***

In a small American town, a diabolical circus and its demonic proprietor prey on the townsfolk.

A family of aerialists dream of accomplishing the Quad, the most difficult quadruple somersault, for which a $250,000 prize has been offered. Their dream gets sidetracked…

The film traces Phineas Taylor Barnum’s career from 1835 to 1881 when he joined James A. Bailey to form the famous ‘Greatest Show on Earth’.

A little boy is locked up in Bastille metro station. Wandering along the undergound corridors he arrives in a clown’s dressing room. Together they resurface and find themselves in the middle of a circus ring.

A little traveling circus arrives in a Vietnam’s central highlands. The artists bring in the magic and illusion of entertainment, and take advantage of townsfolk’s gullibility to sow seeds of doubt and disarray in their minds.

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless mother — the leader of a strange religious cult — and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name as he becomes ‘her arms’.

Young pregnant Yanka’s lamentable existence as a circus employee is made a bit more harrowing when a slimy parasite leaps from the body of one of the zoo's leopards and enters her womb. Possessed of an evil intelligence and cranky disposition, the organism transforms her fetus into a snarling little jerk of a monster with a curious interest in human nature and an insatiable thirst for blood.

Author, poet and playwright Marcel Spadice is fascinated by the circus which is a source of inspiration for him. With the help of his friend Hélène Lagache, he manages to seduce ring-attendant Franz-Ali Aoussine, who dreams of becoming a tightrope star. Marcel takes over the young man's training, imposing a steel-like discipline on him. Franz-Ali submits to the Master's demands, risking his life in the process...

Alma works as a fire-eater and her father as a clown at the Fantasia Circus; she becomes pregnant with his child. When he dies, she works the streets, then joins an itinerant puppet theater which presents Old Testament tales in poor neighborhoods.

In 1950s Tokyo, a little orphaned girl joins a freak-show circus troupe whose members rape and abuse her. She then finds a glimmer of hope in the enigmatic magician who joins the group.