Prince Prospero

He mentions the gold arch, right? He chases...

Or he walks to the first room and he chases and, like, you know, kills Prince Prospero.

So it's like maybe this is the death's viewpoint of it.

Right, yeah.

A thousand times he prepared for his death and then she came back for her death and probably for his own too.

But The Mask of the Red Death, his story about a prince, Prince Prospero, who locks up his friends in a castle to try to avoid the plague and then the plague comes to get them anyway.

The red death is tuberculosis, he says.

Blood was its avatar and its seal.

And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court.

and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.

All these and security were within.

Without was the Red Death.

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade, but first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held.

But yeah, then this, this thing comes in, you know, you don't know if it's a real person, you know, I guess I don't think it is.

It's something, it's the red death itself, kind of a personified God in, you know, and, um, Yeah, and Prospero dies.

It's nice.

He bore aloft a drawn dagger and had approached in rapid impetuosity to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer.

So Prospero is pursuing the Red Death.

And, you know, intending to kill it.

Yeah, how dare you?

Yeah.

And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless, and sagacious.

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.

This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august tastes.

There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.

All these and security were within.

Without was the "Red Death." It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade.

Thanks.

You have Prince Prospero, a staggeringly wealthy aristocrat, facing a pandemic, the Red Death, that causes rapid, gruesome mortality.

It's a really nasty disease.

It is, and Prospero's response is the ultimate manifestation of elite detachment.

He abandons his dying populace, summons a thousand of his equally wealthy aristocratic friends.

Of course he does.

This is where the narrative mechanics get genuinely thrilling.

The article confirms Madison is playing two roles in the film.