Circus of Horrors

Star Review

Relishing the salacious new freedoms offered by the British X certificate, Hayers’ outrageous Circus of Horrors is usually linked with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom for its frank (for its time) depiction of sadism and its daring exploitation of the partially dressed female form. More unusually, both films also centre on a blond, Teutonic psychopath who happens to work in the entertainment industry. (Carl Boehm is an unhinged cameraman in Powell's film; here, the dashing Anton Diffring is a showman with a distinct difference.) Both films were released within a few months of each other in 1959/60.
No-one should make the mistake of looking for layers of psychological complexity in Circus of Horrors. Rather, you should just enjoy the perverse oddness of this lurid tale of a renegade plastic surgeon who takes over a circus and populates it with misfits whose faces he has reconstructed. It is vintage 'Horror Double Bill' material, directed with characteristic imagination by the ever-reliable Hayers, who was also responsible for the stylishly sinister tale of voodoo on a University campus, Night of the Eagle.

Julian Upton on 16th April 2007

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Film Description

A lurid shocker from 1960 in which a plastic surgeon on the run after disfiguring the face of a patient hides out in a circus, where he transforms the faces of badly scarred women into the the beautiful stars of his show. However, the police and a nosy reporter become interested when the women who want to leave the circus begin dying in freak accidents, and they begin to suspect that the doctor is responsible.

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Film Details

Cast

Yvonne Romain, Donald Pleasence, Anton Diffring, Kenneth Griffith, Erika Remberg, Yvonne Monlaur

Technical Details