The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

directed by Roger Corman

USA/UK

90 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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(This review was written in late summer of 2021.)

When I was a kid, I had a book with a few illustrated and abridged versions of popular Edgar Allan Poe stories. Unfortunately I don't remember the publisher or the illustrator, but what has stuck with me all these years is its version of Masque of the Red Death. I was probably too young to be reading something like that, or at least too young to be giving it as much thought as I did, but the climax of the story was rendered as horrendously macabre in the book's art style, and I still remember the masked figure in red stalking through the halls trailing an actual, physical red wake. I remember the clock chiming midnight, the figures of the revelers twisted and diseased, the slow progression through each colored room. I remember a feeling of weighty silence even though it was only images on a page. I probably like that artwork better than I like Poe's original story, and because of it, Red Death has remained my favorite of his.

This movie is, of course, not that. My apologies for going on, but I wanted to mention that to give an idea of the impression that Masque of the Red Death made on me at a very young age. I wish I didn't have to ever say this, but the story itself is extremely relevant right now: a cruel, uncaring ruler holed up in his castle with a select few of the super-rich while the poor die in droves right outside the gates. It's the perfect pandemic movie, and I doubt anybody involved in its production could ever have imagined it would be so relevant. I think almost all of the top reviews of it on Letterboxd right now are covid jokes. That says something about where peoples' minds are when they watch a movie about rich people hoarding power in the middle of a pandemic. Of course, the idea of the rich isolating themselves from the poor is not new, but the combination of it and a contagious disease (even if said disease is more metaphor than anything) hits particularly hard right now.

Vincent Price as Prince Prospero is the obvious centerpiece of this whole film, and even his signature slight hamminess can't hide the fact that the character he plays is just a hideous human being with no redeeming qualities. His cruelty is almost cartoonish, but almost is the key word there - neither the script nor Price's performance ever tip the scales so much that he becomes entirely unbelievable as a villain. Maybe this is an effect of the film's aforementioned current relevance, but even though he does ridiculous things, like command people to crawl around on the ground doing various animal impressions, Prospero is never more funny than he is despicable. And it's also fairly harrowing to watch Francesca's slow descent into acceptance of her fate, being dragged along like a plaything with no possible chance of escape until she doesn't even want to escape anymore. A lot of the acting is not up to today's standards, and seeing everyone pull off these performances while dressed in dollar store medieval chic takes a little away from it, but Francesca's abduction and captivity remain upsetting nevertheless.

Something I'm really interested in that has no real relevance to the actual quality of this film is the ending, when figures implied to be personifications of different plagues show up, but they are also, curiously, coded to the colors of Prospero's indulgent colored rooms that he has for no reason other than to show off his wealth. (It would of course be a little harder and more expensive to assemble such rooms when colors and dyes weren't as easy to come by as going to Home Depot with some paint swatches.) There's something I find compelling about that. When Prospero constructed the rooms, was he driven, unknowingly, by the invisible hand of each specter of disease? Was something - fate, or possibly God - guiding him to create physical reminders of his own mortality? And would he have been able to recognize that reminder of his mortality if he were not fooled by his own riches and power into believing he was functionally immortal? Those rooms always gave me an uneasy feeling, even when I was reading the book as a kid, and I've never been able to figure out why.

I don't have much else to say about this. It's not the best movie I've ever seen, but the performances and the symbolism and everything else about it, especially the camerawork by Nicolas Roeg of all people, make it shine brighter. I just can't stop thinking about how this is a movie that doesn't feel like it should be this depressing or leave me as reflective about real life as it does. It's too gothic and has too much grandeur for that. Plus, it's too cheesy - Vincent Price shouldn't give me a sense of ennui, and yet. This should remain a grotesque but fictional story, and instead we're all living in it and we don't even get to wear cool masks.