New Project which Turned Out to be Eerily Timely
A short while ago (around the beginning of March) I had a dream that featured a scene from Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death" in a surreal/expressionist style. I liked the concept and design possibilities, and so started thinking about it as my next project after "Mysterious Barricades" was eventually finished. Little did I know how weirdly appropriate this story would become.
It's an extremely short story (less than five pages), full of (mostly) visual writing and descriptions of the characters, the abbey and it's distinctive seven coloured rooms. It also contains a lot of aural imagery; music, the great clock, etc. Upon reading it, though, I was most struck by Poe's depiction of Prospero, who is not the evil, sadistic figure that some filmmakers have made him out to be. Instead, in Poe's words, he is "dauntless and sagacious", a man with "eccentric yet august taste". One gets the sense that he brings in the thousand friends to truly attempt to save them. One can't help but draw parallels with Poe's own life. His mother, foster mother and wife all died of tuberculosis, a "red death" in itself. His portrayal of Prospero could seem to be a way of dealing with own feelings of total helplessness in the face of the deadly disease that claimed those he loved. Prospero is in charge (perhaps even megalomaniacal), and is a man of action, rather like Poe would have liked to be, I'm sure. But even Prospero is no match for the contagion that is both fatal and hideous, and the Red Death makes it through his best defenses. Poe's pessimistic fatalism triumphs in the end; one senses that from the beginning he knew that Prospero's battle against the plague, like his own, was futile, but the prince had to try. All of this gives the story (in my mind) more poignancy than horror. I fervently hope this story doesn't turn out to be prophetic, writing as I am in the midst of a raging global pandemic hanging over each and every one of us like a pall. Really, who knows what tomorrow will bring? It seems like a new Age of Poe.
******
The film in all its expressionistically surreal glory will hopefully be completed within the next month or so, and I'll post about it here. I'll leave you with a version of Prospero's "castellated abbey".
It's an extremely short story (less than five pages), full of (mostly) visual writing and descriptions of the characters, the abbey and it's distinctive seven coloured rooms. It also contains a lot of aural imagery; music, the great clock, etc. Upon reading it, though, I was most struck by Poe's depiction of Prospero, who is not the evil, sadistic figure that some filmmakers have made him out to be. Instead, in Poe's words, he is "dauntless and sagacious", a man with "eccentric yet august taste". One gets the sense that he brings in the thousand friends to truly attempt to save them. One can't help but draw parallels with Poe's own life. His mother, foster mother and wife all died of tuberculosis, a "red death" in itself. His portrayal of Prospero could seem to be a way of dealing with own feelings of total helplessness in the face of the deadly disease that claimed those he loved. Prospero is in charge (perhaps even megalomaniacal), and is a man of action, rather like Poe would have liked to be, I'm sure. But even Prospero is no match for the contagion that is both fatal and hideous, and the Red Death makes it through his best defenses. Poe's pessimistic fatalism triumphs in the end; one senses that from the beginning he knew that Prospero's battle against the plague, like his own, was futile, but the prince had to try. All of this gives the story (in my mind) more poignancy than horror. I fervently hope this story doesn't turn out to be prophetic, writing as I am in the midst of a raging global pandemic hanging over each and every one of us like a pall. Really, who knows what tomorrow will bring? It seems like a new Age of Poe.
******
The film in all its expressionistically surreal glory will hopefully be completed within the next month or so, and I'll post about it here. I'll leave you with a version of Prospero's "castellated abbey".
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