The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Dir. Roger Corman

Written by Charles Beaumont, R. Wright Campbell, based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe

Starring Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher

            I’ve heard enough “based on” claims in my day to develop a healthy skepticism about the ability of any given medium to fill out a feature-length film. You’ve got your “based on a true story” of course, with the usual free-associative definition of the “based” and “true story” parts. You’ve got “inspired by true events,” which at least has the benefit of more ambiguous language to hide behind. You’ve got “based on a novel,” which usually equates to “inelegantly  summarized from a novel,” and then --only then-- we reach the rogues gallery of even more dubious origin stories: “based on the video game created by Capcom,” “based on characters created by Dinesh D’Souza*,” “based on the theme park ride” “based on the board game created by Parker Brothers,” “based on He-Man and the Masters of The Universe by Mattel.”

            What we have here is a “based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe,” which should, in theory, be a less suspect pedigree than films based on toys or board games. Not only do we at least have an assurance that this is based on a story (rather than, say, a piece of plastic), but it’s a story by one of the all-time great masters of genre writing. But Poe stories do not, candidly speaking, have a track record of producing cinema which faithfully reflects the masterful craft of their source material. They are, in fact, almost uniformly garbage, perhaps rivaled in their wholesale worthlessness and ubiquity only by Lovecraft adaptations. Part of that is probably that while short stories are a tremendous medium for incisive, imaginative fiction, they are also, by definition… short. The Masque of the Red Death, first published in 1842, is just a hair under 2400 words. For comparison, my review of LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACREIII is over 2600. The Wikipedia page for the He-Man and The Masters of the Universe toy series by Mattel (which also got its own movie, in 1986) is significantly in excess of 26,000 (including tables, it would be over 100 printed pages).

            Short stories stretched into 90 minutes movies are going to necessitate a lot of filler, which is a serious problem, because come on, if you liked the short story enough to feel it was worth turning into a movie, you probably didn’t finish it and say, “hey, that was great, I just wish there had been a bunch more characters and subplots and general narrative detritus to pad it out into a fatty 300 pages.” But that’s exactly what a screenplay is going to need, because in addition to being short, these stories are also seldom structurally narrative. They’re not, generally speaking, about a character who encounters conflict and changes as a result; they’re mostly accounts of incidents. Such an incident often has more structural similarity to a specific scene or sequence than to a full movie, and expanding it into a more traditional story structure consequently entails stitching that incident to other incidents which may not, in themselves, be especially worthwhile. The end result is that your film, made to showcase a short story, instead spends most of its runtime constructing an inelegant kludge of backwards-engineered backstory, wasting time and ironically diminishing through dilution the actual impact of the original inspiration.

Point being, in most cases, a direct, unvarnished adaptation of a short story is off the table. Poe adaptations tackle this problem in a variety of ways; the twisty Italian YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, billed as an adaptation of Poe’s The Black Cat, spends most of its runtime as a softcore noir before finally becoming an adaptation of the story only in the last few minutes. Corman’s 1963 THE RAVEN compensates by cultivating only the scantest fleeting references to the titular poem and mostly being totally unrelated. 1963’s THE HAUNTED PALACE is actually more closely based on a Lovecraft story (?!). TALES OF TERROR (1962), SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968), and TWO EVIL EYES (1990) are all anthology collections.

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH cleverly pads a little of its time by stealth adapting a second Poe story, 1845’s Hop-Frog, but mostly makes do with maintaining the essential elements of Poe’s original story, and then weaving a broad tale around them of wholly new cloth. Which is not, it turns out, an especially tall order; there are really only four concrete elements of Poe’s original story: the “red death,” a virulent plague spreading through the land; a “Prince Prospero,” holding a masked ball in his quarantined abbey with a misplaced sense of invulnerability; the curious description of Prospero’s castle as divided into six rooms, each of a different color; and finally, the appearance of the “Red Death” personified as a masked reveler who commits the ultimate party foul. That’s it. That’s not just an annotated version, that’s the entire story; everything else is just Poe’s sublimely disquieting lyricism.

A very long time ago indeed, when I reviewed 1971’s exceedingly loose adaptation of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, I pointed out that while Poe undoubtedly had a knack for crafting clever, devious scenarios, his real talent was a literary one; it was his uniquely masterful grasp of language and his ability to use it to obliquely evoke --rather than literally depict-- the uncanny and the disturbing, that makes his work so powerful. But that gift is one stubbornly rooted in its native medium. There’s only one spoken line in the entirety of the Poe story (which, incidentally, does not appear in the movie anyway), leaving almost nothing left of the original art in its transition to its new format. Cinema, of course, has its own native art in its visuals, but it would take a rare talent indeed to craft a visual style as artful and potent as Poe’s words. Someday, I hope, it will happen. But the wise would not look for it in a Roger Corman movie.

And yes, this is a Roger Corman movie, seventh of the eight Poe adaptations he made between 1960’s HOUSE OF USHER and 1965’s TOMB OF LIGEIA, all but one of which starring Vincent Price. That’s hardly a pedigree to be ashamed of, but also not one which exactly strikes one as a likely fount of great art. But Corman brought in two ringers this time around who give the proceedings some unexpected heft: screenwriter Charles Beaumont, and cinematographer (wait for it) Nicolas Roeg!

We’ll get to Roeg in a moment, but it’s actually Beaumont (prolific short story writer and frequent Twilight Zone scribe, whose work here was finished by Corman regular R. Wright Campbell as Beaumont gradually succumbed to the mysterious illness which took his life three years later) who makes the most impression here, doing arguably the hardest job: building a narrative around those four sentences of plot description which stays true to the spirit of Poe’s story while carving out enough of its own identity to work as a full-length film. This he does by using the entire tale as a crucible to examine Prospero, more a plot device than a character in the original story, but here a much more definite figure, more clearly a villain, but an intriguingly philosophical villain not at all shy about evangelizing his philosophy. Which is, ahem, satanism.

            OK OK, I know what you’re thinking, that evil Satanists are the oldest and dullest cliché in the book. That’s true, of course, but Beaumont’s take on Satanism isn’t the usual creaky old chestnut about sacrificing babies and pagan debauchery. It’s actually somewhere closer to the vicinity of actual Satanist philosophy than just about anything I’ve ever seen depicted on film (especially interesting, because Anton LeVey’s establishment of the official Church of Satan was still two years off), basically a kind of carnal rationalism and pragmatic self-interest. It is assuredly, to hear Price tell it, Machiavellian and cruel. But it just might be a completely reasonable reaction to the grim world of dire poverty and random, meaningless horror that Prince Prospero inhabits.

It is, at any rate, a philosophy which prioritizes a sense of control over a world of cacophonous, powerful forces. Asked if Satan is the god of hate, Prospero responds, “Oh, no! Of reality, of truth. The world lives in pain and despair...but is at least kept alive… by a few dedicated men. If we lost our power, chaos would engulf everything.” This is, of course, monstrously self-serving, and Prospero himself openly scoffs at the idea of beneficence. But Price’s delivery is earnest and gentle, with not a hint of smarmy sanctimony; however misplaced his own faith in his ability to exert control may be --for that, of course, is the heart of Poe’s tale-- Prospero has come by his faith honestly, and genuinely believes it to be the only honest and rational response to a world of unremitting horror. You’re either the terrorizer, or you’re the terrorized, and the choice between the two isn’t a hard one. As horrible as serving the Devil may be, Beaumont suggests, at least it’s more comforting than facing the idea that we are helpless victims of a random and dispassionate universe.

            This is reasonably interesting to mull over, and Price uncharacteristically plays the loquacious villain with a restrained, almost sorrowful quality that makes him an interesting and very nearly (though never entirely) sympathetic character. It’s a good role for him, broad enough to make use of his theatrical flair, but complex enough to allow him to do something other than play to the cheap seats. And that’s good, because other than Hazel Court (THE CURSE OFFRANKENSTEIN) as his consort/Satanic sidekick, everyone else in the film is about as bland and dull as it is possible to be and still reflect the visible light spectrum enough to be picked up by a camera. That would include the film’s nominal protagonist, a young village girl snatched by Prospero to administer a lesson in corruption (Jane Asher, ALFIE**), and her fiancé and father (David Weston, BECKET, and Nigel Green, THE SKULL respectively) who have almost nothing whatsoever to do except react with bafflement and shock to Prospero’s philosophizing.

            And they’re not alone, because I gotta be honest with you, there is a lot of philosophizing in here. Some of it is marginally interesting, particularly given the context of the film -- with the rising counterculture, the cold war raging, Vietnam heating up, and Kennedy's assassination a very recent memory, I imagine the contemporary world looked just as random and brutal as the fog-drenched, pestilence-ridden Grimm’s fairytale landscape conjured for the film. Satanism was in the air, with the official founding of the Church of Satan two years off, the Rolling Stones’ endearingly corny Their Satanic Majesties Request and Kenneth Anger’s LUCIFER RISING waiting in the wings a few years down the line from that. Venal nihilism does indeed seem to have been something of a natural outgrowth of so much chaos. But even so, there’s no two ways about it, the movie is stagey and talky, and in 2018, all the prattle about the Prince of Darkness seems more corny than provocative. Price is constitutionally incapable of not being entertaining, but the material, while interesting, certainly isn’t riveting enough to buoy a whole movie.

            Fortunately, right about the time the plot really starts flagging, our old buddy NicolasRoeg (DON’T LOOK NOW, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, WALKABOUT) begins to assert himself as cinematographer. This was only four years into his career in that capacity (though he’d worked in film, most often as a camera operator, going back to the early 50’s) and, as near as I can tell, either his first or second film in color.*** And for a while, he doesn’t make much of an impression, mostly sticking to unobtrusive, mediums shots with a tendency (shared by many British films of the period) towards overlighting. It’s certainly professional enough, though all the bright lights tend to make the sets (left over from the prestigious BECKET earlier that year, which counted Art Direction among its 12 Academy Award nominations!) look chintzier than they actually are. But he really hits his stride once Prospero begins to venture into Poe’s six colored rooms (only four in this version, but we’ll allow it), where he sets up numerous striking shots both by taking advantage of the borderline-surreal monochromatic setting, and by shattering it with a geometric intrusion of a foreign color.

Observe below: (note, in particular, that they're each wearing colors corresponding to one of the rooms; in the yellow room, they both stand out, contrasting their opposite color schemes. But in the purple room, Price blends in to the point of vanishing, while in the white room, he stands out vividly. In the black room, unsourced red light alters her contrast to the black, representing her inherent corruption by the act of entering. Finally, note the final shot, which changes the angle and gives us a glimpse of a nesting doll of colored rooms stacked on top of each other (black, then purple, then yellow, creating a gradient effect of dark forces closing in on our fleeing figure. It's damned thoughtful stuff.)

He’s also able to indulge his penchant for straight up psychedelia in a hallucinatory sequence where Court is menaced by… well, by a series of unfortunate ethnic stereotypes of primitive shamans, but more importantly the whole thing seems to be taking place in a lava lamp filled with glitter and blue curacao. It’s actually a pretty bold bit of visual stylization, and it probably comes as close as any sequence ever put to celluloid to taking me up on my suggestion of trying to capture the sinister ambiance of Poe’s prose entirely through pure cinema. It’s not quite there (and actually evokes Lovecraft more than Poe in its specifics), but it’s an ambitious effort, and inaugurates the film’s final act with a feverish delirium that never entirely dissipates.

            Pleasingly, the film’s three main strengths -- Price’s hamminess, Beaumont’s intellectualism, and Roeg’s adventurous visuals-- come together strongest in that finale, when the titular masque is interrupted by a solemn gentleman in red. The masque itself is a disappointingly tame affair -- no more than 20 dancers, I should think, garbed colorfully but hardly extravagantly, gliding halfheartedly around a drab-walled tile floor. Corman later recounted that he was himself dissatisfied with the sequence, which he had not had time to shoot properly (when the Red Death appears, Prospero picks him from the crowd and fumes that he had specifically forbade any reveler to wear red, which is an odd claim to make because I count no fewer than five other dancers who are prominently wearing that color, a fact that I take to be representative of the amount of planning time available). And yet, it works, I think;  Price’s butter-smooth transition from triumphant to uneasy to hysterical is a thing of beauty, magnificently showcasing the actor’s range; the conversation between Prospero and the Red-garbed interloper (an inexplicably uncredited John Westbrook, TOMB OF LIGEIA) rather nicely plays off all the intellectual groundwork Beaumont has been setting up during the film, and dovetails rather beautifully into Poe’s original point; and meanwhile, Roeg, (with editor Ann Chegwidden [AND SOON THE DARKNESS]****) works the camera into an impressionistic frenzy of moving bodies and stark colors. The effect is histrionic, to be sure, and more than a little campy (especially with Price in full operatic mode and composer David Lee’s [a noted jazz musician in one of his few films as composer] score churning dramatically) but nonetheless potent.

In fact, it’s good enough to make one seriously consider how necessary the rest of the film is. If the movie started ay 73 minutes in, we would still find every major aspect of Poe’s story (save the colored rooms, unwisely not utilized for the titular masque) handily covered, and with a lot less dilly-dallying around with dull heroes, unrelated subplots, and the finer points of Satanic philosophy. Once again, the case for stretching a finely-tuned and elegantly concise little fable into a 90-minute narrative film is a difficult one to make. Even with the inimitable watchability of Price and the added artistic heft of Beaumont and Roeg, one is never entirely unaware that this concept has been stretched a bit thin.

But fuck, you got something better to do with your time than watch Vincent Price mince around about Satan in front of handsomely framed, vaguely surreal sets? No, you absolutely do not. No less an authority on the subject than Corman himself has numbered it amongst his favorites of his own films, and that’s pretty high praise coming from a guy with a filmography as extensive as his. Characteristically practical producer Samuel Arkoff, grumbling about its lower-than-expected box office, suggested that the film was too “arty-farty” and not scary enough, and that might be a valid criticism. There’s probably no justification for making a film version of Masque of the Red Death in the first place, but since they were going to do it anyway, producing something that could be described with any variety of “arty” is probably something close to a miracle. Very few films with the “based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe” credit justify their existence; this one, at least, does enough to justify having watched it.

* I actually realized in the editing process that I intended to write Steven de Souza, but actually this is much funnier so I’m gonna let it stand.

** But probably still most popularly known --to her obvious irritation-- as the one-time girlfriend and muse of Paul McCartney, whose first gig with the Beatles, attended by Asher, occurred during filming.

*** It’s either this or the same year’s NOTHING BUT THE BEST

**** Chegwidden, by the way, dances so deftly around Roeg’s visuals that this sequence could fit into any of his later films as a director. It’s genuinely amazing that an editor --and especially an editor in 1964!-- seemed to so intuitively grasp what Roeg was going for long before he was a known auteur with a recognizable style. I’ve never seen any of the other films she edited, so I’m not sure if she was an unrecognized visual wunderkind in her own right, or if she collaborated closely with Roeg, or if his cinematography is so distinctive that it naturally bends to this kind of editing, or what.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	We Defy You To Stare Into This Face. Done and Done.
TITLE ACCURACY	Sure, that title happens
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yup, both of 1942's Masque of the Red Death and 1945's Hop-Frog.
SEQUEL?	None, although you could probably count is as part of the eight Poe adaptations Corman made between 1960-1965.
REMAKE?	Yes, actually, there is another Corman-produced movie of the same name from 1989, starring Adrian Paul of all people.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Corman and Price are American, but it was shot in England with an English crew, for tax reasons.
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Satanism, Body horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, although we know for a fact that Paul McCartney visited the set.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Vincent Price, Roger Corman, Edgar Allan Poe
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	I mean, Prospero kindaps the poor girl and keeps her locked up in his castle, and kind of forces her to be his date, although I don't think he does anything physically untowards. But certainly extremely ungentlemanly behavior. Also the dream sequence with Hazel Court seems to have taken on a sexual element to some commentators, but I'm kinda scratching my head on that one. It's maybe some kind of rape metaphor? But if so I don't really get it.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Falcon straight up kills a lady. Tragic, but if a three pound bird can kill you, I dunno lady, how badly did you really want to live?
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No, nothing like that
POSSESSION?	Surprisingly no
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Actually it just seems like Prospero and his lady, but they got, like, a shrine and everything, I think it counts.
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Nah
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don't assume Satanism will save you from bacteria.

B- , anyway