Dis­cov­er the dev­il­ish plea­sures of this Roger Cor­man chiller

The Masque of the Red Death is the sev­enth of eight fea­tures which Roger Cor­man adapt­ed in the first half of the 1960s from the writ­ings of Edgar Allan Poe. Some of these adap­ta­tions were very loose: The Haunt­ed Palace, for exam­ple, made one year pri­or, mere­ly took its title from an 1839 poem by Poe, while bor­row­ing its actu­al sto­ry from a dif­fer­ent author and text entire­ly, HP Lovecraft’s 1927 novel­la ​‘The Case of Charles Dex­ter Ward’.

First pub­lished in 1842, Poe’s ​‘The Masque of the Red Death’ tells of Prince Pros­pero holed up for months with the local nobil­i­ty in his lux­u­ri­ous­ly appoint­ed abbey to avoid the dead­ly plague out­side, only for death’s emp­ty embod­i­ment to gate­crash the masked ball and fatal­ly to infect all the rev­ellers. It’s an evoca­tive and impres­sion­is­tic sto­ry, but it is also very short. And while Corman’s film of the same name cer­tain­ly retains the bare bones of its source, it also flesh­es these out with all man­ner of oth­er influences.

As writ­ten by Charles Beau­mont and R Wright Camp­bell, and played with inim­itable deca­dence by Vin­cent Price, Corman’s Pros­pero is not mere­ly the leader of an exclu­sive elite but also a Satan-wor­ship­ping sadist hell­bent on tor­tur­ing the cap­tives he keeps in his dun­geons and cor­rupt­ing the inno­cent – like the wide-eyed, God-fear­ing Francesca (Jane Ash­er) – so that his cas­tle comes to resem­ble not only the plea­sure palace from Poe (with its suite of colour-cod­ed rooms) but also the infer­nal château from the Mar­quis de Sade’s noto­ri­ous 1785 nov­el ​‘The 120 Days of Sodom’.

Here Pros­pero has an invent­ed con­sort, Juliana (Hazel Court), whose desire to become a hand­maid­en to the Dev­il allows Cor­man to cre­ate a lyser­gi­cal­ly-lit dream sequence in which she is vis­it­ed in bed by a suc­ces­sion of ​‘exot­ic’ men bran­dish­ing phal­lic blades. One sequence, in which Francesca, her father Lodovi­co (Nigel Green) and her fiancé Gino (David West­on) are tricked into think­ing they have escaped the cas­tle, is lift­ed from Auguste Vil­liers de l’Isle-Adam’s 1883 short sto­ry ​‘A Tor­ture By Hope’, while anoth­er sub­plot involv­ing the dwarf jester Hop-Toad (Skip Mar­tin), who wreaks a hor­rif­ic revenge for the mis­treat­ment of his lover Esmer­al­da (Veri­na Green­law) by the noble­man Alfre­do (Patrick Magee), is tak­en straight out of Poe’s own 1849 short sto­ry ​‘Hop-Frog’.

All these dif­fer­ent sto­ry­lines are deft­ly inter­wo­ven to show the greed and priv­i­lege of a land­ed gen­try that imag­ines itself immune to the depri­va­tions and death affect­ing the peas­antry below and beyond the cas­tle walls – although the wil­ful­ly wicked Pros­pero does not mind extend­ing his mur­der­ous cru­el­ties to his fel­low nobles and even to his own con­sort, mak­ing him as indis­crim­i­nate in his deprav­i­ty as the Red Death is in his destruction.

The Red Death him­self (an uncred­it­ed John West­brook) is no mere apoc­a­lyp­tic phan­tom appear­ing only at the end, but a speak­ing – if mys­te­ri­ous – char­ac­ter right from the open­ing scene, who seems, with his philo­soph­i­cal talk, game play­ing and ulti­mate lead­ing of a danse macabre, to have been mod­elled less on Poe’s bale­ful appari­tion than on the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of Death in Ing­mar Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal.

There is, though, one major dif­fer­ence: as his very name implies, the Red Death is pre­sent­ed in full colour, and is cov­ered from head to toe in the same bloody crim­son that marks the vic­tims of his plague. This makes him stand out not only from Bergman’s mono­chrome vision but also in the Prince’s oth­er­wise mul­ti-hued cas­tle from which the colour scar­let – along with the sim­i­lar­ly named noble­man Scar­lat­ti (Paul Whit­sun-Jones) – has been express­ly and force­ful­ly proscribed.

Indeed, one of the great thrills of The Masque of the Red Death is the bril­liant, Bava-esque colour on dis­play, lov­ing­ly shot by then cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Nico­las Roeg and here restored to their full Tech­ni­col­or lus­tre by the Acad­e­my of Motion Pic­ture Arts & Sci­ences Film Archive and the Film Foun­da­tion. In the end, this is a goth­ic tale of two vying domin­ions, one ruled by an effete, debauched man whose per­verse plea­sures are entire­ly earth­bound, the oth­er unworld­ly, unde­ni­able, unde­fi­able – or in a word (quot­ed direct­ly from Poe’s text) ​‘illim­itable’.

Any view­er who wish­es to find moral mean­ing in the spar­ing of Francesca from (and by) Death must over­look the fact that she is not only tempt­ed by Pros­pero to aban­don her Chris­t­ian faith and come over to the Devil’s side, but also ulti­mate­ly appears to suc­cumb to that temp­ta­tion. Yet near­ly every­one else – lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple, many no doubt less ambigu­ous­ly pious, and com­ing from more than mere Chris­t­ian cul­tures – does not survive.

This is a cel­e­bra­tion not of death’s right­eous­ness and mer­cy, but of its inex­orable arbi­trari­ness, oper­at­ing beyond the colour­ful dra­mas of good and evil that the Prince stages with­in the more or less con­trolled con­fines of his palace. Death may on occa­sion wear the Prince’s face, even as the Prince some­times does Death’s work for him – but the Red Death comes in many masks, even in many colours, and always finds a way to ruin the par­ty, no mat­ter the class or creed, age or abil­i­ty, pedi­gree or prove­nance of those attending.

In these days of lethal pan­dem­ic, The Masque of the Red Death comes with a par­tic­u­lar res­o­nance, but real­ly there can be no time when this memen­to mori lacks its poly­chro­mat­ic punch.

The Masque of the Red Death is avail­able on Blu-ray, DVD and dig­i­tal in an extend­ed cut, restored in 4K by Mar­tin Scorsese’s Film Foun­da­tion and The Acad­e­my, from Stu­dio­Canal on 25 January.