They play no games. They are death.
Surely, one of the stranger films to come out of Hammer's vampire cycle is 1972's Vampire Circus. Directed by Robert Young, it is set in a small town ravaged by a mysterious plague that is visited by the equally mysterious Circus of Nights, which splits its time between enthralling the populace and picking them off one by one. Seems 15 years earlier the townspeople rose up under the direction of schoolmaster Laurence Payne and burgermeister Thorley Walters (a frequent Hammer supporting player being given a rare starring role) to destroy the count (Robert Tayman) preying on their children, only for him to use his dying words to curse them all. With the arrival of the plague (a recent development, it would appear), the surrounding towns have put up roadblocks manned by trigger-happy neighbors who shoot indiscriminately at anybody who tries to leave. Doctor Richard Owens manages to slip through, though, depriving the town of one of its few citizens who doesn't believe in vampires.
As for the vampiric circus itself, it is led by gypsy woman Adrienne Corri, whose attractions include a panther who can transform into a man (Anthony Higgins, also a vampire), a stroppy tiger, a monkey that doesn't get to do much of anything, a pair of bats who turn into flying twin acrobats (Robin Sachs and Lalla Ward, also vampires because of course they are), a dwarf (Skip Martin, who previously played Hop-Toad in Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death), and a silent strongman (David Prowse). As it turns out, their main targets are the children of the men who banded together against Tayman. This is why Higgins goes to great lengths to claim Walters's voluptuous daughter (Christine Paul-Podlasky) and the twins go after Payne's (Lynne Frederick), who is rather ineffectively protected by the doctor's son (John Moulder-Brown). Naturally, the vampires are defeated in the end, but it's more through dumb luck than anything else. After all, when you're dealing with circus-trained vampires, you'd think they'd be better at dodging falling crosses and the like.