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THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
Rating:  ½
USA. 1964.
Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Charles Beaumont & R. Wright Campell, Based on the Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Nicolas Roeg, Music – David Lee, Special Effects – George Blackwell, Makeup – George Partleton, Production Design – Daniel Haller. Production Company – AIP.
Cast:
Vincent Price (Prince Prospero), Jane Asher (Francesca), Hazel Court (Juliana), Patrick Magee (Alfredo), David Weston (Gino), Skip Martin (Hop Toad), Nigel Green (Ludovico)
Plot: The cruel and sadistic Prince Prospero burns the village of Cartania to the ground when he finds that one villager has contracted the Red Death. The innocent Francesca begs Prospero to save the lives of her father and the man she loves so he asks her to choose which one he will kill and which he shall spare. But then he decides to take them all to his castle. There he, a practicing Satanist, is determined to corrupt Francesca’s innocence. However the Red Death has promised the villagers their freedom and makes a surprise appearance during a costumed masque held by Prospero.
The Masque of the Red Death was one of the seven-and-a-half Edgar Allan Poe adaptations made by producer-director Roger Corman between 1960 and 1964. (The half is The Haunted Palace (1963), which only uses the title of Poe’s poem and in fact adapts an H.P. Lovecraft story). In his Poe series Corman had clearly been inspired by the Gothic revival that had been stimulated by Hammer Films beginning in 1957. The Poe adaptations, all but one of which starred Vincent Price, brought Corman critical attention as a director and took him away from being a director of the no-budget (albeit zesty) hackwork he had churned out for James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff at American International Pictures in the late 1950s. Masque was the sixth and second to last of Corman’s Poe adaptations and is generally the most critically acclaimed of them all.
As with most of Corman’s Poe adaptations, Corman and his writers (in this case acclaimed fantasy author Charles Beaumont, who wrote 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964), and sf author R. Wright Campbell) have taken a fragment that is the Poe story and padded it out into a feature-length script. Masque is a three-page short story, which is essentially just a setup for a sombre twist ending where the Red Death attends Prospero’s masque in person – thus Beaumont and Campbell have to invent a whole backstory to make Prospero come to life. (They also throw in the Poe story Hop-Frog (1849) to pad things out). They make the script into an amazing study in cruelty and sadism. In the opening scene Jane Asher begs for the lives of her father (Nigel Green) and lover (David Weston) to be told by Price that she must choose which of the two will be allowed to live; then later Price constructs a game where the two men must alternately gash themselves with daggers, not knowing which of the daggers is poisoned. A husband and wife come begging Prospero’s asylum from the Red Death, the man offering his wife to Price to which Price coldly replies “I’ve already had that pleasure” and shoots the man with a crossbolt and throws the woman a sword, “Spare yourself madam.”
In this version Prospero and Prospero’s sister, played by an alarmingly jealous Hazel Court, are also Satanists. This makes Masque the first real Hollywood film, apart from fitful early attempts such as The Black Cat (1934) and The Seventh Victim (1943), to actually mention Satanism. It’s fairly tame in comparison to the depictions of Satanism that emerged after Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) – not much more than a drug-trip sequence with a few cackling masked figures, although there is a good shock sequence where Court brands herself as Satan’s bride with an inverted crucifix.
The film is the most sumptuous of all Corman’s Poe adaptations with some expansive castle interior sets, most notably a series of interlocked rooms with each in a single colour scheme. The film is also luxuriously photographed by a young Nicolas Roeg, who would later embark on his own directorial career with the likes of Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and The Witches (1990).
Corman’s other Poe films are The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), the Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Corman also produced a disappointing remake, Masque of Red Death (1989).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2000
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