Blimey what have you come as?

THE “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade.

So begins Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 short story, filmed in 1964 by good old exploitation maven Roger Corman and starring the lurching glooming orotund king of Poe, Vincent Price. In his usual way of giving people a leg up the cinematographer was Nic Roeg, of Walkabout and Performance fame. Oh and Jane Asher’s in it.

It is fabulously lurid:

but now of course I’m off a Roeging: I was mad for Nic Roeg when I was mad for the artfilm elixir: now not so much. But he had his moments, as did Mick. This was one, Ned Kelly wasn’t.

ooh Matron, how decadent…..he isn’t half crap at acting though, innit? But James Fox is beautiful. We went to a fancy dress 40th the other week: glam sixties, ie James Bond was the theme, but I went in my green suit from Thailand via St Vinnie’s, as an East End villain: no one got it ;’you know like in Performance, I said and took all my clothes off singing Memo From Turner. Alright I didn’t.

The best fancy dress I ever saw was at a party in Highbury in 1985: a guy had a bloody shirt and his head all bandaged: what are you we all asked “I’m a working miner” he said, and we all laughed even though we were all, you know, up the miners. I even bought a badge. And a handkerchief.

~ by bettyslocombe on April 20, 2008.