I own it, and I like it. Honestly, I don’t think it was supposed to be a horror. It’s really sympathetic to the ‘freaks’, they’re the characters the audience is set up to connect with. The director, Tod Browning, had a background in the Circus and wasn’t interested in taking advantage of carny folk, able bodied or no.
That said, it’s amazing when the human torso is crawling under the caravan with a knife in his teeth. You just know he’ll cut you, you just don’t know how.