FANTASIA OBSCURA: Edgar Allen Poe Comes to Life! Er, Death
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, we have no choice but to choose death over the alternative…
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
(Dist.: American International; Dir.: Roger Corman)
American horror, if not all horror, owes a great debt to Edgar Allen Poe. His stories and poems of the macabre would haunt readers and writers for centuries, giving them nightmares to both watch and live in as sublime terrors crept up like a chill in a damp night to claim their mood, if not their life.
His tales and poems have also been the source of eight films that Roger Corman did for American International, with this, the seventh released, being one of the director’s favorites.
The main plot of the film is fairly faithful to the original Poe story from 1842 with divergences noted below. In summary: in a kingdom far away and long ago, the dreaded plague, the Red Death, is ravaging the land. The ruler, Prince Prospero, wishes to wait out the epidemic in comfort, and so invites his noble and well-off guests to hide out in a fortress-like abbey until the disease burns itself out.
During a fancy party, a masque, the guests are surprised to find one member of the affair dressed as a representation of the Red Death; when challenged, the guests find out that this is no mere costume that comes amongst them.
As noted, Corman’s film does make a few divergent choices. Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) is not just a heartless dick willing to wait it out while others die; he’s also cruel, haughty, and a full-fledged Satanist. He has a consort, Juliana (Hazel Court), who’s working her way through the circles of initiation to be a bride of Satan.
Juliana has tendencies to be jealous, as demonstrated when Prospero brings back the peasant girl Francesca (Jane Asher), who caught his fancy while he burned down her village, and whom he wants to corrupt in as many possible definitions of the word as he can.
Throw in a little person named Hop-Toad (Skip Martin), an allusion to Poe’s 1849 story “Hop-Frog,” who takes out an act of revenge on one of Prospero’s friends, Alonzo (Patrick Magee), and you have enough additional material to turn a 2,400-word short story into a 90-minute feature film.
What makes the film a success is how well Corman captures the feel and flow of Poe’s story on film. As the story follows the narrative and action from room to room in the sanctuary of iniquity, so too does Corman’s camera roll via dolly through the colored rooms where most of the film takes place.
By following the characters as they transverse the hall, we get the same sense of Prospero’s fortress being more of a prison, as the fear present on every character’s face at one point or another shows how trapped they all are. Even in a few scenes where we’re not going from room to room, such as Juliana’s vision sequence where she gives herself fully to the Dark Prince, Corman uses bright colors that makes the viewer feel pushed back against the wall, the assault on the eyes keeping the viewer in the same spaces as the cast, with nowhere to go as it gets bad.
Indeed, the sense of inevitability in the end, of death being the final victor, is a tone that both gives the film its power, and kept it from being produced earlier than it was. Corman’s approach to the film, working of a script initially written by Charles Beaumont, was, he admitted, very close in feel and tenor to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
In fact, the film’s production was delayed for years before Corman felt enough time had gone by to not feel awkward about the similarities. And both Masque and Seal can be seen as facets of a bigger story of the continent-wide danse macabre that haunted the late Middle Ages, a big enough happening that would allow at least two films, if not more, room enough to reflect on the times.
Another big difference between these two films, in addition to the source story, is the role of Death personified. Not so much a bystander or a stiff just doing its job, Death here comes across as the hero; when it makes appearances, he seems to really have it in for Prospero.
The whole vilification of the prince to the nth degree seems unnecessary, but with the expectation of a clear villain from the producer, and an actor like Price who was known for playing such devilish roles, there probably was no choice.
In terms of how the choices were received, the film supposedly did not do as well at the box office as the six preceding “Poe Cycle” films Corman had done. As noted, though, Corman had a soft spot for this production, and as an adaptation of the original source material it succeeds a lot better than other story-to-screen works do, capturing the flavor of the writing, as well as most of the main story plot points (in addition to a good bit of “Hop-Frog” as well for good measure) in the final cut of the film.
When it was finally released, the heart of the source material, much like Darkness and Decay and The Red Death, held illimitable dominion over all.
NEXT TIME: The story about an outrageous entertainer who parlays his infamy into a run for president; no, it’s a fictional story, not a recap of last year’s events…
