01
The Vampire Lovers
Why this pick
A lush Hammer companion in spirit: period gothic settings, sensual menace, ornate colour, and a predatory vampire threat played with the same dreamlike theatricality.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1972 1h 27m GBR
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Vampire Circus
Horror
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Vampire Circus, try these.
01
02
Twins of Evil
Why this pick
Its 18th-century village, fanatical anti-vampire crusade, and flamboyant bloodshed closely match Vampire Circus’s mix of folk-horror dread and vivid Hammer spectacle.
03
The Blood on Satan's Claw
Why this pick
Another beautifully unsettling British period horror, where an isolated rural community is overtaken by corrupting evil and mounting paranoia.
04
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter
Why this pick
Offers Hammer’s richly coloured, old-world vampire atmosphere with a more adventurous rhythm, eccentric characters, and inventive variations on vampire lore.
05
The Devil Rides Out
Why this pick
For the same heightened Hammer pleasures: elaborate occult danger, urgent confrontations with evil, handsome period design, and unapologetically stylised horror.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
One evening near the small Serbian village of Stetl, early in the nineteenth century, schoolmaster Albert Müller witnesses his wife Anna taking a little girl, Jenny Schilt, into the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a reclusive nobleman rumored to be a vampire responsible for the disappearances of other children. The rumours prove true, as Anna, who has become Mitterhaus' willing acolyte and mistress, gives Jenny to him to be drained of her blood. Men from the village, directed by Müller and including Jenny's father Mr. Schilt and the Bürgermeister, invade the castle and attack the Count. After the vampire kills several of them, Müller succeeds in driving a wooden stake through his heart. With his dying breath, Mitterhaus curses the villagers, vowing that their children will die to give him back his life. The angry villagers force Anna to Running the gauntlet, but when her husband intervenes, she runs back into the castle where the briefly revived Count tells her to find his cousin Emil at "the Circus of Night". After laying his body in the crypt, she escapes through an underground tunnel as the villagers blow the castle with gunpowder and set fire to it.
02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Thorley Walters
Burgermeister
Anthony Higgins
Emil
Laurence Payne
Prof. Albert Mueller
Richard Owens
Dr. Kersh
Domini Blythe
Anna
Adrienne Corri
Gypsy Woman
John Moulder-Brown
Anton Kersh
Lynne Frederick
Dora Mueller