The Masque of the Red Death [M]

A European prince terrorises a small village in his country; plucking rebels from the slums and torturing them for entertainment and taking their pure and God-fearing women to the castle to corrupt them for his own sordid and Satanic plans. Whilst he considers himself master of fear and corruption, when a plague known as the ‘Red Death’ strikes, he wholes up in his castle with many corrupted and grotesque ‘friends’. But no one is beyond the reaches of Death, even those who make a pact with the Devil. 

Probably the most decadent gothic cult adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling tale, Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death is a film that is both enthralling and anticlimactic. Oversaturated with a decadent gothic aesthetic it’s physically a very captivating film and its cult status stems from its metaphoric and confronting scenes that depict sin, corruption, and particularly the loss of innocence. 

There are a lot of different meanings that you can take away from this movie, just as there are multiple ways in which you can interpret Poe’s original tale of terror. 

The combination of political, tyrannical, and religious angles bring about the ‘complexity’ of the film, whilst its overdramatic script and performances create that decadent gothic aesthetic, which is so thick that you could suffocate. It’s like drowning, or being smothered in velvet. 

Admittedly the film’s heavy metaphoric edge and its scenes that harbour a plethora of different meanings is what makes it so captivating however, the over-heavy use of gothic decadence is what brings it down. The castle as a sight of grotesque corruption, greed, and the loss of innocence is overly lit and extravagantly decorated with colour and brightness that doesn’t really fit with the timbre of the tale. It almost camps it up much like the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast, which just isn’t cool. It’s pretty, but not really in-keeping with the tone of the whole thing. 

Then we have the laboured performances from supporting characters. A wooden door has more animation and flexibility than the performance of David Weston as the valiant lover doomed to torture and Hazel Court’s performance as the jealous and obsessed ‘bride of Satan’ is nothing but heavily breathy lines spoken with a deadpan expression that could rival a stone statue. Whilst brutal violence and really bad blood effects help to break up this really heavy and suffocating atmosphere, the film ultimately gets really bogged down in that heavy decadent aesthetic that makes the Gothic so great. It’s very unbalanced and, as a result, it amounts to a filmic experience akin to trying to backstroke through molasses. 

Starring Vincent Price, who is very good as the tyrannical prince, Jane Asher, Nigel Green, Patrick Magee, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Robert Brown, Verina Greenlaw, and Skip Martin, The Masque of the Red Death is a movie that I liked on one level, but then disliked on another. Whilst I love the multitude of meanings that can be taken from it, which is very close to the original text if memory serves me right, it was oversaturated with the gothic aesthetic so much so that even I felt slightly disgusted by it. 

Filled with action, greed, corruption, violence, drama, and suspense, it is both a hit and a miss: a solid criterion for a cult movie.