Last year’s Vincentennial, the citywide celebration of the 100th anniversary of our man Vincent Price’s birth, left some of us hungry for more. Certainly, the festival was a multifarious look at Price’s talents—his serious-thespian chops, his evolving horror-icon status, even his yen for gourmet cooking and art collecting. But that extended intro, satisfying though it was, only served as an invite to the autodidact keen on delving deeper into Price’s legacy.
One of the highlights of the fest was a screening of Price’s 1964 horror feature Tomb of Ligeia, with legendary B-movie director Roger Corman in attendance. Ligeia is noted as one of no less than seven Price/Corman collaborations based on stories by Poe, all produced between 1960 and 1964. It offered Price in a truly funky pair of sunglasses, officiating a fight between his wife and his dead wife, to borrow a phrase from Robyn Hitchcock.
Many aficionados of the series of literary-ish films will tell you that 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death is their favorite. Price is at the height of his creepy/classy powers. Violence and lust (together, naturally) seem to lurk behind every door. Corman indulges a surprise talent for expressionistic filmmaking, and his cinematographer, none other than Nicolas “Man Who Fell to Earth” Roeg, captures each scene in a soft welter of 35-mm magic. It’s just stunning.
Toxic Cinema, an informal series of horror screenings sponsored by the ConTamination Horror, Pop Culture, and Sci-Fi Convention (held each June), will show Masque at Culpepper’s in Creve Coeur tomorrow. It’s a cool opportunity to see just how well this one has aged, nearly 50 years after its release.
At the film’s beginning a mysterious, hooded figure garbed completely in scarlet robes hands a white rose to an old woman. As she takes it, it turns blood- red. She then shuffles back to her village, where it becomes clear that the rose is a symbol of plague—she comes down with the “Red Death,” a highly contagious and fatal disease that begins, with her death, to ravage the countryside.
Price, as Prince Prospero, is a sadistic monster who openly worships the devil and delights in hosting lavish, decadent shindigs at which he comes up with ever-more-creative ways to humiliate his guests (and partakes in some medieval wife-swapping, too). He fears nothing—nothing but the Red Death.
(Other stars include the flame-haired Jane Asher, perhaps best known for being a onetime fiancee of Paul McCartney, and Corman favorite Hazel Court.)
Many are familiar with the Poe story, and the spine of the plot is unchanged. Prospero gets wind of the pestilence, and barricades a throng of nobles within his castle, promising them safety if they’ll just wait it out for a few months. Nobody gets in, and nobody gets out. This is no austere bunker, though; the prince turns the castle into a nonstop Satanic rave, with revels ranging from the saucy to the fatal.
Price gets to say the best lines. Prospero leads the fair Francesca (Asher), whom he has seized bodily and tarted-up for his amusement, to a room in his castle. “My father imprisoned a friend of his in this room for three years,” he tells her. “When he was released he could never again bear to look at the sun, or even a daffodil.” Price’s sinister, condescending delivery is delicious as ever.
Later, the evil noble tells his pulchritudinous peasant plaything, “I do not want to hurt you, my dear, can’t you understand? I want to help save your soul so you can join me in the glories of hell. The way is not easy, I know, but I will take you by the hand and lead you through the cruel light into the velvet darkness.”
This sort of breathless dialogue, depending on how much you love the horror genre, will strike you as either wicked-cool, campy-silly, or both.
Much of it comes courtesy of co-screenwriter/adapter Charles Beaumont, the writer who penned some of the most memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Poe’s vision of a series of rooms in Prospero’s castle decorated in monochrome—a white room yielding to a yellow room yielding to a purple room, and so on, is recreated vividly and magically in Corman’s film. The final room, black suffused with red—the colors of Old Scratch—is appropriately forbidding, and a simply swell place for a buxom maid (Court) to set a spell, cast a spell, and maybe brand the image of an inverted cross on her cleavage, all of which she does.
Near the film’s end, Death reads his Tarot cards for a child in the middle of the woods. It’s a riveting nonsequitur, that, in its expressionistic oddity, serves to bookend the film with a second scene of sylvan occultism and the corruption of the innocent. That head-to-toe scarlet get-up that Death wears; the child giggling at the gravity of her Tarot cards; the randomness of it all: it lingers.
However, with the passing of Price, the world also lost that cinematic current that mingled his elegance with an old-fashioned sense of gothic doom. Think James Mason in Salem’s Lot, or Christopher Lee as Dracula. It’s a vibe that has simply gone extinct in horror movies. These days, it needs to bleed to lead, and there is little to no gore to be found in Masque.
Another of the genre’s bygone triumphs: the film’s wicked-cool poster, depicting devil-worshipers writing in agony just so, to comprise Price’s character’s face, a la Arcimboldo. The original source story by Poe is quite short, and less stiff and formal than a lot of Poe’s other prose. Check it out here.
The Masque of the Red Death screens at Culpepper's Creve Coeur location (12316 Olive) on Thursday, September 27 at 7 p.m. Admission is $3. For more information, call 314-469-1888, or visit the Facebook event page.
