I'm aghast at your report that reviewers have been dismissing the R. Corman/V. Price Masque film as "trash"--when I was a young'un, the movie was widely regarded as the high point of the Corman Poe AIP series, beautifully stylised with exquisite images and a literate, provocative screenplay. Only The Tomb of Ligeia surpassed it because it was just a bit more finished and had a more understated approach to the subject matter. Perhaps today's critics regard Ligeia as trash, too.
I just did a quick survey of reviews of Corman's "Masque of the Red Death" on the Internet trying to find the one or two negative reviews I came across last week, but couldn't find them now. One review might have just been someone posting on imdb, but I know that one was definitely on a "review" type of site that had a cache of fairly extensive reviews. Happily, I see now that most reviews are positive and intelligent, such as the one on dvdverdict, whose reviews seem to be consistently high quality.
The site that dismissed Masque as "trash" (the term used might have been "garbage") reminded me of a similar one I've seen for "Eye of the Devil." I know there is always difference of opinion, but then there is such a thing as obtuseness. Even "Variety" isn't immune from that disease. Last year I looked up Variety's review of "Eye of the Devil". I can understand that the concept behind that movie might go over a reviewer's head, but there doesn't seem to be any excuse for blindness to its filmic qualities. Highly original camera work was dismissed as "overly mobile" and inspired by TV commercials (I'm afraid I don't remember any particularly avante garde TV commercials in the late '60s). No notice was made of the hallucinatory sequences (or the trance theme for that matter), though those sequences were to inspire Roman Polanski in "Rosemary's Baby" (Gothick, maybe you pointed that out to me). No mention of the striking location work in the Aude department of France, nor of the highly original music score by Gary McFarland, which mixes elements of "classical" and modern - for example, the harp solo at the beginning (which is later echoed by bells), reminiscent of Ravel; the haunting vocals with a touch of early medieval polyphony; and modern symphonic sound, unusual enough for a film score. (Sadly, McFarland only did one other film score before he was poisoned in a Greenwhich Village bar and died a couple of years later. A handful of his jazz-influenced albums have been re-released on CD in the past few years but seem to have disappeared already.)
A footnote to the discussion above about the seven rooms of different colors in Prospero's palace in "Masque." I happened to pick up a book yesterday that recounted a description by Manley Palmer Hall (probably from his Secret Teachings of All Ages) of rites associated with the cult of Odin which he believed followed the pattern of the ancient Mystery religions' rites of initiation, which involved the seeker passing through nine rooms until reaching the inner sanctum, where the initiate symbolically confronts . . . himself. This is exactly what happens in Masque when Prospero confronts Death in the initiation chamber (I won't say anymore than that to avoid spoilers). This seems more than a coincidence to me, even though the number of chambers differs.
I take it that Giuliana's
nightmare vision at the last stage of her initiation is the result of her conscience getting the better of her since part of her still holds back from giving herself over wholly to Satan. On the other hand, the reviewer at dvdtalk, another solid site, views this as Giuliana becoming victim of a macabre joke for her malice after turning herself over wholly to evil. (My thought is that she still retained some goodness and had truly tried to help Jane Asher escape.)
BTW, Death's voice is supposedly dubbed by Christopher Lee. I admit it does sound like him in the final scene, so it's possible he dubbed it, though another source says it was John Westbrook. I don't think IMDB provides a credit.
An aside about the DVD. Mine seems to skip in several places which is distracting (as if a frame or two were missing here and there). The film didn't do that when it aired on AMC a couple of years ago so I don't know if my disk is defective or what. I haven't had that happen with any other DVD.
Re: Ligeia: I rank Ligeia as the best of the Corman Poe pics, with Masque probably at number 2. The double-sided DVD pairing of "Tomb of Legeia" with Price's one-man dramatic readings of Poe (made for TV in the '70s) is sublime!
If my mood was dark in an early post, in addition to contemplating the effects of war and pestilence, I had been reading about witchcraft executions in Lorraine, which reached some of the highest levels in Europe. I was reading about a nine year old boy who was executed by strangling after providing a full confession of his sorcery. Of course the same thing happened in Sweden and elsewhere.