The Masque of the Red Death [Reviewed by Lackey]

88 min., 1965
Directed by Roger Corman
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix

Cartoon Satanists vs. mod heroines and Bergman’s personification of Death in this very ’60s Technicolor extravaganza.

* * *

Premise

Europe during the medieval period. A horrific plague, known only as the Red Death, stalks the land. Tyrannical Prince Prospero orders a local village to be burned to the ground at the first sign of the plague, and after abducting a pretty village girl, takes refuge in his castle, which he believes to be safe from the Red Death. But as he prepares his annual gala feast and masquerade ball for his fellow nobles, it turns out he’s not as safe as he’d assumed…

Review

Last week I reviewed Targets, a 1968 film whose central thesis seemed to be that the then-current paradigm of cinematic horror–has-been character actors luring around faux-Gothic sets reciting purple dialogue–was irrelevant when compared to real-life horrors such as Charles Whitman and the war in Vietnam. Targets, in a large part, owed its existence to Roger Corman…who, as irony would have it, was one of the chief merchants of that outmoded style of horror.

Corman’s 1965 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death” is probably a prime example of what Targets was pushing against. Screenwriters Charles Beaumont (frequent contributor to The Twilight Zone) and R. Wright Campbell have their work cut out for them here. Poe’s original story is almost entirely mood and atmosphere and not a whole lot of plot or character development. Beaumont and Campbell bulk up the story by injecting elements of other Poe stories (“Hop-Frog” is incorporated as a subplot) and introducing a few original developments. The least successful is the one-dimensional strain of Satan-worship followed by Prospero, his wife Juliana and the other nobles in the story. On top of that, the medieval setting of Masque is all surface; it’s a movie with modern sensibility dressed up in motley and tights, but the Satanist angle precludes a number of possibilities for social commentary. (That being said, I did enjoy the nihilistic implications of the final twist.) While you can argue that Masque is meant to be a fable, I felt the antagonists would have been more effective if they’d been less cartoony.

On the plus side, there’s a fairly strong cast to make up for some of the deficiencies in characterization. While Prospero isn’t a career-defining role, Vincent Price is in excellent form, and gains a lot of mileage out of underplaying the role a bit. Patrick Magee (Dementia 13, A Clockwork Orange) is also strong as the second-string villain Alfredo, and Skip Martin (Vampire Circus) makes the most of court jester Hop Toad’s moral ambiguity. The role of Prospero’s wife, Juliana, is a bit of a missed opportunity as far as characterization goes, but Hazel Court does the best she can with it. And while nobody’s going to accuse Jane Asher (the woman Paul McCartney dumped in favor of Linda Eastman) of great acting in this film, she does “innocent and in peril” fairly well.

Production designer Daniel Hallier (who’d go on to direct Die, Monster, Die! and the 1970 version of The Dunwich Horror) and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (who’d go on to direct Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth) pull out all the stops when it comes to defining the film’s aesthetic sense: while the sets are occasionally wobbly, they’re always beautiful; the costumes are delightful (even if the Red Death is a bit too obvious a nod to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) and the color-palette lush. Corman’s direction is for the most part solid, despite some sluggish action sequences, a couple of cheesy sequences (in particular, Juliana’s faux-psychedelic initiation sequence and a scene in which Prospero is chased by a mob who alternate between trying to tear him apart and re-enacting dance sequences from West Side Story), and several comic gaffes.

The Masque of the Red Death isn’t a bad movie. There’s a lot going for it, such as Price’s performance and the design and photography. It’s definitely head-and-shoulders above the schlock that constitutes the vast bulk of Corman’s body of work. But that doesn’t keep it from feeling more than a bit shallow and very difficult to take seriously.

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