Demy's only British production was shot on location in Germany. Closer to the Brothers Grimm source than the romanticism of the Robert Browning poem, Demy's darkly political interpretation of this legend, with its fantastical images of death, is not intended as a children's film. Pop singer Donovan, who scored the film, plays the fourteenth-century piper hired to rid the town of Hamelin, beset by the Black Plague, of its rats. (The rat wrangler on the production deserves credit!) “The Pied Piper deserves to be remembered as a very strange hybrid indeed: a neo-Marxist fairytale” (Reynold Humphries, Jump Cut).