Whereas Edgar Allan Poe lived in nineteenth century America, his sense of literature was outlined by an older sensibility. Therefore like so lots of his tales, 1842’s “The Masque of the Purple Dying” is ready within the Center Ages the place a proud and smug Prince Prospero invitations a thousand “lighthearted” nobles of comparable opulence and energy right into a walled abbey. It’s there they intend to outlast the arrival of the Purple Dying (the bubonic plague in all however identify) in type and grandeur. Whereas the serfs are left to die outdoors, the nobles and their retinue will dine at an elaborate masquerade ball in ornately embellished rooms. Nonetheless, Dying himself is available in human type to stroll amongst them.
The story has been tailored a number of instances earlier than, most famously by Roger Corman in a kitschy however amusing Vincent Value film from 1964. That movie took the medieval setting of the brief story however not a lot else. It additionally added a little bit of Devil worship and an overt insinuation that Prospero’s shindig was devolving into an orgy.
We don’t know if the brand new movie will get so lurid, or even when it will likely be a interval piece, albeit the latest success of Robert Eggers’ pot-committed remake of Nosferatu suggests audiences are prepared for Gothic horror once more. Admittedly, calling the brand new Masque “revisionist” may tease it will likely be a modernization (just like how the story was tailored as only one episode in Mike Flanagan’s Fall of the Home of Usher on Netflix in 2023). Nonetheless, we expect it would imply one thing a bit extra enjoyable… corresponding to Prospero now being a princess who invitations essentially the most debauched into her fortress of frivolities.
The larger attraction to the story is how well timed it feels practically 200 years after it was written and about 700 years after it was set. The twenty first century simply lived by way of a worldwide pandemic that left tens of millions useless, and but a few of the leaders who fiddled whereas it worsened are newly rewarded with energy as they, in flip, try and rewrite historical past.
Regardless of going by way of a plague, many nonetheless assume cash, energy, and dishonesty can protect themselves from the horrors of the pure world or the struggling of others. They insist they’ll simply construct the wall larger.
It’s on this vein, Sweeney makes plenty of sense contemplating she already starred in final yr’s Immaculate, a movie that was the primary in what turned out to be a sequence of pro-choice horror motion pictures about males attempting to regulate ladies’s our bodies in a post-Roe v. Wade America. Bringing that very same pointed and scathing sensibility to Poe’s already extremely sardonic story a couple of royal who thinks he should buy his (or her) approach out of assembly the Grim Reaper couldn’t arrive at a greater second.
