Price + Poe + Corman = colorfully frightful fun

Roger Corman, known by the late 1950s shlock filmmaker extraordinaire for his low-budget horror movies of that era, upped his game considerably with the turn of that decade. Between 1960 and 1964, he churned out his most consistently well-regarded pictures, better known as the Poe cycle: a series of eight horror films based on Edgar Allan Poe's works, distributed by American International Pictures and known for their gothic atmosphere, elaborate set designs, and frequent collaboration with actor Vincent Price. 

The series began with House of Usher (1960), establishing the style with Price as Roderick Usher, followed by The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), adding to Poe's original story. The Premature Burial (1962) starred Ray Milland, while Tales of Terror (1962) presented an anthology of three Poe tales featuring Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. The Raven (1963) took a comedic turn with Price, Lorre, Boris Karloff, and a young Jack Nicholson. The Haunted Palace (1963), though marketed as part of the Poe Cycle, was actually based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward with some Poe elements. The Masque of the Red Death (1964) is highly regarded, blending Poe's titular tale with Hop-Frog, while the final entry, The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), explores a man's obsession with his deceased wife and her potential return from the grave.

It’s not easy adapting Poe’s work for the big screen. The author’s macabre tales are often introspective, moody, atmospheric stories that relay the inner thoughts and emotions of a character and lack action, realistic characters, and dialogue. They’re also usually quite short, lacking enough back story, character development, and subplots to sustain an 80-minute-plus film. One advantage to adapting Poe, however, which also attracted Corman: they are in the public domain and free to tinker with.

Despite low budgets, these films are admired for their atmospheric horror and creative set designs. All explore the repression of sexuality, the disintegration of personality, and the entry of an innocent character into a realm of decay and corruption, from which the innocent prevails. Most include some eerie dream sequence.

What’s the best film in Corman’s Poe cycle? Many cite The Masque of the Red Death (1964), which follows Prince Prospero, a cruel nobleman who worships Satan, as he hosts a decadent masquerade ball in his castle to avoid the plague ravaging medieval Europe. The story unfolds as Prospero becomes fixated on Francesca, an innocent peasant girl, and brings her, along with her lover Gino and her father Ludovico, to the castle. As the ball progresses, mysterious figures appear, including a figure in a red cloak symbolizing the Red Death itself, leading to a darkly poetic conclusion about mortality and morality.

 

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Masque of the Red Death, conducted earlier in October, click here.

Masque of the Red Death is one of the first Hollywood films to explore satanism, preceded earlier by Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim. This film had the largest budget (an estimated $1 million) of all the Corman-Poe movies as well as the highest production values and most impressive sets. Much of the elaborate castle scenery was repurposed from the film version of Becket, which had been filmed earlier that year and earned a BAFTA for its set design, along with an Academy Award nomination for Best Art Direction. This movie also marked one of the earliest color films shot by cinematographer Nicolas Roeg. Masque of the Red Death is widely considered the best of the Corman-Poe films, earning a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest mark among the eight films in this cycle.

This film is replete with themes, including man’s obsession with sex and death, as exemplified by Prospero’s affection for Juliana and Francesca, and his determination to keep the Red Death plague outside his castle walls. Man’s bestiality, hedonistic tendencies, and animal instincts are also explored: recall the mentions of dogs and hounds; the man in the ape suit; Prospero commanding subjects to behave like a pig, worm, or other creature; and the bird-killing falcon.

This film further ruminates on touching as an act of desecration, as exemplified by the white rose that is turned red; the menacing of the prone Juliana by weapons of torture; the bloody hands of the sick, terminal party guests clutching out for Prospero at the end during the dance of death sequence; the poisoned dagger sequence; the satanic cross branding; and the falcon’s attack on Juliana.

The ultimate takeaway is arguably not good vs. evil, however; it’s that death plays no favorites between the two—by the film’s conclusion, only six random survivors are left, and good and evil characters alike have perished.

Colors become an obvious motif. Consider the use of red: the white rose turned red, the two redheaded women, and the incarnation of the Red Death plague itself in the form of a mysterious figure clad in crimson whose victims bleed as a symptom of the disease. In the original tale by Poe, there were seven color-coded rooms in the abbey, arranged from east to west, which are thought to symbolize the journey of life. Each room reflects a stage: blue for birth, purple for youth, green for adolescence, orange for adulthood, white for old age, violet for approaching death, and black/scarlet for death itself. In this adaptation, however, there are only four colored rooms: yellow, purple, white, and black. What they stand for is open to interpretation, although the black chamber is associated with Satan and death.

Some have theorized that the colors of the cloaked figures signify different diseases, with red being anthrax, white for tuberculosis, yellow for yellow fever, orange for scurvy, blue for cholera, violet for influenza, and black for the bubonic plague.

Look more closely and you can spot some subtle Freudian symbolism, as demonstrated by the running of Francesca down an eerie corridor. In an interview, Corman said: “That is very symbolic and extremely important. To me, the corridor is, simply, a vagina. You must set up two things in the movement down the corridor; I think it is a child’s approach to sex, in which he knows there is something great and wonderful out there but that child has also been told by the parents, ‘That’s bad—don’t do that!’ So to recreate that feeling—because I think the sense of horror does have elements of sexuality within it—you go down the corridor, and the audience must be saying to the person—identifying with the person—‘Don’t take another step. Get out of there right now! Don’t open that door! At the same time, the audience must be saying, ‘Open the door. We must see what is behind that door!’ If you set that sequence up correctly, it never fails to generate an emotional response.”

Similar works

• Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, which also features a dance of death and a mysterious robed figure that stalks and even plays chess with the characters
• Witchfinder General, also starring Price, featuring an utterly evil, merciless torturer who has women burned at the stake for supposed witchcraft
• Poe’s short story Hop-Frog, a revenge tale about a dwarf that Corman chose to weave into this tale to pad out the story
• The story Torture of Hope by Auguste Villiers de I’Isle-Adam, from which a sub-plot in Masque is taken.