Film Review
Following the staggering success of
Horrors of the Black Museum
(1959) on both sides of the Atlantic, Anglo-Amalgamated gave another
jolt to the emerging phenomenon of exploitation cinema by distributing
two similarly lurid entries in the psycho-thriller/horror genre,
Circus of Horrors and
Peeping
Tom, completing what has come to be known as the
Sadean Trilogy. The critics
may not have been impressed by what they saw as an orgy of death
concocted by evil sadists but audiences apparently couldn't get enough
of this new kind of gorily explicit escapism. Even before Norman
Bates had sliced his way into cinema notoriety the exploitation
bandwagon was already on the road, catering to one of the most basic
and incomprehensible of human needs: to see others suffer in the most
horrible way imaginable.
Circus of Horrors may lack the
depth and sustained artistry of Michael Powell's
Peeping Tom but it is still one of
the more respectable entries in the exploitation line, its impressive
production values, solid (albeit slightly bonkers) script and a
captivating central performance from Anton Diffring making up for its
gratuitous excursions into Grand Guignol excess. (Other faults
which are harder to overlook are an incongruous song that later became
a hit record, some scenes involving men in monkey suits trying
desperately to look ferocious and Donald Pleasence struggling with what
is possibly the worst French accent in any British film.)
Independently produced by the British company Lynx Films, the film is
directed with flair by Sidney Hayers, who also made the occult thriller
Night of the Eagle (1962)
before devoting the bulk of his career to television on high profile
shows that included
The Persuaders!,
The Avengers,
Knight Rider and
Dragnet.
This is not the first horror film to be set in a circus - Tod
Browning's
Freaks (1932) memorably used
this setting in one of the genre's more unsettling offerings - but the
use of the circus brings a particularly devious form of irony to the
subject matter. Like the audience in the big top watching the
death-defying acts, we too are sitting with baited breath, waiting for
the deadly slip-up that will gratify our thirst for blood. In a
similar vein to
Peeping Tom,
Circus of Horrors makes us aware
that we are voyeurs naturally drawn to the spectacle of unfolding
horror, but whereas Powell's film is so shocking that we end up feeling
repulsed by this revelation, this one feeds our morbidity with no moral
compunction, as though we were insatiable wild beasts being thrown big
chunks of meat which we readily gorge on.
The fact that Billy Smart's Circus consented to contribute the big top
and the acts performed therein (many of which have now been prohibited
by animal welfare laws) lends the film not only a grim authenticity but
also a real sense of spectacle. Unlike many cheaply made horror
films of this time (Hammer's films excluded)
Circus of Horrors has the visual
impact of a far more expensive production, sumptuously shot in
Eastmancolor to make the most of its macabre set-pieces. Every
on-screen killing is excessively signposted (once a girl so much as
hints that she intends leaving the circus you know she is next in line
to be filleted) but Hayers turns this script flaw into a strength,
extracting as much tension as possible before our strained patience is
rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of a mangled or mutilated
corpse. The first circus death comes as shock, but as the formula
is repeated again and again, it becomes increasingly funny. There
is a bleakly mechanistic quality to
Circus
of Horrors that makes it as much a black comedy as a decidedly
grim horror film.
Another crucial ingredient that sets the film apart from the reviled
genre it helped to spawn is Anton Diffring's presence as a classier
example in the mad surgeon line. Diffring spent most of his
career playing German officers of varying degrees of nastiness - in
such film as
The Colditz Story (1955) and
Operation Daybreak (1975) - so it's
a treat to see him cast as a very different kind of villain, one who
could so easily be mistaken for a tragic romantic hero were it not for
his cold Teutonic allure and a somewhat irksome habit of killing people
in the most horrible way imaginable. Like Michael Gough's
character in
Horrors of the Black
Museum and Carl Boehm's Mark Lewis in
Peeping Tom, Diffring's plastic
surgeon Dr Schüler is a potentially useful member of society who
becomes a dangerous threat when an all-consuming obsession drives him
to kill what he cannot possess. His madness is an extreme form of
the Pygmalion complex: he feels compelled to turn disfigured women into
objects of perfection, and when they acquire a will of their own, he
has no choice but to destroy them.
A master of subtlety, Diffring portrays Schüler neither as a
sadistic fiend nor as a soul in torment. He is curiously amoral,
someone who fascinates us as much as he appals us, and despite the
horrific nature of his crimes, we can't help pitying the tragic decline
of a man who, at the outset, only wanted to do good. It's a
variation on the 'misunderstood monster' theme, and like Boris Karloff
in the original
Frankenstein
movies Diffring compels sympathy even when he is steeped in the
bloodiest horror. As you watch the film and slowly fall under its
lead actor's hypnotic spell, you can't help wondering if he was
consciously making it into an allegory of the failure of Nazism.
© James Travers 2015
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