NOT Available on DVD: ‘Vampire Circus’

The popularity of Hammer horror films began to decline in the early 1970s and the British studio, struggling to maintain its place in the market, made some adjustments with their many vampire films. The gore and nudity quotient was ramped up, overt lesbianism was introduced, and the Christopher Lee Dracula series was even moved to contemporary London all in attempts to bring new ideas to the vampire genre. One of my favorite Hammer films from this period is their 1972 oddity VAMPIRE CIRCUS, an eccentric film that mixes a traveling circus sideshow story with vampire lore resulting a bizarre, original fantasy. While most of Hammer’s output is readily available for home viewing VAMPIRE CIRCUS, one of the best, is not.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS begins with an exciting 12-minute pre-credits prologue that is vintage Hammer and plays like a short feature. The villagers of the Austrian town of Stettel, led by Professor Mueller, storm the castle of the vampire Count Mitterhouse. He has taken the local schoolteacher’s wife as his lover and, with her assistance, lured a young girl to her death. The villagers drive a stake through Mitterhouse’s heart but not before he has cursed them all (“None of you will live!… Your children will die to give me back life!”). After the credits finally roll we return to Stettel, 15 years later. The town is infected by plague and cordoned off from the rest of the country by armed guards from neighboring towns.. The mysterious Circus of Nights, lead by a Gypsy Woman and her dwarf sidekick, somehow break through the roadblock to perform in Stettel. The circus offers clowns, a strongman, acrobats, exotic animal acts, and offers the townsfolk a welcome distraction from their affliction until the youth of Strettebegin to disappear. Professor Mueller’s daughter Dora has been studying in Vienna, but when she heard that her village is diseased, she returns to be with her father and her boyfriend. Together they combat the reawakened Count Mitterhouse and the evil sideshow that is the VAMPIRE CIRCUS.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS is traditional Hammer horror in some respects (19th century setting mostly in the town square of a European village) but it’s mostly a bizarre blend of new ideas, ignoring much of the conventional vampire mythology from Hammer’s better-known Dracula series. Since Peter Cushing is not around to explain the rules, the audience is never quite sure what is possible and what is not in VAMPIRE CIRCUS. The vampires don’t appear to be harmed by sunlight nor do their victims return as vampires. Not all of the troupe are vampires and some shape-shift into different animals. The circus performances are shot with an evocative fairy-tale quality – the black panther jumping into the audience before quickly transforming into a suave human and advancing hungrily towards a young girl; bats flying through the air and then transforming into brother-sister acrobats; the nude woman painted as a tiger gracefully performing a strikingly sexy dance. VAMPIRE CIRCUS is one of the gorier Hammer films with many impalings, moldy corpses, and decapitations. There are a lot of plot inconsistencies and weird logic in VAMPIRE CIRCUS but the end product is so colorful and the atmosphere so dreamlike that it makes for a delirious viewing experience.

Perhaps VAMPIRE CIRCUS seems so unusual because much of Hammer’s usual roster of star talent (Cushing and Lee) was not involved, instead involving new blood in front of and behind the camera. Thorley Walters (Cushing’s assistant in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN) is the only Hammer regular here and he’s good as the town burgermeister. Robert Tayman is creepy as the paedophiliac Mitterhaus, who comes across as a far more repellent villain than Christopher Lee’s Dracula ever did. Adrienne Corri (who played a similar role in MADHOUSE in 1974 opposite Vincent Price and fans may remember as the rape/murder victim Mrs. Alexander in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE ) is convincingly wicked as the mortal gypsy woman who leads the pack of vampires. As the circus strongman David Prowse (who played the Frankenstein monster twice for Hammer in HORROR OF FRANKENKENSTEIN in 1970 and FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL in 1974) is silent and scary and would go on to play Darth Vader in the first three STAR WARS movies. In his directorial debut Robert Young has a lot of story to tell and gives VAMPIRE CIRCUS a crazy, breathless pace. Young would have a distinguished career in British cinema and is still directing today, but would never return to Hammer. But my favorite talent in VAMPIRE CIRCUS is the aforementioned tiger woman. Bald and sexy, she’s one of the great women of Hammer. I have no idea who played her (probably a nude dancer), but I can remember staring fascinated at photos of her in my horror movie books as a child and my disappointment when Channel 11 would show VAMPIRE CIRCUS in the middle of the night in the 1970’s and all her scenes were cut out (until I saw VAMPIRE CIRCUS on laserdisc I assumed she was wearing some sort of painted-on body stocking….she’s not!).

VAMPIRE CIRCUS was at one time a difficult title for Hammer collectors to find in its uncut form. I still have my VHS taping of a butchered version from Commander USA’s Groovy Movies on the USA channel in the early ‘80’s. It never had a VHS release in the U.S. but did surface on laserdisc in a decent full-frame transfer. Most Hammer Horror has been issued on DVD but VAMPIRE CIRCUS is on a short list of key Hammer titles (that includes TWINS OF EVIL, THESE ARE THE DAMNED, and the prehistoric/fur bikini epic CREATURES THE WORLD FORGOT) that are still NOT available on DVD.