VAMPIRE CIRCUS

UK, 1971, 87 minutes, Colour.
Adrienne Corri, Thorley Walters, John Moulder Brown, Lawrence Payne, Lynne Frederick, Elizabeth Seal, Anthony Higgins.
Directed by Robert Young.

Vampire Circus is a Hammer horror film which has received very good comments in after years. It came after the development of the Dracula and Frankenstein features with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. By the early 70s, the time of Vampire Circus, the Dracula series was moving towards its end with The Satanic Rites of Dracula and Dracula AD1972.

This is a vampire film but has a difference. A count has been ruthless with the village people who then rebel against him. A plague descends upon them and they are in need of help from the outside for medical resources. They are cut off from the outside - until a circus, a circus of night, arrives. The villagers welcome the circus and its exotic characters. However, the circus itself is quite sinister and wreaks havocon the villagers.

The film has a strong cast including Adrienne Corri who had appeared the year before as the victim in Stanley Kubrik's A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Higgins was at the beginning of his career as was Lynn Frederick. John Moulder Brown who had appeared in Deep End and King, Queen, Knave was significant at this moment - but he made a lot of films outside the United Kingdom and then had a career in television.

1. Was this just another Vampire film? Why? What made it different?

2. What was the impact of the initial innocent sequence of Anne and the little girl contrasting with the Count's vampirism, as well as the town's staking of the Count? (Why did they not kill Anne?) Did this help audience identification with the townspeople?

3. Why the continued fascination with Vampirism, even in our own day? What insights into human fear and evil do vampire stories offer?

4. How did the plague situation add to the meaning of the film - the isolated village left to its own resources, fears, lack of reality because cut-off; superstition and the curse?

5. Were the principal characters well-drawn and interesting?

6. The impact of the circus - coming from nowhere, morale-booster for the village, yet menace - animals, dwarf, gypsy woman etc.?

7. The filming of the circus - dance, acrobatics, birds – the ethereal world of beauty and unreality, yet evil beneath - the device of Evil and the panther, of the Mirror of Truth?

8. How frightening was the terror - Rosa, Evil, the animals mauling escapees, Dora's arrival, the death of the boys, of the Mayor?

9. Was the final climax effective or much like other films of the genre?

10. What is the value of this kind of film?