Years ago a friend who’s interested in the occult introduced me to Roger Corman’s 1964 film The Masque of the Red Death, starring the inevitable (and inevitably campy) Vincent Price. As luck would have it, someone has put it up on le Yewtybbe, so you can experience this garish Technicolor spectacle for free from the comfort and safety of your own home. This is worth seeing just to count how many different colors they can make wax candles out of . . .
I had already whipped out my copy of the Gold Bug and Other Tales of Mystery by Edgar Allan Poe - a childhood gift from my Uncle Tom and Aunt Joan (obviously a good choice - 300 years later I still have it!) - but now I had to reach for the slightly battered, red-bound gold-stamped The Works of Poe from the set of other red-bound gold-stamped books by classic authors published by Black’s back in the day.* In this book is Poe’s original short story, which is short on plot but big on Gothic atmosphere. The movie was based on a second Poe story, too: “Hop-Frog,” about a dwarf court jester bent on revenge.
So, you can read the original short story “Masque of the Red Death” at the Poe Museum’s website here.
And you can read “Hop-Frog” here at Poe Stories.
But my truly favorite pox-related story is “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle**,” the third of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s four “Legends of the Province House” in his Twice-Told Tales. (Read it here online at Hawthorne in Salem.) A monomaniacal beauty comes to live in colonial Boston, bringing with her a marvelously embroidered mantle of white satin. Well whoopsy-doo, Lady Eleanore turns out to be a smallpox carrier; hilarity ensues. This story includes my favorite speech in all Hawthorne:
“O Jervase Helwyse,” said the voice - and as it spoke it contorted itself, struggling to hide its blasted face - “look not now on the woman you once loved! The curse of Heaven hath stricken me, because I would not call man my brother, nor woman sister. I wrapped myself in PRIDE as in a MANTLE, and scorned the sympathies of nature; and therefore has nature made this wretched body the medium of a dreadful sympathy. You are avenged - they are all avenged - Nature is avenged - for I am Eleanore Rochcliffe!”
Something else tangentially appropriate: Lon Chaney’s silent version of Phantom of the Opera from 1929. The Phantom appears as the Red Death at the Opera ball (see gif above).
Otto Preminger’s Forever Amber of 1947 includes some great and gruesome scenes of London during the Black Plague of 1665-1666. Amber (played by Linda Darnell) has just married a jealous, elderly earl, but that doesn’t stop her from leaving her wedding reception to race to London to rescue her true love Baron Bruce Carlton (played by Cornel Wilde) from the horrible black plague. If it’s not one thing it’s another, from bribing a soldier to allow them refuge in an abandoned house to murdering the thieving nurse in self-defense, to lancing Carlton’s plague boil herself. I’m a big fan of the movie, not least for George Sanders as Charles II. Jessica Tandy shows up as Amber’s maid! And my beloved Alma Kruger (now remembered only by me, but who appeared as Rosalind Russell’s aunt by marriage in Craig’s Wife and as the Maria Theresa with Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette) appears as a wedding guest.
Years ago I tried reading Kathleen Winsor’s blockbuster best selling novel Forever Amber, on which the movie was based. But once it diverged from the plot of the film, I lost interest. You might have better luck. Certainly she found a very genteel way of suggesting that King Charles was doing it doggy-style in the window with his mistress!
Lastly there’s always my beloved Jezebel, the source of Bette Davis’s second Oscar. Yellow fever sweeps through 1852 New Orleans, claiming principled Henry Fonda as a victim. Will Bette scheme sufficiently to keep Hank’s Yankee wife (Margaret Lindsay) from accompanying him to the leper colony?
So that’s quite enough (or is it?) for the moment. Enjoy!
*Maybe two dozen of them, always on our family bookshelves, and it was a source of pride to my father to give them to me years and years ago. In this winter’s purge I got rid of over half of them, to my surprise - but without regret.
**Remember, a mantle goes around your shoulders. A mantel goes around your fireplace. Don’t get them mixed.