foster mother Frances Allan. But it is also clearly related to the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, which decimated Europe in the 14th century. Treating the plague as a symbol, and with an approach closer to that of a prose poem, it’s Poe’s marriage of the grotesque and the poetic that has garnered his short story “The Masque of the Red Death” such wide, lasting appeal. Originally published in 1842 in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, “The
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Masque of the Red Death” is set in medieval Europe and revolves around Prince Pros- pero’s attempts to evade the titular epidemic, which is killing off his subjects. He gath- ers his fellow aristocrats behind the walls of his castle and throws a masquerade party. But one guest, wearing a funereal robe and garbed as a victim of the disease, arrives to spoil the merriment – moving through a sequence of seven rooms in the castle, each furnished in a different colour. When Prospero eventually confronts the imposter in the Black Room – bathed in red light and furnished with a huge ebony clock – he literally meets Death, and the party-goers discover the costume “untenanted by any tangible form.” Prospero is forced to realize his social position and fortune (symbolized by his name) don’t make him any more immune to death than the peasants dying around his walls. The climax makes it clear: “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” The plague of the Red Death is an allegorical presentation of physicality and mor- tality, symbolized by the recurring theme of crimson blood and emphasis on the colour red. Poe’s treatment of the disease does not mitigate it with sentimen- tality or allusions to the afterlife but confronts us with death in all its corpo- real repulsiveness. Resistance is futile and does not alter the fact
he Red Death – Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional disease that causes “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores,” leading to death within half an hour – may have been inspired by tuberculosis, which took his beloved wife Virginia, as well as his mother Eliza, brother William and
reverberated throughout Prospero’s castle by the clock’s memento mori: the pas- sage of time equals death. This is also evident in the stranger’s passage through the coloured rooms, from the eastern to the western wing (following the sun’s path), which ends in the one black as night. Art, for Edgar Allan Poe, was the only successful means of attaining a sort of
immortality, and beauty was his only “weapon” against death. As H.P. Lovecraft noted, Poe’s elevation of disease, perversity and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was infinitely far-reaching in effect via its influence on French poet/art critic/essayist Charles Baudelaire. With its surreal and highly symbolic imagery, “The Masque of the Red Death” was one of the key stories to influence the Decadents and the Symbolists. Horror fans know, of course, that the tale’s influence goes beyond those particular art movements. The story’s greatest cinematic adaptation – Roger Corman’s The Masque of
the Red Death (1964) – certainly owes a lot to Poe’s European shadow, and to this day remains one of the best Gothic horrors ever filmed. The screenplay by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell adds Baudelairian Satanism into the brew, while the surreal Gothic visuals (thanks to production design by Daniel Haller and luscious colour cinematography by Nicolas Roeg) are like a combination of Hammer and Ingmar Bergman (especially The Seventh Seal, 1957). Vincent Price as Prince Prospero, in his greatest Poe-related role, has numerous opportunities for gleefully witty, villainous monologues, as well. Other memorable references to the story include the titular character disguised
as the Red Death at the ball in Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera (and its 1925 screen version with Lon Chaney). Still more modern echoes exist in Stephen King’s The Shining, Dan Simmons’s The Terror and Chuck Palah- niuk’s Haunted – all of which contain several quotations from, and allusions to, the story. In addition, the tale has had more adaptations (comic books, short films, animations, audio readings by the likes of Christopher Lee and Basil Rathbone, etc.) and provided content to more goth, death and black metal groups and songs than this space allows to mention. “The Masque of the Red Death” simply keeps on spreading. DEJAN OGNJANOVIC
RM70
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