The Masque of the Red Death (1964) on Netflix
Prince Prospero, a Satanist, rules a village in medieval Italy. When the Red Death plague reaches it, he orders the village burned and takes Gino, Ludovico and Francesca to his castle.
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- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.9/1018,625 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
The plague called the Red Death is sweeping through medieval Italy. In the village he rules, Prince Prospero, a Satanist, is confronted by the starving villagers Gino and Ludovico. An old woman there has died of the disease. Prospero gives the order to burn the village and takes Gino, Ludovico and Francesca to his castle; Francesca is Ludovico's daughter and Gino's lover. The local nobility are called to the castle.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- British censors removed part of a scene where Hazel Court's character asks the devil to send her a demon; the BBC wrongly claimed in a documentary that the cut scene showed her imagining demonic figures attacking her on a slab.
- Roger Corman announced the film in 1961 from a script by Charles Beaumont, but kept delaying it because he felt it was too close to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and feared being accused of stealing from Bergman.
- Corman liked Charles Beaumont's early draft, which made Prince Prospero a Satanist, but Beaumont was too ill to come to England to rewrite it, so Corman brought R. Wright Campbell, who added the dwarf subplot from Poe's "Hop-Frog".
- When the film came out, producer Alex Gordon sued AIP, claiming it was based on a script he had written, but he lost his case in court.
- Many of the castle sets at Elstree Studios were left over from Becket, which had won a BAFTA award for its sets and an Oscar nomination for art direction.
- Daniel Haller worked as production designer without credit so the film would qualify as British, and George Willoughby was credited as producer even though Corman was the actual producer.
- Corman shot the film's final masked-ball "masque" sequence in a single day, saying that would have been enough time in Hollywood but that English crews were too slow.
- The different cuts the film was given by British and US censors were not restored until the 2018 restoration by Martin Scorsese's film foundation.
