Directed By Arthur Crabtree
As a young boy, I quivered in my boots when some know-it-all teenagers told me about a movie they caught at the local drive-in. “This girl gets a pair of binoculars in the mail, she looks through them, and these spikes come out and poke her eyes out!” It was the opening scene from the notorious Horrors of the Black Museum , and this image remains as potent as anything found in cinema. Photographer Diane Arbus (1923 – 1971) immortalized this image, snapping the moment of impact directly off the screen during one of her many ramblings across New York City ’s Times Square fleapit movie theaters. Arbus herself admitted she derived inspiration for her series of photographs of the physically challenged from the repeated revivals of Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932) on 42nd Street.
on DVD