Vena (Janine Carazo) has moved to this carnival with her parents where they are planning to run the shooting gallery there while they stay on the site in a trailer though actually investigating their missing son, but no sooner has she arrived than she starts to feel suspicious about the place. Why do they never see the owner, Malatesta? The only representative they can talk to is Blood (Jerome Dempsey) who talks at length but never seems to say anything informative, basically they cannot get a straight answer out of him. To make things a little better, Vena strikes up a friendship with Kit (Chris Thomas) who offers to show her around, but even so there appears to be more to the carnival than meets the eye, and the staff are mostly weirdos.
Malatesta's Carnival of Blood was one of those one-offs from people who mostly never worked in film again to any great high profile that thanks to its sheer strangeness was able to generate a cult following, and much of that was down to the setting. The king of such movies, Carnival of Souls, also had the benefit of a unique location for a memorable set of scenes, but this took place in the carnival for more or less the whole movie (with interiors shot in an empty factory), making the most of its creepy atmosphere and dilapidated look. It was a genuine carnival that had seen better days director Christopher Speeth and his team were working in, and adding to the intrigue it was torn down the next year due to lack of interest.
Speeth never directed another film, making him one of those one hit wonders, or he would have been should this have actually been a hit. He demonstrated a keen eye for the noteworthy image, though that location was a gift to anyone making a horror movie, and as the film grew increasingly surreal and oppressive he was wont to use the script by Werner Liepolt (another person whose sole credit this was) to head off into bizarre tangents. In particular there was a dream sequence, a nightmare really, where Vena ran through the place at night, and in the surrounding countryside too, all in her nightie, that genuinely did evoke the feeling of troubled sleep and perhaps suggested Speeth should have ditched the plot for the visuals.
Although you could argue that was more or less what he did anyway, as there was an atmosphere thick with the strange and outré, albeit on a low budget that relied on the sort of unease around carnivals that was probably best experienced in Ray Bradbury's classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, not that this was up to that standard, though it was cut from the same cloth. What seems to be going on is that Malatesta's establishment conceals a whole tribe of cannibals who live in its lower depths and he organises it so they are fed on the bodies of the patrons they pick off from the rides up above, which you'll struggle to understand how it worked as a business model as somebody must have noticed all these people going missing whenever anyone visited the place, wouldn't they?
As if that were not bad enough, Blood wasn't so-called for nothing as he turns out to be an actual vampire, complete with fangs, and he spends a lot of the already fairly brief running time chasing Vena about. As with many low budget horror movie makers of this period, the creators were very much enamoured of the old chillers in black and white more often than not, wishing to bring up that sensation of staying up late to watch them on television and being a little creeped out in the process, so there were references to classic films such as the Dracula and Frankenstein posters on the wall or the cannibals killing time by watching the likes of The Phantom of the Opera or Cabinet of Dr Caligari projected hugely before them as they mill around. The only actor here who would be recognisable (most of the cast were from theatre) was Hervé Villechaize, largely unintelligible with his thick French accent but contributing to the skewed mood. Assuredly not for the mainstream, and even seasoned horror fans might have trouble with it, but it did have a certain something.
