveling opposite crossed the median. Mr. Skal’s long-time partner, Robert Postawko, briefly survived the terrible crash, but he too would succumb due to injuries sustained

On 18 February 2025, University of Minnesota Press published a revised edition of Skal and Elias Savada’s Dark Carnival: the Secret World of Tod Browning – Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre. This new edition, already well-into-the-works prior to Skal’s tragic passing, promised the “extensive use of Browning’s personal scrapbooks and photographic archives.” Such rare material had been unavailable to the authors at the time of the book’s original 1995 publication.

This amended version of Dark Carnival will likely serve as the final major project of David J. Skal, the Publisher’s Foreword noting the author had, “tragically passed away during the final weeks of this edition’s production.” As a film historian Skal certainly has left behind a legacy. During a career of forty-odd years, he had served as an essayist, contributor, editor, short-story writer, novelist of both fiction and non-fiction works, and film and television documentarian. One of Skal’s most recent projects was his contributing audio commentaries to Criterion’s Blu- ray set of “Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers: Freaks (1932), The Unknown (1927) and The Mystic (1925). That glorious release of silent film classics was released in October of 2023, only a few months prior to Skal’s passing.

If anyone was best- suited in providing Criterion with expert commentaries re: the career of Tod (“The Edgar Allan Poe of Cinema”) Browning, it was certainly Skal. In 1995, Anchor Books/Doubleday first published Dark Carnival, a seminal study of Browning’s melancholic life and his thematically dark and unsettling oeuvre. A self-professed “monster kid,” Dark Carnival was not the first of Skal’s book-length works to study horror-film history and the genre’s cultural impact.

In the five years preceding Dark Carnival, Skal had published such other non-fiction studies as Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (W.W. Norton & Co., New York 1990) and The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993). The latter title remains, perhaps, his best known work. Shortly following the original publication of Dark Carnival, Skal published the less academic, more pop-culture friendly encyclopedia, V is for Vampire: the A-Z Guide to Everything Undead (Plume, 1996). The author’s primary interests, as one might guess, tended to all things macabre.

Prior to Dark Carnival, Tod Browning remained one of the most elusive figures of early cinema studies. Browning was something of a polarizing character amongst critics and peers alike: some thought him “an unassailable auteur of cinematic darkness,” others belittled his work as that of a hack. Some thought of Browning as a “kindly and generous person,” others saw him as an “obsessively private” person of “nasty disposition,” a “classic Hollywood son of a bitch with a morbid streak a mile wide.” Celebrated by one circle of cineaste admirers, others derided his directorial legacy as a miasma of recycled storylines, exploitational tropes and relationship dysfunction. In the book’s prologue, the authors suggest they found the writing of Browning’s biography as most challenging when attempting to sort out historical fact from fiction. Their research was further hindered as the curmudgeonly Browning chose to leave “the world no reminisces, no diaries, no official recounts of his career, affecting an indifference to the film medium that approached outright contempt.” He was, from the very beginning, an outcast.

Dark Carnival mixes straight biography and film criticism in equal measure. Born Charles Alpert (“Tod”) Browning in Louisville, Kentucky, 12 July 1880 – or, perhaps, as early as 1874. Even his correct birthdate was obfuscated, Browning’s personal account differing from the official record. As a young man Browning wasn’t particularly religious in belief, though he did cultivate a lifelong obsession with baseball, alcohol and – especially - show business. Browning was particularly interested in performing as ringmaster. As a child he would put on penny admission shows in a shed behind his family home.

Uninterested in a life tending horses or working for the railroad, Browning was fascinated by the exotic pageantry to which he was introduced in and around Louisville. He was especially taken by the annual Mardi Gras-style atmosphere of the Satellites of Mercury Parade, of the colorful, roving gypsy encampments he encountered outside of the newly christened Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, of the raucous entertainments offered in the vaudeville playhouses and burlesque theatres aligning the city’s “raffish” riverfront.

When, at age nine in 1890, a devastating tornado swept through Louisville, Browning was witness to the terrible structural and human wreckage left in the storm’s wake. It may have been a result of this experience that Browning became haunted, perhaps obsessed, by the sight of the maimed, crippled human bodies that littered the streets of his hometown. Browning would marry Amy Louis Stevens in March of 1906, but as he had a roguish “roving eye,” he abandoned his first wife in the summer of 1909, having “not contributed anything towards her support or maintenance.”

The truth was his true real love was show business. Oddly, Browning became obsessed with those whom many saw as the lowest-rung practitioners of show business: carnival folk and their peripatetic gypsy troupes. His people were the barkers of ballyhoo, the sideshow freaks, geeks, midgets, sword swallowers, snake handlers, fire eaters, contortionists and “wild men” from parts unknown. Those of higher station status saw such performers as migratory panhandlers: alcoholics, swindlers and grifters, all scuffling for the pennies and nickels of gullible gentile audiences. The symbiotic relationship between the two disparate groups was transactional: the book alleges that, “The carny ethos divided the world into two rigid camps: show people and everyone else – “suckers,” marks,” and “rubes.”

Browning would throw his lot in with the former. He did a spell as a carny, allowing himself to be buried alive nightly as a so-called “Hypnotic Living Corpse.” He later graduated from carny life to the stages of vaudeville and burlesque houses. There he worked alongside magicians and illusionists, carefully studying the deceptive tricks-of-the-trade of the psychic-mesmerists. A chance meeting in 1913 with D.W. Griffith gave Browning the opportunity to travel to Los Angeles and act in no fewer than fifty one-reel comedies circa 1913-1915. In 1915 he ambitiously moved to the director’s chair. Browning would helm a number of one or two reel silent melodramas as director, many of these early storylines reworked and revisited later in his career.

His alcoholism was becoming more obvious. One raucous “roadhouse revel” led to a terrible collision of his car with a railroad flatbed. The collision fractured Browning’s leg and caused him serious internal injury and the loss of most of his teeth. Tragically, the unfortunate passenger in Browning’s vehicle was killed instantly, the impact so violent that imprints of the flatbed’s iron rails were found pressed into the victim’s skull. The authors note that none of Browning’s colleagues interviewed could recollect him ever talking about the incident, much less offering any “”feelings of responsibility” or complicity in the death of his friend.

Following a period of convalescence, Browning returned to directing silent pics for Metro. In 1918, Browning came to the attention of Irving G. Thalberg, then with Universal. Signing with Universal, Browning helmed a number of five and six reelers for the company, two of which featured one of their big silent stars, the actress Priscilla Dean. Those two films, The Wicked Darling (1919) and Outside the Law (1920), would introduce Browning to their otherwise unheralded co-star, Lon Chaney.

Though Browning would freelance on productions of several other film companies, both he and Chaney would follow Thalberg in the latter’s defection to MGM. It was during this period with MGM that Browning’s melodramatic, envelope-pushing cycle of silent films – all made in collaboration with Chaney - that solidified his reputation as a bankable director of merit: The Unholy Three (1925), The Blackbird (1926), The Road to Mandalay (1926), The Unknown (1927), London after Midnight (1927), The Big City (1928), West of Zanzibar (1928) and Where East is East (1929). When sound film production became the norm, things changed.

The authors of Dark Carnival remind, “Neither Browning nor Chaney was comfortable with the prospect of a talking screen: their art, after all, was firmly rooted in the tradition of pantomime.” Indeed, Chaney would appear in only one sound film prior to his passing in August 1930, Jack Conway’s talking version of The Unholy Three. Robbed of his primary collaborator, Browning would direct his first sound production for MGM, The Thirteenth Chair (1929), before signing a contract with Universal to remake his own Outside the Law (1930), Edward G. Robinson now cast in the role Chaney played a decade earlier.

While working on The Thirteenth Chair, Browning made the odd decision to cast a “perversely inappropriate” actor, Bela Lugosi, as a police inspector of mysterious personage. The authors suggest Lugosi’s against-type casting – abetted by the actor’s uber-melodramatic performance and lugubrious speaking voice – was intentional. Browning had been “colluding with the actor” to get Universal to consider the offer “of a screen test for the film version of Dracula.” If this was the case, their gambit was successful. Lugosi would claim the title role and Browning would secure the director’s chair. Universal’s production of Dracula (1931) would, for all of its staginess, missed opportunities and long silences – prove Browning’s greatest success.

In contrast, Browning’s follow-up to Dracula, Iron Man, was a too-talkie and too stagey melodramatic photoplay that, similarly to the sound version of Outside the Law, opened to mixed reviews. Still confident in his talent, MGM would lure Browning back into the fold with a generous fifty-thousand dollar salary and three picture commitment. As further inducement, the studio offered Browning an additional 50K “adjustment check” for a trio of previous MGM pics Browning had done considerable advance work on – projects that had sadly fallen to the wayside due to Chaney’s illness. It was a speculative investment in Browning’s career the studio would come to regret.

The film Browning would choose to lens on his return to MGM was the notorious Freaks (1932). This pre-code film, in which a troupe of carnival “freaks” and human oddities avenge the cruel manipulation and murder plot against one of their own, retains the ability to shock even in 2025. The book’s chapter (“Offend One and You Offend Them All”) concerning the production – as well as the subsequent public and critical outrage following the release - of Freaks, is revelatory and fascinating, a compelling historical read-through.

Though Browning would go on to direct four more pictures in the wake of the controversies kicked up by Freaks, the stinging criticism to his grim melodrama signaled the beginning of the end of his career as director. Two of his remaining four pics, Mark of the Vampire (1935, a sound remake of his own London after Midnight) and The Devil Doll (1936) are passably interesting mystery-horror mellers, though both would underperform at the box office. The other two, Fast Workers (1933) and Miracles for Sale (1939) were efficient if unremarkable comedies. Unfortunately, and more damnably, these latter two pics had, similarly to Freaks, not only performed below expectation, but were outright money losers for MGM.

Though Browning continued to pitch ideas to MGM for future projects, his proposals were shunted aside or rejected outright. In time, Browning saw the writing on the wall: he had, in his own estimation, been “blackballed” from the film industry. He would “officially” retire in January of 1941, quietly retreating to his cottage in Malibu with his second wife, Alice (nee Wilson). Married in 1917, Alice would remain at her husband’s side (with periodic separations) despite Browning’s indiscretions – including a scandalous “drunken dalliance” with the under-age actress Anna May Wong. Following Alice’s passing in 1944, Browning became a virtual recluse – a brooding, gloomy melancholic with few close friendships.

Browning would spend his final years in near-isolation, drinking prodigious amounts of bottled beer and spending his days and insomniac nights watching baseball games and black-and-white movies on television. Prior to his death in October 1962, he demanded that no memorial or viewing be staged to commemorate his passing. Only a drinking-buddy – a house painter known only as “Lucky” – was allowed to visit his corpse and proffer one last post-mortem toast.

Browning’s biography is, to say the least, a unique one. Having lived a life nearly as haunted and troubled as his cinematic melodramas, I’m guessing it is unlikely that Browning’s story will ever be told better than here in the pages of Dark Carnival. The greatest platitude I can ascribe to Skal and Savada’s masterful study is that it rekindles genuine interest in the director’s filmography. The book ignites a desire to seek out as many of Browning’s extant films as one can source. The best books regarding cinema studies are those that leave readers curious to visit or revisit old film titles, either famous or forgotten. A superbly researched and elegantly written study, Dark Carnival is, without question, one such book.

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