The Masque of the Red Death

The best of Corman's eight Poe films, shot in England on sets left standing from Becket, with Nicolas Roeg behind the camera five years before he directed anything.

Prince Prospero seals himself and the local nobility in a castle while plague takes the countryside, and holds a masque.

Roeg's colour is the reason: a suite of rooms each lit in a single saturated hue, which Corman had wanted since the first Poe picture and never had the budget for.

Vincent Price plays Prospero as a genuine Satanist rather than a decadent, and the film takes his theology seriously enough to argue with it.

Corman made these on roughly three-week schedules and this one had five, which is visible in every frame.

The ending grafts on a second Poe story and works anyway.