The Masque of the Red Death

It’s a film that has been shown “early” to many future horror fans, having been a staple of high-school English classes whose students had lately read the Poe story, back when students could read a full story. Colors are key, with their shades, juxtapositions, symbolic meanings, and implications, and function as characters themselves. The movie is akin to a series of paintings in motion, and you could hang scenes from the work on a museum wall, the same as you could the dissolves from Orson Welles and Gregg Toland’s Citizen Kane.

Patrick Magee, with his ever-expressive face, excels as the kind of undercarriage-tonguing hanger-on you want to punch in that face, but he’s lit up—literally—in delightfully satisfying fashion, courtesy of Skip Martin’s court jester. Most of the film pertains to a party, and it’s hard not to think of detached, modern-day “elites” and their sinecures of insanity as we watch; the unexamined, gilt (and always guilt-free) lives, posturing, off-screen performative culture. There’s a sex scene between a nubile and the Devil, and if that doesn’t make you think of 80-year-old billionaires climbing atop someone 50 years their junior for a few toggles of the old in-and-out as though this was an add-on perk to their divine-right gift basket from the netherworld gods-in-reverse, then you just might be one of them.

Corman fretted that people—by whom he presumably meant critics—would say that he filched from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), but his Masque of the Red Death relies more on itself than it even does on Poe. It’s Corman’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Asher, incidentally, would have a long relationship with The Beatles’ Paul McCartney), the vessel that has left familiar channels for waters all its own.

The sets were left over from the British film Becket, shot earlier in the year, the crew was English (including cinematographer Nicolas Roeg doing the work of his life), the film’s setting was Italy, meaning that this is a European picture, a British picture, and an American picture made by a man hailing from Detroit. It smacks of a work that has Western Hemisphere corruption covered. No wonder they added Satanism. 

The Masque of the Red Death is also painfully relevant in a culture of (handheld) screen addiction, weaponized classism, rampant and countenanced sexual criminality, despotism become increasingly tyrannical through narcissism, dismissed mental illness, and sociopathic demands of and needs for attention. When the cloaked figures who have assembled outside Prospero’s castle walls get down to business, we are, as sports fans say, pumped and jacked, if also crestfallen that we’re unlikely to find them forgathered and fine-tuning their battle plan outside of our own relevant walls. 🩸