The Poe Series, dominated by the possessed characterizations of Vincent Price, became ritualistic danses macabres paralleling the cancerous decadence of willful sixties excess.
--John H. Dorr, American Directors (McGraw Hill, 1983)
There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.
--Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death.
In Corman's film the wealthy hide in Prospero's castle as the red death ravages the villages of the peasants. The film is undeniably creepy in many ways, even to the casting of an eight-year-old girl (Verina Greenlaw) as a ballet-dancing dwarf, her voice dubbed by an adult. Prospero has made a deal with the devil, helped by the slutty Hazel Court and the virginal Jane Asher, who pledges allegiance to Prosero in order to rescue her lover. The castle is closed, even to the wealthy, to keep out the red death. One noble pleads with Prospero to be allowed in, telling him that he will give him his wife "to do with as you please," to which Prospero replies "I have already had that doubtful pleasure."
There is no doubt this is a Corman film, with his common themes of moralism and fatalism, but as usual he is helped by his regular collaborators --production design by Daniel Haller and screenplay by Charles Beaumont and R.Wright Campbell -- and the addition of English cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, an expert in widescreen and color who would go on to direct his own idiosyncratic films. Corman also shot in England both for tax breaks and to effectively use the sets left over from Becket.
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