Five years have passed since the release of a very good Blu-ray of this colorful chiller …. and now it’s in 4K Ultra HD. CineSavant compares the two discs, below.
Death-defying acts were always a major part of the appeal of carnivals and circuses, which is one reason why the circus movie genre lends itself so well to horror. Our favorite scary circus movie — our favorite circus movie period — is the stylishly garish exploitation item Circus of Horrors. The English production pushed the Hammer Films philosophy of sex and blood to the extreme of what mainstream movies would accept. Did the ‘wholesome’ circus background put the censors to sleep? The sadism is right out in the open, in a story fixated on mutilation, murder, sex and death. Behind the high wire performers and dangerous circus beasts is a lunatic tale of mad surgery.
The well-crafted Circus of Horrors places its medical trangressions in the capable hands of actor Anton Diffring, who had recently excelled in another mad doctor role. In this case, his deranged surgeon is inflamed by hubris and an unbridled sex drive. The show transcends its own exploitative nature by simply being upfront with its curious and (for 1960) ‘sick’ ideas.
It’s Guignol, y’all.
No slow opening for Circus of Horrors — it begins in action and races from one sensation to the next. After botching a plastic surgery experiment on socialite Evelyn Morley Finsbury (Colette Wilde), the arrogant Dr. Rossiter (Anton Diffring) kills a policeman and crashes his car. That necessitates some ad hoc repair work on his own face, peformed by his ever-loyal assistants/lackies Angela (Jane Hylton) and Martin (Kenneth Griffth).
Hiding in France under a new identity as Dr. Bernard Schüler, Rossiter inveigles himself into the good graces of Monsieur Vanet (Donald Pleasence), the owner of a small circus, → by repairing the face of Vanet’s daughter Nicole (Carla Challoner). When a performing bear attacks Vanet, Schüler doesn’t intervene. Appropriating the circus, he populates it with beautiful women, ex-prostitutes and criminals whose faces he has restored with his brilliant reconstructive techniques — and who can be blackmailed. When these performers rebel or attempt to shake Schüler’s possessive grip, he arranges for them to meet with ghastly ‘accidents’ in full view of horrified crowds.
The ‘Jinx Circus’ rakes in the cash. Schüler talks about clearing his name, but instead fixates on sexually dominating his ex-patients/circus stars. Horsewoman Magda von Meck (Vanda Hudson) wishes to quite performing and get away from Schüler’s sexual advances. Aerialist Elissa Caro (Erika Remberg) pressures Schüler for top billing. She becomes furious when Schüler’s attention turns to a new potential beauty, the acid-scarred Melina (Yvonne Romain). When the circus tours England Schüler finds himself back where people still remember the notorious name Rossiter. The grown-up Nicole (now Yvonne Monlaur) is unaware of her ‘uncle’s’ villainy and is preparing to join the act as well.
How can something so luridly trashy, be so compelling?
Circus of Horrors’ shocks are held together by plot contrivances with just enough credibility to motivate the mayhem. It’s Grand Guignol all the way, led by a conscienceless fiend convinced that his talent with a scalpel gives him ownership of his patients. His dedicated enablers Angela and Martin are trapped in his web as well. Surgeon-trainee Martin has graduated to committing murders for his mentor. Angela loves Rossiter/Schüler, and suffers each time she discovers him making love to another new ‘discovery.’ Angela and Martin are still despicable villains: they rebel only when personally threatened.
The sleazy goings-on become backstage drama for a gaudy big-top drama with dangerous acts and glorious showgirls. The horror unspools in the brightest of settings, before a delighted audience. Instead of avoiding its own own subject matter, Circus of Horrors embraces the perverse thrill of destroying beautiful, desirable women. Elissa Caro spins fifty feet in the air, dangling from a rope that we know has been sabotaged. The horrible suspense plays out under the movie’s ironically romantic theme song, ‘Look for a Star.’
The film’s emphasis is split between horror and sex. Schüler’s circus has a tableaux vivant ‘parade of beauty’ sideshow, where patrons view women in themed costumes, standing still like statues. It’s a nod to Victorian attractions in which nude women posed in imitations of famous paintings, ‘art’ exhibitions exempt from the usual legal taboos. Alternate unclothed scenes were filmed for a still- elusive ‘Continental’ version of Circus of Horrors. Frame grabs have appeared online, but not the ‘adult’ version itself.
Female flesh is Dr. Schüler’s artistic medium and his playground, and he pursues his surgical art to satisfy his libido. Schüler’s dressing-room advances toward Magda von Meck would seem inappropriate for the kiddie-matinee audiences that saw the film in 1960. Parents didn’t realize what their kids were seeing, when they dropped them off for shows like Horrors of the Black Museum.
In England Circus was rated “X,” but America’s censors must have been caught napping, as seen by the skimpy costuming for the abundant Vanda Hudson and the horror star Yvonne Romain (The Curse of the Werewolf, Corridors of Blood, Captain Clegg, Devil Doll, The Last of Sheila).
The most intense of the film’s actresses is Erika Remberg, whose aerialist Elissa Caro makes the mistake of demanding control of her own billing. The second-billed Remberg has a hungry, impatient look. She eventually moved on to adult films, such as Radley Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet. The IMDB calls out three marriages for Remberg, to director Sidney Hayers and actors Walter Reyer and Gustavo Rojo.
← Remaining virginal throughout the story, Yvonne Monlaur’s Nicole is the only plastic surgery patient not directly targeted by Rossiter’s lust. Under the logic of male sex fantasies, virginity makes her a candidate for survival. Ms. Monlaur was briefly a star in prime Hammer horror — Terror of the Tongs and The Brides of Dracula.
Circus of Horrors introduces four out of five actresses through gruesome close-ups of their facial scars. Nicole’s is an innocent war injury, but with the other three performers it’s assumed that Rossiter found them as criminals or prostitutes. The mutilations ‘cured’ by Rossiter are given a J.G. Ballard fetish treatment. Erika Remberg’s alarming makeup makes her terrible scar look like an erotic ornament. One must look back to silent Tod Browning movies to find sadism as direct as this.
By virtue of his life-changing talent, Schüler claims rights over his patients’ sexual lives. He’s a Harvey Weinstein of the Big Top, a megalomaniac in love with his own power. As interpreted by the icy, oily Anton Diffring, Rossiter/Schüler becomes an iconic Continental seducer-bogeyman, more cartoonish than mysterious. With our expectations fulfilled by the brutal killings, we’re more than primed for Rossiter’s comeuppance. It arrives in several satisfying stages, so we get to witness the sadism coming and going, so to speak.
Nobody would ever murder somebody THAT way. Well, Duh.
Briskly paced and smartly directed, Circus of Horrors makes an asset of plot hooey that would slay many another thriller. A notorious public enemy chooses a very public circus in which to hide out. He then finds several mutilated-yet-gorgeous, blackmail-able women, all of whom easily develop ace circus skills. The actions of Rossiter’s murderous sidekicks are simply crazy. Angela’s misplaced love for Schüler makes okay dramatic sense, but Martin’s willingness to commit so many capital crimes is explained only by the defeated, miserable look on his face.
These cops are the craziest cops ever in a horror picture. Given the toxic reputation of Schüler’s circus, the authorities would withhold permits until they were satisfied about things like, oh, the actual identity of the owner and his star performers. Scotland Yard instead sends a Don Juan investigator (Conrad Phillips) to obtain information by seducing a performer. The show sidesteps these weirdnesses simply by not giving us time to think about them.
And those crazy circus animals … Rossiter keeps a man-in-suit simian around for little purpose but to cause havoc in one of the film’s multiple mayhem climaxes. Upon viewing Circus of Horrors, a friend suggested that maybe the murderous Bosco the Bear needed to hide out from the cops too, so Schüler used his surgical skill to transform him into the ape-monster in the cage!
Circus is so busy, it drops a couple of interesting story points. A tell-tale scarab ring could have been better established, to cue Lady Morley-Finsbury’s traumatic memories. And Elissa Caro seems to have an admirer in an unnamed, un-credited circus clown, whose makeup resembles that of Emmett Kelly. ↖ The clown is given several close-ups, but we don’t realize that he’s the crying-on-the-inside type until the director gives him a moment of special mourning. Was an extra bit of Elissa-Clown sidebar content lost in the rush to give the film a breakneck pace?
It’s long been noted that ‘Bernard Schüler’s’ initials allowed the use of Billy Smart’s circus without repainting the ‘BS’ logos seen everywhere. Great color lensing by Douglas Slocombe (The Fearless Vampire Killers) mixes the backstage action with circus acts both staged and real. Every shot is simply beautiful.
Sidney Hayers isn’t celebrated as a maker of fine horror, despite having directed the superior Night of the Eagle ( Burn, Witch, Burn!). Hayers had previously cut the acclaimed Tiger Bay and A Night to Remember. The excellent cutting here sells the illusion that Yvonne Romain is attacked by a cageful of lions, and maximizes the brutality of the knife-throwing incident. The impact of a body falling from a great height is also perfectly edited — Georges Franju may have seen this show before filming his Judex.
Her function is to be slaughtered, plain and simple.
The film’s most striking scene is a gory set piece loaded with voyeuristic bloodlust. Affixed to a canted turntable and wearing only a skimpy costume of flowers, Magda von Meck is a spinning target of flesh for a knife artiste. When Rossiter fidgets on the sidelines, Angela realizes that her brother Martin is below futzing with the turntable mechanism, to throw off the knife-thrower’s timing. We know exactly what’s coming: Magda’s overexposed vulnerability is the essence of women in exploitative horror. The violent finish is a shock, even though we’d have felt cheated had she escaped. Don’t fool yourself — movie-watching is a guilty business.
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