“American Horror Story: Freak Show,’’ premiering tonight on FX, employs elaborate digital effects as well as actors with deformities to depict backstage life at a 1950s carnival.

Clips and stills indicate it’s clearly influenced by the 1932 horror classic “Freaks,’’ which employed actual “freak show” performers for one of the most unusual films ever made by a major Hollywood studio — one so disturbing the movie was out of circulation for decades.

The cast included Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton; Johnny Eck, whose body seemed to end just below his rib cage; Prince Randian, who had neither arms nor legs; hermaphrodite Josephine/Joseph — and a troupe of “pinhead” microcephalics headed by Schlitze Metz, who wore a dress but was actually a man. The cast included Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton; Johnny Eck, whose body seemed to end just below his rib cage; Prince Randian, who had neither arms nor legs; hermaphrodite Josephine/Joseph — and a troupe of “pinhead” microcephalics headed by Schlitze Metz, who wore a dress but was actually a man.

“Freaks’’ starts out by depicting the “freaks’’ sympathetically, living normal lives while working for a circus — until they’re driven to take bizarre and shocking revenge on a cruel trapeze star (Olga Baclanova) when she wrongs one of their number.

MGM executive Irving Thalberg had asked director Tod Browning to make a horror movie that would top his “Dracula,’’ but after a disastrous preview showing, “Freaks’’ was cut by a half-hour. (Still today, only 65-minute prints are known to exist.) It flopped following a critical hazing. MGM leased the film to an exploitation distributor, who released it under titles like “Nature’s Mistakes’’ and “Forbidden Love.’’

“Freaks’’ had been unseen for decades when it turned up at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962. The classic then became a midnight-show staple in US theaters in the 1970s before finally reaching TV audiences. It’s available on DVD from Warner Home Video and is also streaming at Amazon Instant Video.