In the film noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947), based on the 1946 novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, Tyrone Power plays a sideshow barker in a seedy carnival which includes a geek biting the heads off live chickens.
In one of Gresham's non-fiction books, Monster Midway, he further details the process of making an alcoholic or a drug addict perform a geek act in exchange for a fix.
It is directed at the 'straight' Mr Jones, who is unable to come to terms with the counter-culture youth revolution around him: In the 1975 Robertson Davies novel World of Wonders, the narrator, Paul, tells how as a boy he was kidnapped and molested by a Willard, a carnival magician.
(“Bounty Hunter”, Season 1, Episode 22) The artist Joe Coleman bit the heads off white rats as part of his stage act as Doctor Momboozo[2] in the 1980s.
Aloysius, the proprietor of the traveling circus, comments that college boys often toured as geeks during their summer breaks, but at the sight of the lovely Crystal Lil and her eagerness they made an exception.
[5] In the film The Wizard of Gore there is a show that opens with "The Geek" (played by Jeffrey Combs) eating maggots and then biting the head off a rat.
[citation needed] In HBO's 2003 television series Carnivàle, Ben Hawkins' father, Henry Scudder, deserted the Austro-Hungarian Army and fled to America where he eventually succumbed to alcoholism and worked as a sideshow geek at Hyde and Teller's carnival.