THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH: Price summons all his authority to confront himself in the film’s memorable final reel.


them against one another, and poison them. He succeeds, but the tables are finally turned when he is distracted long enough from making a pot of soup for the cat to tip the open poison bottle into it. Perhaps it was here that Matheson’s idea originated, along with the best choice to direct it.) The film didn’t lose money, as is often reported—as Matheson says, AIP never spent enough money on a picture to lose any—but it didn’t fare as well com- mercially as THE RAVEN. No one knows why, but the theatrical trailer (2m 32s), in retrospect, is sur- prisingly adult and lascivious, with lots of attention paid to the “bountifully blessed” Joyce Jameson and Miss Beverly Hills; one can easily imagine parents of that era seeing it and refusing to let their children attend. Matheson also talks at length about the pro- posed follow-up, SWEETHEARTS AND HORRORS, which would have regrouped the whole cast and added Tallulah Bankhead; it sounds like one of the greatest films never made, and Matheson allows that it was never made simply because the cast started to die off. An Iowa PBS wrap-around with Price and a generous stills and poster gallery are also included.


Arrow’s stand-alone disc, which we were unable to review at first-hand before deadline, includes— in addition to the Matheson interview and trailer—a new audio commentary by David Del Valle; an ar- chival on-camera interview with Vincent Price en- titled “My Life and Crimes” (51m 40s); “Whispering in Distant Chambers: The Nightfall of Jacques Tourneur,” a specially-commissioned video essay by David Cairns, which charts the career of director Tourneur (16m 57s); and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Chris


Fujiwara, author of JACQUES TOURNEUR: THE CINEMA OF NIGHTFALL.


THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 1964, Scream Factory, 88m 47s


At present, Scream Factory’s THE VINCENT PRICE COLLECTION remains the only source for


Roger Corman’s personal favorite among his Poe films on Blu-ray. In perhaps the most truly Sadean role of his career, Vincent Price stars as Prince Prospero, a Satanist who reigns over the peasantry of a poor Catanian village from his fortress-like castle. When the village is best by a plague known as the Red Death, Prospero gives shelter not only to other men and women of money and influence, but to three Christian villagers: Gino (David Weston), his virginal fiancée Francesca (Jane Asher) and her father Ludovico (Nigel Green)—with the intention of corrupting the lustrously red-haired Francesca. When Prospero decides to host a masked ball, the Red Death himself joins the guests and confronts Prospero, who presumes the Devil’s protection, with his own vulnerability. Hazel Court, in her last real screen role, is Prospero’s mistress Giuliana, who succumbs to Satan as a means of holding onto her sire. Filmed in England at Elstree Studios, where the production was able to take advantage of a govern- ment tax subsidy and a wealth of period set flats left over from BECKETT, MASQUE (mostly written by R. Wright Campbell, revising a first draft script by Charles Beaumont, which also incorporates ideas from Poe’s story “Hop-Frog”) is the most colorful and opulent, and perhaps the most psychologically resonant, of the Poe films. The 2.35:1 1080p


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