Synopsis
The Masque of the Red Death (1964) is a British-American horror film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Roger Corman and adapted from two Edgar Allan Poe stories. Vincent Price plays Prince Prospero — a Satanist nobleman who seals his castle against a plague sweeping the countryside and throws a masked ball that turns medieval Italy into something closer to a private hell.
Prospero has locked the local aristocracy inside with him and locked the dying peasants out. Among the captives is a young village woman named Francesca — played by Jane Asher — whose father and fiancé Prospero takes as sport. She's the one person in the castle who won't perform fear for him, and that becomes the film's central tension. Nigel Green and Patrick Magee fill out the court as men who have long since traded their consciences for proximity to power.
Corman shot at Shepperton Studios in England, and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg — years before his own directing career — gives the film a visual weight unusual for the cycle: deep reds and golds, shadows that pool in the wrong corners, interiors that look genuinely oppressive. The ending follows Poe's logic without softening it. For a studio horror film of its era, the nihilism is real. Watch The Masque of the Red Death (1964) online on iFILM.
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