THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*


Like most of Roger Corman's adaptations of Poe, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH is obliged to build up the author's rather schematic plot with a number of subplots. The original story is concerned with Poe's most prevalent theme; that of doleful death overcoming all of the beauties and felicities of life. There is, however, a slight element of class warfare in the way that Prince Prospero attempts to remove himself and his aristocratic kindred from the misfortunes of the hoi polloi, and scripters Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell logically build up that element. However, I'm more impressed by the fact that they also show their Prospero-- in this Vincent Price iteration, a believer in Satanism-- treating his fellow aristocrats as badly as he treats the lower classes. When he denies two aristocrats entry to his castle, he's at least partly motivated by the possibility that they may carry the Red Death. But he also takes sadistic pleasure in informing the male aristocrat that he Prospero has already slept with the man's wife,

The Satanism alteration strengthens the plot's narrative momentum. Even viewers who have no familiarity with the Poe story will probably expect that somehow Prospero's sanctum will be violated and that he will fall victim to the plague. But Poe's Prospero is merely a selfish, flamboyant aristocrat, while Prospero the Satanist is more nuanced. He's first seen tyrannizing over his subjects, abducting virginal young Francesca for his pleasure and imprisoning the young woman's father and her lover Gino. Yet unlike some of Price's other tyrant-figures, Prospero doesn't immediately take advantage of Francesca. Indeed, he tries to convince her of the superiority of his Satanist faith, describing how Satan is the god of "reality." In one line, he almost sounds like Melville's Captain Ahab, seeking to "strike through the mask" of outer appearances:

Somewhere in the human mind, my dear Francesca, lies the key to our existence. My ancestors tried to find it. And to open the door that separates us from our Creator.

It seems obvious that what Prospero really wants is both a confidante and a convert by the way he earnestly seeks to persuade her to renounce her naive Christian faith. Strangely, though in one line he credits his ancestors with seeking "the key to existence," in another he excoriates his ancestors for being Christians who tortured hundreds of victims in order to save their souls. I'm not sure Beaumont and Campbell really had Prospero's ancestry worked out, but at the very least, they were aware that the Christian hegemony was based on violence and death. Prospero has decided that because some of his ancestors were deluded, he's going to pursue Satan as a guide to reality, and he proselytizes to Francesca in the same way that Sade's libertines repetitively seek to persuade their audiences. He fails in his Sadean scheme to force Francesca's boyfriend and father to fight one another, but succeeds to some extent by forcing them to court death in order that each may save the other. Yet, even after Prospero kills Francesca's father and casts Gino out of the castle in order to be killed by the plague, Francesca seems not entirely averse to the saturnine aristocrat at the film's end. No sympathies are voiced, but it's as if Prospero did partly convert her, not with his sophistry but out of his sheer neediness, born of his soul's emptiness.

While the Satanist content improves the character of Prospero, it's rather a waste of time when applied to the original character of Juliana, the prince's consort, essentially cast aside in favor of Francesca. While Prospero believes that his allegiance to Satan will insure that the Red Death never broaches his castle, Juliana's motive for pledging herself  to be Satan's bride seems to have no real motivation. She suffers a bloody death attributed to the Dark Lord, and it may be that director Corman simply wanted a little more gore in the middle of the film to keep audiences interested.

Somewhat more successful is a subplot derived from Poe's "Hop-Frog." In that story, a dwarf revenges himself upon a king and his courtiers by tricking them into dressing up like apes and then immolating them. The film changes the dwarf's name to "Hop-Toad" and only has him kill off one enemy in this manner, but it's at least a serviceable gore-piece.

The conclusion is much more metaphysical than the Poe original. As in the short story, Prospero meets the specter of the Red Death, but this death-figure is a little more moral than Poe's. Earlier Death is seen rendering minor aid to good-guy Gino, and Death allows Francesca and a few others to escape the fate meted out to countless others. But far more significantly, Death also destroys Prospero's Satanic beliefs before slaying the prince, telling him:

Each man creates his own God for himself, his own Heaven, his own Hell.

If MASQUE had centered entirely upon Prospero's subversive philosophy, even if it was still for the purpose of subverting the subversion, I think I would have rated its mythicity higher. But the subplots, while necessary structurally, distract from the symbolic discourse.