Circus of HorrorsMovies like Circus of Horrors
- Key Features:
- Circus, Plastic surgery, Disfigurement, Murder, Mystery, Obsession, Transformation, Escape, Violence-moderate, Psychological thriller, Noir, Betrayal
- Tone:
- serious, suspense-driven, gritty
- Target Audience:
- Horror fans, Thriller enthusiasts, Cult film aficionados, Dark cinema viewers
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Dread → Horror
Circus of Horrors

A plastic surgeon and his nurse join a bizarre circus to escape from the police. Here he befriends deformed women and transforms them for his "Temple of Beauty". However, when they threaten to leave, they meet with mysterious accidents.
Circus of Horrors
A detective investigating a missing model in Paris uncovers a plastic surgeon’s horrifying secret involving kidnapped women, blood, and organs.

Plastic surgeon Larry Roberts performs a series of minor alterations on a group of models who are seeking perfection. The operations are a resounding success. But when someone starts killing his beautiful patients, Dr. Roberts becomes suspicious and starts investigating. What he uncovers are the mysterious - and perhaps murderous - activities of a high-tech computer company called Digital Matrix.

A top surgeon is besotted with a beautiful woman who once rebuffed him. Unable to come to terms with life without her, he tries to convince her that they need each other. She has other ideas, but a horrific accident leaves her at his mercy.

A sculptor opens a wax museum to showcase the likenesses of famous historical figures, but quickly runs into trouble when his business partner demands the exhibits become more extreme in order to increase profits.

A criminal psychologist loses his arm in a car crash, and becomes one of three patients to have their missing limbs replaced by those belonging to an executed serial killer. One of them dies violently, and disturbing occurrences start happening to the surviving two.

An unnamed doctor has always had everything he's ever wanted, but that has only made him develop more extreme and depraved needs. He kidnaps a young couple in the prime of their life together and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival.

Laura is a successful plastic surgeon who feels her life is somewhat empty. She meets a young nurse and falls in love and experiences sexuality to a extent not known to her. However, this spiral of desire and seduction is a dangerous game where no one is who they appear to be.

After a spate of murders, the villagers of Schtettel kill the depraved perpetrator, Count Mitterhouse. Fifteen years later the Circus of Nights appeared in the plague-ridden village and its performers include Mitterhouse's mistress, children and cousins. They have come to Schtettel to fulfil the Count's last words, an evil, vicious curse of death and destruction on those who participated in his impaling. The children of Schtettel become the targets for a brutal and devastating revenge as the Vampire Circus rehearses for its most deadly performance.

A doctor works to cure patients suffering from crippling phobias by placing them inside his invention which induces and controls hallucinations.

A brilliant plastic surgeon creates a synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.

Hélène Masson visits her friend Gérôme Savignat in the isolated rejuvenation clinic owned by Dr. Devilers and his partner Dr. Berbard. But after a series of tragic events, Hélène goes further in her investigation of the clinic.

The wife of a psychoanalyst falls prey to a devious quack hypnotist when he discovers she is an habitual shoplifter. Then one of his previous patients now being treated by the real doctor is found murdered, with her still at the scene, and suspicion points only one way.

Dr. Génessier is riddled with guilt after an accident that he caused disfigures the face of his daughter, the once beautiful Christiane, who outsiders believe is dead. Dr. Génessier, along with accomplice and laboratory assistant Louise, kidnaps young women and brings them to the Génessier mansion. After rendering his victims unconscious, Dr. Génessier removes their faces and attempts to graft them on to Christiane's.

A delirious young woman feels trapped in a remote mansion at the mercy of a madman.

In the darkly phantasmagorical world of the carnival magician and sideshow hypnotist, the gruesome "illusions" of Montag the Magnificent are unique in that they seem to become retroactive reality long after the the tricks are done. Is it coincidence, or circumstantial evidence of the world's most diabolically ingenious murders? When an underground journalist begins to investigate the strange deaths, the truth proves to be far more bizarre and disturbing than anything he or his readers might have imagined.

A loving father finds a clown suit for his son's birthday party, only to realize the suit is part of an evil curse that turns its wearer into a killer.

A priest-doctor chasing a man with supernatural regenerative abilities, who has recently escaped from a medical lab, reaches a small town where the mutant goes on a killing spree.

With a renowned plastic surgeon for a mother, Hyun-soo is always surrounded by girls in line for beauty consultations. But her happiness comes to an end as her friends who have received facial surgery from her mother start to commit mysterious suicides by cutting out their faces.

After being contacted by their mysterious former colleague, four psychics arrive at a secluded hotel where they are stalked by a group of murderous puppets.

A young psychiatrist applies for a job at a mental asylum and must pass a test by interviewing four patients. He must figure out which of the patients, is in fact, the doctor that he would be replacing if hired.

After witnessing a mysterious woman brutally slay a homemaker, prostitute Liz Blake finds herself trapped in a dangerous situation. While the police thinks she is the murderer, the real killer is intent on silencing her only witness.

The sought-after images of top model Jennifer adorn magazine covers and billboards worldwide. When alone at a club, she is abducted and incarcerated in a cell with another prisoner. When their captor subjects the two to torture, they commit to escaping the chamber of horrors before they're killed.

In 1880, Sir Robert Cargrave, a London physician known for his experimental work in paralysis treatment, is summoned to Gorslava by the mysterious Baron Sardonicus—who is now married to Cargrave's former wife, Maude—to treat his disfigurement. When Cargrave arrives, he finds the masked baron is a cruel sadist who has threatened to harm Maude if he is not successfully cured.

A reclusive circus master invites a group of social media stars to his house of haunts. Anyone who can make it out before being scared into submission will earn $250,000 - but the stars soon learn they are not only competing for money, but also fighting for their lives.

Five dangerous patients, suffering from extreme phobias at a government testing facility, are put to the ultimate test under the supervision of a crazed doctor and his quest to weaponize fear.

A talk show hostess and her boyfriend investigate a shady magician who has the ability to hypnotize and control people's thoughts in order to stage gory onstage illusions using his powers of mindbending.

A female psychologist wants to understand the minds of a confessed serial killer who spent the last five years in a mental hospital because of his state.

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

An ophthalmologist's assistant with an unhealthy interest in human eyeballs goes on a killing spree to collect eyeballs for his overbearing mother's collection. Reality soon takes a bizarre turn, both for the characters and the audience.

A detective tries to track down a masked killer who reappears every Halloween to wreak bloody havoc.

After a team of surgeons botches his beloved wife's operation, the distraught Dr. Phibes unleashes a score of Old-Testament atrocities on his enemies.

During a stopover in Germany in the middle of a carefree road trip through Europe, two American girls find themselves alone at night when their car breaks down in the woods. Searching for help at a nearby villa, they are wooed into the clutches of a deranged retired surgeon, who has a very disturbed vision.

Kira's skin starts to age rapidly, dry out and crumble away. But then she discovers that she can replace her own skin with somebody else's.

A San Francisco doctor encounters a prostitute who bears a striking resemblance to his late wife.

A detective starts spiraling out of control when a wave of gruesome murders with seemingly similar bizarre circumstances is sweeping Tokyo.

Three teenage brothers are terrorized by a trio of escaped mental patients disguised as clowns.

Andre Toulon's diminutive assassins take up residence at The House of Marvels, a traveling doll circus run by Dr. Magrew, who has been trying to create a living doll of his own with little success.

In the 1960s, a nurse's last day on her job is ruined when a doctor inadvertently creates a cyst monster that terrorizes the office.

A deranged scientist creates a ray that can shrink people down to doll size.

An otherwordly perpetrator has been attacking female virgins in Manhattan. As Dr. Pace and Detective Andriotti work together to identify the strange organic materials found on the women, the victims begin arising in a trance and leaving the hospital.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

A surgeon transplants the heart of an ape into his ailing son with horrific results.

Fashion designer Joanna Crane leads a double life. By night she is China Blue, a prostitute who's attracted the attention of a sexually frustrated private detective, and a psychopathic priest in possession of a murderous sex toy.

Dr. Tremayne is an enigmatic psychiatrist running an asylum that houses four very special cases. Visited by his colleague Nicholas, Tremayne explains his amazing and controversial theories as to why each of the four patients went mad.

Mrs. Van Houten has shown signs of losing touch with reality, and her husband discusses possible treatment with Dr. Caligari, who says Mrs. Van Houten has a disease of the libido.

A collection of death scenes, ranging from TV-material to home-made super-8 movies. The common factor is death by some means.

Two orderlies pretend to be surgeons to impress two young doctors and conquer, through several scenarios. Finally, they are discovered when they had to operate on a mafia boss to remove a bullet.

A puppet, newly released from his strings, explores the sinister room in which he finds himself.

After a near-fatal car accident, Sam wakes to discover he is trapped in an abandoned hospital by mysterious and sinister forces that have no intention of letting him leave…

With the help of his girlfriend Cathy and Dr. Fong, a psychiatrist, ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett poses as a madman in order to be admitted to a mental institution where a bloody murder has been committed.

After escaping from an insane asylum, a medical student assumes the identity of a mysterious dead man, who appears to be his doppelganger, and gets lured to a sinister island ruled by a mad scientist and his malformed men.

Edinburgh surgeon Dr. Robert Knox requires cadavers for his research into the functioning of the human body; local ne'er-do-wells Burke and Hare find ways to provide him with fresh specimens...

With his partner, a celebrity performance artist publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. An investigator from the National Organ Registry obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed... Their mission — to use the artist's notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.

A psychological thriller based on the concept of anamorphosis, a painting technique that manipulates the laws of perspective to create two competing images on a single canvas.

Aspiring actor Edward undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.

An ambitious carnival man with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychologist who is even more dangerous than he is.

A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his new doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality and causing him to question his identity.

A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

Conducting clandestine experiments within the morgue at Miskatonic University, scientist Herbert West reveals to a fellow graduate student his groundbreaking work concerning the re-animation of fresh corpses.

Top model Lilico, having recently undergone multiple cosmetic surgeries, begins to experience troubling side effects. As she desperately tries to retain her perfect image, Lilico descends into a world of nightmares and makes those around her miserable.

A career criminal who has been deformed since birth is given a new face by a kindly doctor and paroled from prison. It appears that he has gone straight, but he is really planning his revenge on the man who killed his mentor and sent him to prison.

Canadian scientist, Dr Geoff Burton takes up a position at a new institute in wintry Dresden in order to contribute to their most important project—a human regeneration gene—that also has the potential to make something miraculous out of a personal tragedy that has haunted him for years.

An undertaker who hasn't had any 'customers' in a long time is forced to pay one year's back-rent. To get money he starts to kill people, which brings absurd results.

Evil lurks in the gloomy house at Markham Manor where a deranged Sir Edward is the chained prisoner of his brother Julian. When Sir Edward escapes, he embarks on a monstrous killing spree, determined to seek revenge on all those whom he feels have double-crossed him.

A runaway criminal breaks into an eerie chateau, taking its two frightened chambermaids hostage. As night falls, a group of mysterious aristocratic women arrive and the criminal begins to realize the women are hiding a sinister secret.

Sex-hungry teens are kidnapped by auto mechanics, who take them to a rural hospital run by aliens who need their blood as the key to their own longevity.

After years of being browbeaten and walked on, a man wakes one day wearing an expressionless mask, fitted with a personality that enables him to take revenge.

Elliot, a successful gynecologist, works at the same practice as his identical twin, Beverly. Elliot is attracted to many of his patients and has affairs with them. When he inevitably loses interest, he will give the woman over to Beverly, the meeker of the two, without the woman knowing the difference. Beverly falls hard for one of the patients, Claire, but when she inadvertently deceives him, he slips into a state of madness.

Medical student Paula wins a place at an exclusive Heidelberg medical school. When the body of a young man she met on the train turns up on her dissection table, she begins to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

After years of separation, Irena Gallier and her minister brother, Paul, reunite in New Orleans. When zoologists capture a wild panther, Irena is drawn to the cat – and zoo curator Oliver to her. Soon, Paul will have to reveal the family secret: that when sexually aroused, they revert into predatory jungle cats.

When relatively healthy patients begin having 'complications' during simple operations and ending up in comas, a concerned doctor defies her male superiors when she suspects a secret plot.

A series of down-on-their-luck individuals enter the decrepit and spine-chilling Rialto theater, only to have their deepest and darkest fears brought to life on the silver screen by The Projectionist – a mysterious, ghostly figure who holds the nightmarish futures of all who attend his screenings.

A doctor finds himself in the middle of an unsolved serial murder case after discovering a secret from a sedated patient. When dismembered bodies show up close to home, he must solve the riddle before the killer realizes what he knows.

A London opera house is haunted by tragic events on its opening night, but when its star is kidnapped, a producer tracks down the Phantom who is intent on seeking his revenge.

An Oxford Medical School graduate takes a position at a mental institution and soon becomes obsessed with a female mental patient, but he has no idea of a recent and horrifying staffing change.

A mysterious teenager named Ángelo cares for Klaus, a German doctor with a dark past who lives trapped in an iron lung.

Dr Simon Helder, sentenced to an insane asylum for crimes against humanity, recognises its director as the brilliant Baron Frankenstein, the man whose work he had been trying to emulate before his imprisonment. Frankenstein utilises Helder's medical knowledge for a project he has been working on for some time. He is assembling a man from vital organs extracted from various inmates in the asylum. And the Baron will resort to murder to acquire the perfect specimens for his most ambitious project ever.

A troubled young woman wakes up one day as a different person - someone who is stalked by creatures.

An aging hypnotist creates a device that allows the user to control the mind of another person, but his wife abuses its power by manipulating a younger man to commit evil acts.

When Environmental Protection Agency inspector Steve Malone travels to a remote military base in order to check for toxic materials, he brings his family along for the ride. After arriving at the base, his teenage daughter Marti befriends Jean Platt, daughter of the base's commander, General Platt. When people at the base begin acting strangely, Marti becomes convinced that they are slowly being replaced by plant-like aliens.

A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man might have predicted.

A woman kidnapped in the dead of night awakens in a grisly dungeon, where her deranged assailant prepares her body for a morbid ritual.

The sinister Dr. Watt has an evil scheme going—he's kidnapping beautiful young women and turning them into mannequins to sell to local stores. Fortunately for him, Detective Sergeant Bung is on the case, and he doesn't have a clue!

When Susan was a little girl, she rejected the Valentine of a lovestruck classmate. Decades later, she’s come to the hospital for a routine medical examination, and finds herself trapped in a bizarre nightmare, made all the worse as her vengeful childhood valentine, disguised among the hospital staff, begins murdering everyone in his path as a means of proving his undying ‘romantic’ obsession…

A woman becomes very curious about one of her psychiatrist husband's inmates, a man who was found guilty in the murder and disfigurement of his former wife.

A ferocious, misogynistic, and morally deprived serial killer is active in Las Vegas. Obsessed with the collapse of the Twin Towers, and with Nazi tendencies, he even targets underage girls.

Dr. Bock, the chief of medicine at a Manhattan hospital, is suicidal after the collapse of his personal life. When an intern is found dead in a hospital bed, it appears to Bock to be a case of unforgivable malpractice. Hours later, another doctor, who happens to be responsible for another case of malpractice, is found dead. Despondent, Bock finds himself drawn to Barbara, the daughter of a comatose missionary.

A team of paranormal investigators go on one last job to a haunted mental institution where children have reportedly gone missing. While searching for evidence of what is haunting the abandoned building, they stumble upon clues that reveal what made the former head doctor snap and go on a killing spree through the halls decades earlier. Unfortunately, the more they uncover, the more they struggle to make it out of the asylum alive because something inside wants that mystery to stay dead and buried.

Paul Dean has created a deadly parasite that is now attached to his stomach. He and his female companion, Patricia Welles, must find a way to destroy it while also trying to avoid Ricus & his rednecks, and an evil government agent named Merchant.

Six outwardly average individuals have elaborate fetishes they indulge with surreptitious care. A mousy letter carrier makes dough balls she grotesquely ingests before bed. A shop clerk fixates on a TV news reader while he builds a machine to massage and masturbate him. One of his customers makes an elaborate chicken costume for a voodoo-like scene with a doll resembling his plump neighbor. She, in turn, has a doll that resembles him, which she whips and dominates in an abandoned church. The TV news reader has her own fantasy involving carp. Her husband, who is indifferent to her, steals materials to fashion elaborate artifacts that he rubs, scrapes and rolls across his body.

In the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, a starving family find hope in a charismatic hotel owner. Lured by the prospect of a free dinner, they discover that the evening's entertainment blurs the lines between performance and reality. Will they wind up the spectators or the spectacle?

A reporter witnesses a brutal murder and becomes entangled in a mystery involving a pair of twins.

A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.

A woman grows increasingly fascinated with her body after suffering a disfiguring accident.

The life of a successful radiologist spirals out of control when she sees the spitting image of herself driving down a London street. While attempting to uncover who the imposter could be, she stumbles into a terrifying mystery that her family and closest friends are somehow involved in, leaving her with no one to trust.

After a series of scientific experiments directed towards freeing the inner man and controlling human personalities, the kindly, generous Dr Henry Jekyll succeeds in freeing his own alter ego, Edward Hyde, a sadistic, evil creature whose pleasure is murder.

A woman trying to recover from a sexual attack is locked in a posh apartment with a corpse of the very man she's been dreaming would murder her. She tries to hang on to reality when objects around her seem to come to life.

A young woman seeking self-improvement enlists the help of a renowned hypnotist but, after a handful of intense sessions, discovers unexpected and deadly consequences.

During the Cold War, an American scientist appears to defect to East Germany as part of a cloak and dagger mission to find the formula for a resin solution—but the plan goes awry when his fiancee, unaware of his motivation, follows him across the border.
