Albert Müller, Laurence Payne, is a schoolmaster in the small village of Stetl who, one evening, witnesses his wife Anna, Domini Blythe, guiding a small girl named Jenny Schilt into the shadowed castle of Count Mitterhaus, a reclusive nobleman whose name rumors say is tied to a string of child disappearances. The tale of the Count proves true: Anna has become his willing acolyte and mistress, and she hands Jenny over to him for draining. Fueled by fear and fury, the villagers—led by Albert and joined by Jenny’s father Mr. Schilt and Bürgermeister Peter Thorley Walters—storm the fortress. The Count lashes back, taking the lives of several attackers, and Müller musters his courage to drive a wooden stake through the heart of the undead tyrant. With his dying breath, the Count curses the villagers, declaring that their children will die to restore him to life. In a harsh, bitter moment, Anna is forced to run a gauntlet, only to retreat back into the castle as the briefly revived Count directs her to seek his cousin Emil at “the Circus of Night.” The castle explodes in a torrent of gunpowder and flame, and Anna escapes through a tunnel as the ruins burn around them.
Fifteen years pass, and Stetl is scourged by a spreading plague, sealed off by wary authorities who fear further contagion. Dr. Anton Kersh, Richard Owens, dismisses vampiric myth as superstition, even as the countryside tightens its grip around the blockaded villagers. A traveling troupe calling itself the Circus of Night rolls into town, led by a dwarf named Michael, Skip Martin, and a beguiling gypsy woman, whose origins are as enigmatic as the show itself. Unseen by most, Emil, the Count’s cousin and a vampire, is among the performers, along with the twin acrobats Heinrich Robin Sachs and Helga Lalla Ward. The troupe, though entertaining at the moment, carries a chilling secret that the villagers will soon sense. In the ruins of the old castle, Emil and the gypsy woman—Anna in a new guise—return to the crypt and confront the Count’s preserved body, where the curse is restated: those who killed him and their descendants must die, though the gypsy woman’s doubt lingers: >Must they all die?
As anxiety pulls the town in multiple directions, Dora Müller, Lynne Frederick, Müller’s daughter, slips back toward the village to find her father and her beloved Anton Kersh, John Moulder-Brown. Meanwhile, Peter’s fear and Elvira’s concerns about Rosa’s attraction to the handsome Emil set the stage for a new chapter of danger. Rosa, Christine Paul-Podlasky, is drawn into the Circus of Night, and Emil, in a world-weary trance, seduces her before the crypt’s grim reality closes his circle around Dora and Anton. The twins Hauser, Heinrich and Helga, lure the two youths into the hall of mirrors, where the Mirror of Life shows visions and temptation grows fierce. Dora, protected by a cross she wears, slips away from the trap while the twins are drawn on by the cry of the gypsy woman who is revealed to be Anna.
In a grim sequence of betrayal and courage, the schoolhouse becomes a battleground as Emil—now in a panther’s form—kills the boarding students, while the gypsy woman tears the protective cross from Dora’s neck. Dora escapes to the school chapel, where a colossal crucifix overwhelms the twins and buys her time. Yet Emil and Anna press their plan forward, kidnapping Dora and her guardian, Gerta Elizabeth Seal, with the intention of using their blood in a ritual to resurrect the Count within the crypt of Castle Mitterhaus. Dr. Kersh returns from the capital with imperial support and medicines for the plague, and his arrival signals a coordinated counterattack: soldiers assault the Circus of Night, the strongman is slain, and the camp is set ablaze.
The battle reaches the crypt, where Anna’s remorse surfaces even as the Count’s hunger rages. Müller, Kersh, and a soldier force their way into the tomb, clashing with Emil as he seeks to annihilate his enemies. In a climactic struggle, Müller stabs the Count just as Emil’s bite takes effect, reviving the cursed lord. Dora and Anton are saved only by a desperate cross-like device harnessed from Müller’s crossbow, which becomes a crude weapon to force the Count’s neck into a fatal trap. With the Count finally decapitated as the stake is removed and the body explodes back into ash, the villagers, led by Dr. Kersh, set the ruins ablaze and hope to break the century-spanning curse. As smoke rises into the night, a solitary bat escapes the tomb, leaving Dora and Anton wondering what fate still awaits them in the night’s lingering shadows.
