Vampire Circus – 1972 | 87 mins | Horror | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Hammer’s Vampire Circus was a tightly paced written with genuine affection by Judson Milberg. Originally titled ‘Village of the Vampires’, Michael Carreras summarily pulled the plug on the production six weeks into the schedule with several scenes yet to be filmed, so director Robert Young had to make do with what footage he’d got. Young injected a magical fairy-talc ambience into the film, quite unlike anything else in the Hammer catalogue, until the story gradually descends into cliché and 70s sexploitation. The lack of a star in the cast hurt the film immeasurably at the box office. Of the cast, veteran Thorley Walters indulges in some delightful oafish clowning as the Burgermeister and Anthony Corlan is excellent as the feral Emil. 18-year-old John Moulder-Brown is grotesquely wooden as the upper-crust Anton. He was cast on the strength of his performance in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End, and from the same production came Polish actress Christina Paul, was is only required to cavort about half-naked.

1810. When the vampire Count Mitterhaus (Robert Tayman) is staked by the villagers of Schtettel, his mistress, Anna Mueller (Domini Blythe), apparently dies with him. With his dying words, the Count lays a curse on the nearby village. 15 years later, the Circus of Nights comes to the Serbian village led by a gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri) to fulfil the Count’s dying curse. Cut off from the outside world by a mysterious plague, there are many deaths, and schoolmaster Dr Kersh (Richard Owens) and his son Anton (John Moulder Brown) investigate, and after much carnage, Kersh recognises the gypsy woman as his ‘late’ wife, Anna. Though the macabre performers change into bats and black panthers before their very eyes, the villagers take a remarkably long time to catch on to their visitors’ true nature.