Roger Corman on making The Masque of the Red Death
The 94-year-old legend of genre cinema remembers the production of his classic Edgar Allan Poe adaptation starring Vincent Price.
The tale of a deadly plague sweeping through the middle ages, The Masque of the Red Death (1964) is the most celebrated of the six adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories that director Roger Corman made with Vincent Price in the early 1960s.
Starring Price as the diabolical Prince Prospero, who holes up in his castle with invited guests as pestilence closes in on them, Corman’s gothic classic has recently been restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation and released on Blu-ray.
At the Glasgow Film Festival this year, Corman – the legendary producer and director who is about to turn 95 – talked to programmer Anna Bogutskaya about his memories of making The Masque of the Red Death and the creative decisions that led to it becoming one of the defining horror films of its era.