If you need a root canal, you look for a dentist with experience performing root canals. If you need your house painted, you look for a professional house painter. If you need a party catered, you find a chef with experience serving a large crowd. Specialists get the job done. The same holds true in the world of movies--if you want a low-budget exploitation movie, you look for the specialists with experience in the field. Like Hammer, Britain's legendary House of Horror. Producer Anthony Hinds, director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing--these men knew their craft and dominated their art. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were getting squeezed out by a new generation of competitors who churned out sloppier films but at such a deep discount, even Hammer's famous frugality started to look too opulent. The market for Hammer Horrors became drier, and the experienced old hands left. By 1971, Hammer still existed as a brand name, but the specialists had gone.

So it came to pass that a group of wholly inexperienced newbies gathered together under Hammer's banner to make a film called Vampire Circus. It had been pitched on the strength of its title alone--now it was up to non-specialists to make a movie to go along with the title. Producer Wilbur Stark was a television producer with little experience making features. Director Robert Young (not the Hollywood actor but a documentarian with a similar name) had little experience directing fiction. Writer Judson Kinberg was an American who had never had a script produced. It was the horror movie equivalent of asking a dentist to paint your house, or hiring the house painter to cater a wedding. Yet, miraculously, not only did this motley crew make the movie, they made it a crackerjack movie.

While neither Christopher Lee nor Peter Cushing are anywhere to be found, the cast is full of pleasant surprises. Here are venerable supporting players Thorley Walters and Adrienne Corri. Lalla Ward, future Doctor Who companion and even-more-future wife of biologist Richard Daqwkins, makes her screen debut. Dave Prowse, six years from playing Darth Vader in Star Wars, plays the circus strongman. Relative newcomer Lynne Frederick plays the virginal heroine, and went on to become Peter Sellars' fourth wife and eventual widow.

Film historian Tim Lucas, speaking on the accompanying Making-Of documentary, calls Vampire Circus the hybrid offspring of an evil fairy tale crossbred with a Fellini-esque European art movie. Some of its unsettlingly experimental qualities can be chalked up to Young running out of time and leaving portions of the movie unfilmed and unfinished.

Nonetheless it is a movie that is unwilling to be boxed in by convention. It starts at what feels like an ending--an angry mob of villagers storm the vampire's castle and stake the monster. Before the opening titles run, we've been seen a child murdered, some gratuitous nudity, a sadistic whipping, a real bat fly out of a skull's eye-socket, and an exploding castle!

As the rest of the film unspools, we find convention upended at every turn: For example, these vampires appear only in mirrors. In past Hammers, the hero was a Van Helsing or the like, a lone voice who understood the vampire menace. Here, everybody but the hero believes in vampires, and the film repeatedly seeks to discredit its one voice of reason. The vampires make no effort to hide amongst their victims--openly displaying their magical powers and seductive abilities in the guise of circus entertainment.

Hammer's vampire films had always equated vampirism with sexuality. That this time around, the monsters are looking to sink their fangs into children adds a uncomfortable element of pedophilia into the mix. Far from skirting that horrifying subtext, the movie openly courts such associations.

Packed with unusual and distinctive imagery, and with a story that flirts uncomfortably with pedophilia, Vampire Circus burned its way into the minds of viewers--and then vanished off the stage. Although the movie grew into a cult favorite in England, American fans were driven to distraction by its absence. Television screenings were usually censored to the point of incoherence, and the film was orphaned in the age of VHS. A proposed laserdisc was withdrawn before it even went on sale, and in the DVD era only a cropped and grainy copy with burned-in Japanese subtitles circulated, if you can call it that. Now, some forty years after its theatrical premiere, this elusive gem finally arrives on American home video, in such wondrous condition that no complaints are possible.

Synapse Films has used the occasion of Vampire Circus's recovery to make its entry into the world of Blu-Ray, with a Blu-Ray/DVD combo-pack edition (the DVD is not sold alone, only in concert with the Blu-Ray). The presentation is uncut, with all the bare breasts and Tempura-paint blood intact. Slight pillarboxing at the sides preserves the 1.66:1 aspect ratio.

Packaged with the movie proper comes a variety of extra features: a 32-minute documentary about the making of the film, a15-minute special on the history of circus-themed horror movies, a 10-minute documentary on the history of Hammer-oriented magazines (focusing on the short-lived but influential comic House of Hammer), a "motion comic" of Vampire Circus, as well as a stills gallery and the requisite trailer. If you're wondering what a "motion comic" is, this reproduces the comic book adaptation published in House of Hammer (as described in the preceding featurette) with special graphical effects to make the act of reading a comic book on your TV less awkward. The House of Hammer featurette is a real treat, but clearly the main dish of the extras is the 32-minute The Bloodiest Show on Earth, produced for this release by David Griffith. Interview subjects include the aforementioned Tim Lucas, Hammer historian Ted Newsom, film historian Philip Nutman, and movie director Joe Dante, along with archival interviews from the filmmakers. Nicely put-together and well-paced, the featurette does lean too heavily on a snippet of music from the movie that will bore its way into your head by the time you're done watching. Surprisingly, these bonus features appear in full on both the Blu-Ray and the DVD. The only difference between the two platters is the resolution--and it is a testament to the quality of the transfer that the lower-resolution DVD edition looks very nearly as good as the Blu-Ray.

For more information about Vampire Circus, visit Synapse Films. To order Vampire Circus, go to TCM Shopping.

by David Kalat