Vampire Circus

A count is killed by villagers who then suffer a curse. Fifteen years later, sealed off by plague, they are visited by the Circus of Nights, whose performers are not what they seem.

It is barely coherent, was reportedly finished in a rush with scenes missing, and the incoherence works in its favour: the film runs on dream logic, with animal transformations, a hall of mirrors, and a black panther that becomes a man.

Robert Young directs the circus sequences as genuine delirium, and the tone is closer to a fever than to Hammer's usual gothic tidiness.

It flopped, was cut on release, and has become one of the studio's most reassessed films precisely because it is so unlike the rest of them.

The bat attack and the mirror maze are the sequences people return to.