Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #20 November 2015 | Page 53

Cinema Obscura - The Overlooked
Gems of Cinema

Masque of the red death (1964)
ByJeff Durkin
An old woman wanders a set-bound hillside,
collecting firework. She encounters a man dressed
in a hooded, red robe who gives her a rose and tells
her to return home, proclaiming that the ‘day of...
deliverance is at hand.’
So begins Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red
Death. Part of the Corman/American International
Pictures series of films based on Edgar Allen Poe’s
works, Masque of the Red Death stars Vincent Prince
as Prince Prospero, a man of calculating evil who
rules over a Medieval wasteland. While tormenting a
village of his vassals, Prospero discovers that the old

woman’s ‘deliverance’ is the Red Death, a disease that
causes one to bleed from the pores, dying in agony.
As the plague spreads across the countryside,
Prospero gathers the local nobility into the safety of
his castle. Of course, how safe can you be with a man
who worships the devil, likes to spout off about the
true nature of terror and occasionally murders people?
While the local 1% engages in frenzied
debauchery, Prospero tries to convince local villager
Francesca (the beautiful, but bland, Jane Asher) to
embrace evil. The gathering soon devolves into death

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