The Masque of the Red Death

I expect there are many whom despise this film simply for not directly following the source material, I however couldn't disagree more. The choices this film makes to extend the running time into a full length feature are truly magnificent and well thought out. As far as movies based on poe go this is undeniably the best, which should say a lot as some of the actors within the film have actually been in multiple poe adaptations. For starters Patrick McGee, who in my opinion is one of the most underrated actors of all time, was also in lucio fulci's adaptation of "The Black Cat", Hazel Court, who is similarly underrated, was in both 1962's "The Premature Burial", and 1963's "The Raven". Of course there's also Vincent Price who was in 1960's "The House of Usher", 1961's "The Pit and the Pendulum", 1962's "Tales of Terror", 196's "The Raven", 1963's "The Haunted Palace", 1964's "The Tomb of Ligeia", 1965's "War Gods of The Deep", did voice over work for 1968's "Spirits of the dead", 1968's "The Conqueror Worm", 1969's "The Oblong Box", and hosted the TV special in 1970 "An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe", and not even counting all the Poe short stories he was in like Annabelle Lee. Even after seeing all of those films though, I can definitely say that Masque of the Red Death is the best of all the the poe movies, or at least the best one I've seen thus far and I've seen a lot of those, 15 to be exact, I'm currently doing a retrospective on poe adaptations that I'll have uploaded to YouTube every day in October this year if everything goes according to plan. Why, you may be asking, did I say this is the best of these adaptations I've seen thus far, well I won't spoil it for you but I'll do my best sell you on the idea anyway. This film follows Prince Prospero, Played Vincent Price, and his monstrous ways of tormenting the people beneath him. However a mysterious man in a red cloak starts a plague that rapidly spreads and rapidly kills those infected. His reason for doing so seems to be with purpose of killing Prince Prospero, but needless to say, it kills far more innocent people prior to infecting himself. Of course this parable brings to mind the religious beliefs many have that God's plan is ultimately good, even if many innocent lives are sacrificed along the way, and film doesn't ignore this parallel, in fact it seems to be intentional. In this adaption of the story, Prospero is made into a Satanist, not the more popular kind of today that is really just an atheistic religion, but the child sacrificing kind of old, so think less satanic temple, and, more order of the nine angles. The film uses him as a framing device to make him seem almost indistinguishable from a fundamentalist Christian for example, and the main points he deviates are to point out the hypocrisy of Christians that would torture people the same way he does and claim moral superiority. While I'm not going to spoil the ending, let's just say the man in the cloak doesn't actually punish worshiping Satan, as what would been more traditional of films at the time, remember Rosemary's Baby came out 4 years later and was significantly more preachy than this film was an even subtly claimed that people who rejected organized religion were actually just Satanists, again I'm referring to the old school type. Honestly though, this film is so much better that Rosemary's Baby fundamentally, especially since it doesn't claim that any particular religion is especially accurate, leaving it up to more interpretation and effectively making it age better. All and all this film is a masterpiece of cinema, and Roger Corman's magnum opus, as even he has said before, as he consistently wants it to be a film he's remembered for in interviews, if you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor, and correct that mistake ASAP.