If you can’t make it to a PSYCHO-CIRCUS (1966) or a NIGHTMARE CIRCUS (1974), then a VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1974) is the next best thing.  Actually, it’s better. 

If you are of a certain age – say, grudgingly puttering along life’s highway somewhere between exits 40 and 60 - the title VAMPIRE CIRCUS will elicit a particular kind of thrill.  It’s later Hammer horror,  when the flinty little British studio was sailing out of their golden age (which I pin between HORROR OF DRACULA in 1958 and FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED in 1969) and entering the rough and uncertain waters of its inevitable decline.  Hammer’s cash cows, its franchise horrors (cadged from Universal Studios, with permission: Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy) were wrapping up and the old guard was stepping aside or standing down to allow the influx of new blood.  (Some old Hammeronians were trying new things: veteran scripter Jimmy Sangster had turned his hand to directing and long-time Hammer camera operator Moray Grant was a proper director of photography.) VAMPIRE CIRCUS was produced by an independent, American Wilbur Stark (who later put some money into John Carpenter’s THE THING), and written and directed by industry beginners: Justin Kinberg and Robert Young, respectively.  With a couple of exceptions, the film’s cast is largely new to Hammer (if not horror): Laurence Payne from THE CRAWLING EYE (1958) and THE TELL-TALE HEART (1960); Adrienne Corri from DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954), DR. ZHIVAGO (1965) A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971; Scarlett Johansson lookalike Moulder-Brown from HEIDI (1968), THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1969) and DEEP END (1970); Domini Blythe (making her feature film debut here; more recently in THE TROTSKY); Robert Taymen (who went from this to Pete Walker’s THE HOUSE OF WHIPCORD and the Joan Collins vehicle THE STUD) and Lynne Frederick, who had good roles in Cornel Wilde’s NO BLADE OF GRASS (1970), the sprawling NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRIA (1971) and the curious Saul Bass one-off PHASE IV (1974) before her highly-publicized marriages to (and divorces from) Peter Sellers and David Frost and her death from substance abuse at the age of 39 in 1994.  Old timer Thorley Walters (Hammer’s PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS, FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN) pops up to provide a sense of continuity but VAMPIRE CIRCUS remains, appropriately, very much its own animal.

Never truly lost, VAMPIRE CIRCUS nonetheless remained out of frame for many of us who had grown up with stills from it published in Famous Monsters of Filmland or in such 70s era genre studies as Barrie Pattison’s The Seal of Dracula (1975) or Alain Silver & James Ursini’s The Vampire Film; even a dismissive paragraph in David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema (1977) only served to pique our curiosity.  Those who were able to catch the film often had to make do with a censor-scissored cut that cored out the sex and violence (of which there is tons) and made hash of the narrative.  There were late night TV broadcasts and video cassettes and a laser disc pressed at the end of the last century put the whole thing back together… yet VAMPIRE CIRCUS remained just out of the reach for most of us.  Well, all that is academic now that Synapse Films has stepped right up with a definitive DVD release, a combo pack that offers for one reasonable price the film as both a standard anamorphic disc and a Blu-ray DVD, along with a wonderful complement of extras… not the least of which is the Daniel Griffith-written and directed companion piece THE BLOODIEST SHOW ON EARTH: MAKING VAMPIRE CIRCUS. 

Horror fans in general and Hammerheads in particular are well known for shelling out big bucks on account of nostalgia, for digital touchstones of movies that remind them of their childhoods and those seminal scares.  A lot of us weirdos have movies in our home libraries that are lousy (C.H.U.D.), that don’t hold up (THE FROZEN DEAD), even some that never were any damn good (TOMB OF TORTURE anyone?); slap a vintage horror movie onto a digital versatile disc and box it in nice packaging and some of us just lose our wills, or at least our powers of discrimination – we become like those poor saps who go around looking for injured animals to heal, collecting the dregs of cinema because, well, somebody has to care.  I’m happy to report that, at the distance of nearly 40 years, VAMPIRE CIRCUS still works a strange charm.  I won’t say it’s a perfect movie; I don’t know if I could even say it belongs in the top tier of Hammer horrors… and yet it’s got something, and better still something that encourages repeat viewings.  Kicking off with the hoariest of horror loglines – a vampire curses an entire village for engineering his doom and that curse is fulfilled years later – nothing else about VAMPIRE CIRCUS is boiler plate.  In the first five minutes, a woman lures a young child to a forest castle, delivers the girl to a vampire, writhes orgiastically as the girl is killed (offscreen) and then strips down to get it on with her undead lover in dreamy Contenental slo-mo, as if energized by the act of predation.  When VAMPIRE CIRCUS was made, the heinous Moors Murders were only five or six years in the past and the parallel, at least to my eyes, is inescapable.  Dragging that kind of harsh reality into a vampire movie just wasn’t done in 1972, at least not in England, and certainly not at Hammer (company president James Carreras was reportedly not amused) but that’s precisely what makes VAMPIRE CIRCUS such an attraction.

Suffice it to say, VAMPIRE CIRCUS is not for the kiddies, despite the presence of chimps, tigers, insane dwarves and other things children love.  Hammer had worked the “sins of the fathers…” (and mothers) theme into a number of its earlier films, notably THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960), THE REPTILE (1964) and TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1969); the studio even had a full-on pedophilia drama in NEVER TAKE SWEETS FROM A STRANGER (1960) in its back catalog but VAMPIRE CIRCUS concretizes what had long been hinted at, evoked, and implied in the earlier films.  To what end, you might well ask.  And there you have me – I don’t really know.  Part of it may be in the quietly (and occasionally not so quietly) eroticized nature of fairy tales, in which young children are routinely abandoned, taken in by malevolent strangers, transformed, isolated, imprisoned, killed, eaten – you name it.  Those archtypal senaria are part of our cultural legacy and their forms recur in all manner of drama.  VAMPIRE CIRCUS taps into this vein, while also pondering the contradictory impulses to, on the one hand, restrict, repress and protect children from all the unsavory inclinations of the world while simultaneously being drawn to the grotesque, the bizarre, the profane and the dangerous.  Could this be the true meaning behind Count Mitterhaus’ enigmatic rejoinder “One lust feeds the other”?

This essential contradiction, the counterintuituve desire to leave safety and security behind to have a glimpse of the forbidden, is embodied in the film’s Circus of Nights, the traveling carnival that rolls into the Middle European hamlet of Schtettel fifteen years after a 12-minute prologue in which the monstrous, child-eating Count Mitterhaus (Tayman, done up like Mick Jagger in PERFORMANCE) is destroyed by the requisite torch-bearing mob.  In the interim, an occult plague has descended upon the area, prompting the crown to seal Schtettel off from the rest of the world. Needing a distraction from the grim reality of death, the villagers thrill to the promised attractions of the circus, never suspecting that this is the realization of the Mitterhaus curse and that their children are the prime targets of his undying hatred.  VAMPIRE CIRCUS is one of those horror movies in which people keep going to the dangerous place even as the bodies of their townsfolk are piling up around them.  You might see this plot point as a narrative inconsistency – it wouldn’t be the only one – but you might also interpret it as reflecting a sense of cultural denial.  There is in many a British horror movie through the 60s and 70s a strain of national self-loathing.   The filmmakers here etch the villains (among them, circus proprietor Adrienne Corri, in a role Ingrid Pitt would have killed to play) as evil as can be but the film’s heroes are a pretty uninspired lot.  There are no Van Helsings in Schtettel, able to save the day in the final frames, restoring order to chaos and God to his Heaven… there is only fear, dread, impotence (figuratively and perhaps even literally in the case of Laurence Payne’s schoolmaster, whose wife forsakes him to take up with Mitterhaus) and a raging futility that leaves VAMPIRE CIRCUS littered just before the end credit crawl with a veritable shag carpet of dead bodies.  Evil is destroyed and nothing remains.

I suspect one of the things that works (at least for me) in the favor of VAMPIRE CIRCUS as a kind of waking nightmare pressed to celluloid is the fact that it is essentially an unfinished film.  Director Robert Young ran over his allotted six weeks and was denied the opportunity to complete the project, forcing him to cobble together existing footage (and a snippet or two of stock footage) and call it a movie.  I can’t say with absolute certainty that this explains all of VAMPIRE CIRCUS’ ragged ends but the nonlinearity, the loose-knit quality of the film keeps it from being the usual plod through Gothic tropes.  Mind you, these lapses in logic and good storytelling could drive you ’round the bend: why does Laurence Payne’s school master (introduced reading a volume of poesy in a field) not react with horror at his estranged wife’s abduction of the local girl until she has gotten out of earshot?  Why are some of the circus performers in on the plot while others are apparently innocent, human victims-to-be?  What is the point of the upstairs room full of “boarding students” who get ripped apart (entirely offscreen, sort of like that Monty Python radio play skit about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots) by the vampires?  Why are boarding students even in a small town that has been sealed off from the rest of the world?  Questions persist throughout VAMPIRE CIRCUS’ modest running time and yet the film delivers on such a visceral, illogical level that they do not detract from the overall experience.  You will walk away from this as if waking from an erotic but highly improbable dream, chuckling at the absurdities, puzzling at unanswered questions and wishing you could go right back to sleep and dream it all again.

All this by way of saying thanks to Synapse Films for resurrecting this gritty gem of 70s vampire cinema.  I’d like to think that the recent vampire vogue sparked by the TWILIGHT books and films and HBO’s TRUE BLOOD might create some cultural cross-pollination here but more likely is that the people who love those new things will hate this, just as a lot of us old schoolers think the contemporary movies are all posturing, all hair and make-up, with nothing in particular to say beyond damn, but vampires do look fine.  Anyfang, this DVD/Blu-ray combo pack is a dream for those of us who have been awaiting a complete and accessible transfer of this sadly obscure item and we welcome it to the digital canon.  Working in conjunction with Synapse, Daniel Griffith’s Ballyhoo Motion Pictures adds value to the package with a pair of featurettes.  THE BLOODIEST SHOW ON EARTH tells the story of the conception and execution of VAMPIRE CIRCUS through the observations, annecdotes and insights of Hammer scholar Ted Newsom, filmmaker Joe Dante, author/screenwriter Philip Nutman, and Video Watchdog editor/publisher (and, recently, fledgling filmmaker) Tim Lucas (who provides a great story about how optical fogging done to censor the film’s Japanese video cassette release actually made a bit of below-the-corset nudity significantly worse, if only to one’s imagination), as well as the recollections of Dave Prowse, a former bodybuilder and Hammer Frankenstein monster who attained a measure of immortality by filling out the suit of Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) in the original STAR WARS trilogy.  Running under 30 minutes, the documentary is informative and entertaining and bows out before it wears out its welcome.  Equally fun, if more cursory, is GALLERY OF GROTESQUERIES: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CIRCUS HORRORS, which takes the viewer on a guided tour of fear films using circus and carnival backdrops.  The complement of bonuses is rounded out with a theatrical trailer, a still and poster gallery, a featurette of goings on behind the scenes at Hammer Studios and a VAMPIRE CIRCUS comic book.  The SRP for this combopack is $29.95 but smart shoppers know where the bargains are… like vampire acrobats and psychotic midgets, they’re right there under our very noses if we only have the courage to look.