In England, 1947, Dr. Rossiter is a plastic surgeon who botches an operation on society woman Evelyn Morley leaving his patient horribly disfigured. He and his assistants Angela and her brother Martin evade the police and escape to France disguised as Dr. Schüler. There they meet the owner of a rundown circus Vanet whose daughter’s face has been scarred in a wartime bombing. Schuler successfully operates on Nicole and goes on to manipulate his way into the family and the running of the circus, eventually taking over completely when Vanet dies in a drunken incident with a performing bear. The circus becomes the ideal front for his increasingly deranged and experimental surgical exploits, where he befriends disfigured women and transforms them for his internationally successful “Temple of Beauty”. However, when they threaten to leave, they meet with gruesome accidents which begin to raise the suspicions of both the newspapers and Scotland Yard, who are soon hot on his trail.

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