Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Masque of the Red Death, The

Tagged: Film.

Roger Corman has made two movies with this title.

1. UK/US movie (1964). Anglo Amalgamated. Produced by George Willoughby. Executive producers: Nat Cohen, Stuart Levy. Directed by Corman. Special effects: George Blackwell. Screenplay by Charles Beaumont, R Wright Campbell. Based on "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), with a subplot based on "Hop Frog" (1849), both by Edgar Allan Poe. Novelization: The Masque of the Red Death * (1964) by Elsie Lee. Starring: Jane Asher (Francesca), Hazel Court (Juliana), Nigel Green (Ludovico), Patrick Magee (Alfredo), Vincent Price (Prospero), John Westbrook (Red Death), David Weston (Gino). 89 mins. Colour.

The land is ridden with plague, the Red Death, sent out to each village in the form of a rose by a mysterious red-robed stranger. Tyrant Prince Prospero quarantines his castle against all comers, and prepares with his guests for an orgiastic Masque. But the red-robed man also appears at the masque and, after identifying himself to Prospero as Death, or a Death – and not, as Prospero had hoped, an emissary of Satan – spreads the plague among the guests, who lurch into a macabre Dance of Death; last to die is Prospero himself. In the movie's final sequence the red-robed man plays Cards with a child – one of the six people spared by the plague – before joining company with four other Deaths of different colours to continue their duties elsewhere.

This is Corman's stab at mixing Horror Movie with art movie, and a fairly good stab. The influences of Ingmar Bergman (most overtly, the red-robed man is a cognate of Death in The Seventh Seal [1956]) and of Luis Buñuel are obvious, while the rather impressive Vision sequence experienced by Prospero's mistress Juliana after she has betrothed herself to Satan could be traced to any of a number of directors. The ethical dialectic that occasionally emerges is again Bergmanesque. The Masque of the Red Death's appearance is often striking; this is generally attributed to its cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg, later an esteemed director in his own right (of, for example, Don't Look Now [1973]), but such a simplistic assignment of credit is to assume that Corman had no control over his own movie. [JG]

2. US movie (1989). Concorde. Produced by Corman. Directed by Larry Brand. Screenplay by Brand, Daryl Haney. Starring: Clare Hoak (Julietta), Patrick Macnee (Machiavel), Paul Michael (Benito), Jeff Osterhage (Claudio), Adrian Paul (Prospero), Tracy Reiner (Lucrecia). 79 mins. Colour.

A shallower, nastier and mercifully shorter rehash of most of the ingredients of The Masque of the Red Death (1964), marked by wooden acting (Osterhage and Reiner notably excepted) and an overall lack of ambition. The glorifyingly evil Prospero of the earlier movie is replaced by a Prospero who believes that sadistically wielding the power of life and death over others is part of his job. The eventual moral is that no mortal, only Death himself, has the right to command death. [JG]