Interview: Victoria Price reflects on the 60th anniversary of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, Vincent Price's lasting impact and Halloween celebrations

This weekend is The International Edgar Allan Poe Festival & Awardsto commemorate the 175th anniversary of Poe's death in Baltimore. The event will take place from October 4th to 6th and will also celebrate a major milestone: the 60th anniversary of Roger Corman and Vincent Price The Mask of the Red Death.

The event will feature a panel of special guests discussing the film and its legacy, including Victoria Price, with whom I had the pleasure of speaking about the film's meaning, Vincent Price's lasting impact, and her Halloween celebrations.

The festival will feature a 60th anniversary screening by Roger Corman and Vincent Price The Mask of the Red Deathwhich is one of my personal favorites.

Victoria Prize: Me too! Roger was one of those people who I thought would live forever, so it's strange not having him here.

He left such an impression on the people he interacted with. It's amazing the life and career he had. There have been many celebrations and retrospectives since Roger Corman's death and I think it was a great way to celebrate his life and work, as well as that of your father. I also think it's great that so many people still get hit on The Mask of the Red Death and seeing it for the first time. Why do you find the film so fascinating?

Victoria Prize: One of the reasons is certainly the cinematography. Nicolas Roeg's cinematography is great, and I think that's a big component for me. And then my father was born in 1911, so it's very different than it is now. The majority of people don't have an everyday connection to religion like I think my father's generation had. My dad wasn't necessarily a regular churchgoer, but it was just something he constantly thought about and it tied into his love of art history.

So it was this kind of fluid conversation that he always had with himself, and I feel like that's the case every time I see this film more than any other. Of course, many of his films are about Satan or the dark side, and certainly the films that have to do with witches have politics and religion, but there is something completely different The Mask of the Red Death. It almost feels like a reflection of my father's thoughts about his place in the horror genre in the context of his daily spirituality.

I saw a lot of people watching and/or reading The Mask of the Red Death for the first time in recent memory, as his take on a plague had parallels to the pandemic.

Victoria Prize: True, the same applies too The last man on earth.

Yes definitely. In a way, these films take on a whole new meaning for this generation, but also speak to the timeless messages and themes.

Victoria Prize: My father never imagined that horror would become the genre that would replace the Western as the top box office genre. It is now revered and no longer ridiculed. That certainly wasn't the case when he was the King of Horror.

He understood the timelessness of it because he was the voice of Poe for decades, starting in the early '60s. They are short stories that don't tell you everything, so you don't just get a story handed to you. It's 10 or 20 pages that capture your imagination. It's incredible that young people can get involved in this way.

This is interesting because so many people, myself included, had their first exposure to Poe through their father.

Victoria Prize: I have to thank all the middle school teachers who came to school and thought, “I'm not in the mood,” and then thought, “Thank God for Vincent Price!” They just turned on my dad and introduced their students to Poe. This also introduced these students to my father.

Many people associate Vincent Price with his films and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, but he was a Renaissance man. He enjoyed cooking and had a passion for the arts, particularly painting and poetry. Can you talk about his life outside of the horror that maybe not many people are aware of?

Victoria Prize: At the age of eight he fell in love with fine art. At the age of 12, he bought his first work of art, which happened to be a first-hand etching by Rembrandt. He had to pay for it with his pocket money and the money he had earned over three years, so he didn't take possession of it until he was 15.

His favorite poets were the romantic poets. That was something he loved about poetry; He loved Cely and Byron, and this romantic sensibility made him so perfect for the horror genre because his approach came from his love of art.

My father wasn't the king of horror after the '80s, although there was one thriller and Tim Burton, but he was the king of horror when it was mostly gothic horror. This started in the 1940s when he made a film called Dragonwyck. For him, there was absolutely this fascination with gothic horror.

So that was his great passion, and many of the artists he loved most came from the same period that gave rise to this Gothic sensibility. There was no such thing as, “This is an art and this is a craft; “That's an art, and that's cooking.” He understood that the arts had a wide scope, and he was interested in learning about them, promoting them, and giving the average citizen access to them – that was one big deal for him.

When I was younger I was drawn to his films, but as I got older and learned so much more about him as a person and everything he did outside of film, I appreciated him and his work even more.

Victoria Prize: First of all, I love this. He understood that this was a benefit of his fame, that he could use his fame to promote what he loved so much: the arts. The other part of this is that I believe in a greater sense of what gifts have been given in our lives. In a way, I feel like he was given the gift of fame because he wanted to do something with it that would have meaning.

I'm not entirely sure this continues to happen in our world as much as it could. Of course there are a lot of people who use their fame to do really great things, but there are also a lot of people who believe that fame is the goal, and that was never my father's feeling. To hear that you came to him through the films and then found these other things and really loved them, that's exactly what he wanted when he was alive. The fact that it's still happening – he would be so grateful for that.

Now that we're in October and the Halloween season is in full swing, I was interested to hear about your experiences with Halloween as a child and over the years.

Victoria Prize: Halloween is now the second largest retail holiday in the world, at least in the United States. It certainly wasn't back then. Boris Karloff used to say, “Halloween is my busiest time of year,” and I love that, so I kind of adopted that because it has become my busiest time of year.

It was certainly my dad's busiest time of year, and I remember carving pumpkins with my mom. My mother didn't like these scary things at all, so I remember carving pumpkins with my mother and her pumpkins always looked so happy. They were always female, she kept the stem on and often attached a bow to them. And it was their opportunity to reclaim and counteract the uncanny. And because she was a costume designer, her pumpkins always looked great but weren't scary at all. So I've always loved that.

When my father was there, we sometimes threw parties for my friends. Of course, all my friends knew he was “the scary guy.” Sometimes we went trick-or-treating, but my parents were very, very strict about the amount of candy I had. So the focus was definitely on where the best candy came from and how I could get it.

My mother, the costume designer, also thought this was her opportunity to show off her costume design skills to her daughter. And you know how to do it. When you say you want to be something, you really want to be it. You don't want to be their idea of ​​the Bob Fosse version of a black cat. You want to be a black cat. And I was like Bob Fosse's black cat or a crazy orange clown, and I hated clowns.

So Halloween was a mixed bag for me, except when my dad was around. And then he went trick-or-treating with us and we did something fun. And honestly, literally anything with my dad… cleaning toilets with my dad would have been fun. He was very special. People often say, “When did you know your dad was special because he was famous?” And I thought, “I think my dad became famous because he was special and different.”

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