That makes a lot of sense, too, once you become familiar with the plot. Given the star would be spending two-thirds of the film in clown makeup, casting Chaney seems to have been a forgone conclusion. He Who Gets Slapped was the first film to be shot in MGM’s new studios, but the release was delayed a few months until Christmas in order to draw bigger crowds for what was obviously a, ya know, Christmasy-type film for the whole family.

Chaney plays Paul Beaumont, a young and unknown scientist who has only been able to support himself and his wife thanks to the generosity of his patron, Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott). For years now Beaumont has been struggling to prove his radical new theory about the origins of mankind. Now that his work is finally complete, he’s ready to present it before the Academy of Science. But the night before the presentation, his wife steals all of his papers and hands them over to the Baron. On the day of the presentation, instead of introducing him as had been expected, the Baron delivers all of Beaumont’s findings as his own. When Beaumont confronts him in front of the gathered crowd of scientists, the Baron dismisses his claims and worse, slaps him in the face as the crowd roars with laughter. If that wasn’t bad enough, when Beaumont returns home to tell his wife about the outrage, she reveals that she’s in love with the Baron, that they’ve been carrying on behind his back, and—just as bad as that slap—she calls him a fool and a clown. Pondering this turn of events, Beaumont sees he has two choices.

read more: Creepy Clowns are Nothing New – A Brief But Disturbing History

Sure enough we cut to five years later, when Beaumont, now known only as “He,” has joined a small Parisian circus as a clown with a growing reputation. His act, quite simply, involves being slapped in the face repeatedly by other clowns. In some performances he recreates his humiliation at the Academy of Science, and in others the troupe’s other clowns simply form a rotating ring around He, each giving him a slap as they pass. The crowd goes wild. As another member of the circus puts it, “There’s nothing that makes people laugh so hard as seeing someone else get slapped.”

But of course knowing the back story, it’s more terrifying and unsettling than hilarious, which Sjöström points up in two ways. First, though the cinematography in the first part of the film is quite normal and straightforward, once we cut to the circus things change. During the performance sequences the film is intentionally underdeveloped, leaving the clowns a collection of stark, intensely white, almost featureless figures frolicking against an impenetrably black background. Instead of the wild, fun, crazy circus atmosphere we’re used to seeing on film, it plays like the cold psychodrama it really is, as He relives his betrayal and humiliation over and over every night.