Cult Movie Challenge 2018 | 48/52 | Hammer Horror
Fifteen years ago, a schoolmaster named Albert Müller witnessed his wife Anna take a young girl named Jenny to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, where the Count fed on Jenny and had sex with Anna. Albert organized the men of the town to raid the castle, where they staked the Count, but not before the Count cursed the city, saying their children would die to restore his life. The men lined the castle with gunpowder to blow it up. The Count, before he dies, sends Anna to find his cousin Emil at The Circus of Night. She escapes through the crypt tunnels as the castle explodes.
Seasons pass in Stetl with the shadow of Count Mitterhaus looming over them. The bell rings as men drag a cart full of the dead, struck down by a persistent plague. Roadblocks prevent anyone from entering or leaving to prevent the disease from spreading. Is this the Count’s curse, or something more rational? The new town physician, Dr. Kersh, believes the latter. Even Albert thinks that they killed a man, not a vampire.
A clown enters the village, promising hundreds of delights from The Circus of Night. Carriages carrying circus performers ride in, led by a Romani woman. A child peeks into one carriage, spotting a man, yet also a jaguar, flipping between two forms like the flickering of a light. The townspeople welcome the distraction. Dr. Kersh decides that if this circus can get through the blockade, so can he, seeking out medicines to treat the plague.
What are the plans of this circus, besides obviously bringing the Count back to life? Will Dr. Kersh find the cure in medicine or myth?
As Hammer was falling out of favor, their stories became more lurid and the sexuality more explicit. The movie has the most boobs I’ve seen in a Hammer film thus far. The circus shows are fairly horny — the tiger woman is fully nude — but also full of shapeshifting that the townspeople just seem to be cool with. The gore is also quite a bit more explicit, with rotting corpses, decapitated heads, and buckets of blood.
The film doesn’t have the greatest pacing as it shifts between its plot and the weirdo circus acts. Also, Laurence Payne doesn’t have the screen presence of a Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee — a problem that plagued many Hammer films after those actors departed. And this is just personal, but the sad caged tiger really broke my heart. :(
Still, this film lives in the Hammer sweet spot of superstition versus science, draped in Gothic dread. The movie is definitely one of Hammer’s best films from the 70s. Also, those pink credits are everything.