[M]ore than half a century after it was made it’s still sharp, sexy and emphatically not “campy” ... a Hammer-style vampire movie minus the Dracula/Karnstein-family-line backstory ... wed to the eerie allure of old-school circuses.

Erotic, grotesque, chilling, bloody, suspenseful, and loaded with doom and gloom atmosphere, this is the kind of experiment in terror that reinvigorates your love of the scary movie artform.

Gory, cliched, silly and inventive.

Hammer's most elusive Gothic horror movie contains frequent nudity, but its arthouse kinkiness -- its hints of pedophilia, bestiality and incest -- offers a more likely explanation for its limited distribution than its exposed skin.