Maybe the best of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Poe’s original story is a brief and queasy masterpiece (about four pages) that’s mostly made up of a day-glo description of the Grand Guignol house parties thrown by a well-connected artistocrat who hides out from a plague that’s snuffing out all of the poor people. He and his coterie surround themselves with fake horror while they hide out from real horror outside the castle walls. It’s a “voluptuous scene”, as Poe describes it. Poe also uses the word “phantasm” twice in his gilded and poisonous prose. It’s pretty great. Corman’s film version does its best to capture the spirit on a low-budget and a ninety-minute run-time. The brilliant science-fiction writer (and veteran of a stack of classic Twilight Zone episodes) Charles Beaumont co-writes the script with Robert Wright Campbell and re-fashions the story for the drive-ins with Poe’s Prince Prospero (delicious ham Vincent Price) portrayed as a Satan-worshipping sadist who doesn’t see a damn thing wrong with kidnapping a pretty peasant girl (Jane Asher) while he torches her village for fun. The result is almost Corman’s “art film”, if you squint, which I don’t suggest you do for a widescreen Technicolor eyeful such as this. It’s strange and hallucinatory. Corman went to some Fellini films. You can tell.