A circus with bite.

 Vampire Circus (1972) is a movie that delivers on its promises: there is a circus, and there are multiple vampires.  However, if the title makes you think that this will be a lighthearted campy romp, think again; these vampires are specifically targeting children, and this movie gets dark.

Children have been vanishing from the village of Stetl, and village schoolmaster Albert Muller (Laurence Payne) is horrified to discover why.  His own wife Anna (Domini Blythe) has been luring the children through the woods and into the nearby castle, where Count Mitterhouse (Robert Tayman) feeds on them.  There's no real explanation given for why Anna is doing this; she just seems to be really into Count Mitterhouse, so much so that she spends most of her screentime naked.

Muller is a poor teacher from a poor village, so he has limited options, but you don't have to be rich and powerful to lead an angry mob, so Muller leads an angry mob to the castle.  There's a fight, many men die, but in the end Muller manages to stake the vampire, though not before he has a chance to curse the villagers, swearing that their children will die to bring him back from the grave.  The other villagers want to punish Anna for being an enthusiastic accessory to child murder, but Muller asks them to let her go.  This is a mistake; she runs back into the castle, where the Count revives just long enough to send her to his cousin Emil (Anthony Higgins) at the Circus of Night.

Fifteen years later, Stetl is in the grips of a mysterious plague.  People are dying in droves, and the neighboring communities have placed armed men at roadblocks surrounding the village, threatening to shoot anyone who tries to pass.  The influential men of the village gather to debate the cause of the plague and what can be done about it.  Some think it's the work of Count Mitterhouse and his curse, while others, particularly recently arrived Doctor Kersh (Richard Owens) believe it's a disease, and what the town needs is medicine.  And surprisingly, given that this is a vampire movie, we eventually learn that Kersh is right.  It's just a disease which responds to conventional treatment.  Of course, at that point in the movie, Stetl has other things to worry about.

Kersh breaks through the barricade with the help of his teenage son Anton (John Moulder-Brown.)  Anton asks his father to find Muller's daughter Dora (Lynne Fredrick) in the capital and urge her to stay where she is and not try to return to Stetl, because Anton is the only person in the movie with any sense.

Meanwhile the village has visitors!  The Night Circus has arrived, lead by a mysterious and apparently Romani woman (Adrienne Coeri.)  The villagers call her by a different name, but I am just going to call her Anna, because she is in fact Anna.  (It's possible that no one recognizes her with clothes on, but perhaps the fact that she's played by a different actress now has more to do with it.)  It's a small circus, but it hits most of the bases, with animals, a clown (Skip Martin), a strongman (David Prowse), and twin acrobats Helga (Lalla Ward) and Heinrich (Robin Sachs).  They are creepy as hell, but it's not like the quarantined villagers have anything better to do, so every night the show is packed.

And then things start to happen.  Dora shows up in the village, much to Anton's dismay; he loves her, but he would really rather she was somewhere less doomed.  The mayor's daughter Rosa (Christina Paul) is captivated by the show's black panther, particularly when the panther turns into Emil.  The mayor himself (Thorley Walters) collapses after a terrifying vision in the hall of mirrors.  And children start to vanish, because this is in fact a vampire circus.

We are not dealing with the cream of the vampire crop here - Mitterhouse may be a Count with his own castle, but he's also a doofus with bad hair who hangs out in his basement waiting for his girlfriend to bring him children.  Emil has the cool "turn into a panther" power, but he spends half the time lounging in his cage and the other half looking like he's late for Godspell rehearsals.  And Helga and Heinrich . . . well, they're pretty great actually, but they are evil henchmen and spend their time henching evilly.

On the other hand, the villagers are just villagers, without a Dutch vampire hunting scholar or cowboy to be seen.  Anton is brave and sensible and the closest thing the movie has to a hero, but he's just a kid and there's only so much he can do. In the end it's vampires versus villagers, and while most of the village is wiped out by the end of the movie, all of the vampires are destroyed.  Angry mob wins on a technicality.