From the Roman games to American travelling carnivals, freakshows - human anomalies presented for spectacle - have flourished throughout recorded history. The birth of the movies provided a further outlet for these displays, which in turn led to a peculiar strain of bizarre cinema: Freak film.

"Inside Teradome" is a comprehensive, fully illustrated guide to the roots and development of this fascinating, often disturbing cinematic genre. Including: A brief history of teratology; freaks in myth and medicine.The history of freakshows, origins of cinema.Influence of sideshows on cinema.Use of human anomalies in cinema.Freaks and geeksBizarre cinema: mutilation and other fetishes.Illustrated filmography; index.From the pioneering illusions of Georges Melies and the Expressionist distortions of "Dr Caligari," the surgical horrors of "Mad Love" and real-life grotesqueries of Tod Brownning's "Freaks," to the modern nightmare visions of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eraserhead, " and "Santa Sangre, Inside Teradome" reveals a twisted thread of voyeuristic sickness running not only thorugh cinema, but through the society of which it has always been the most telling barometer.