The Masque of The Red Death - Musical Adaptations and References

Musical Adaptations and References

• The heavy metal band Crimson Glory wrote and released the song "Masque of the Red Death", which follows the story, on their 1988 album Transcendence.

• The horror adventure game The Dark Eye features a reading of the story by writer William S. Burroughs.

• The metal band Stormwitch released the song "Masque Of The Red Death" on their 1985 album Tales Of Terror. Its lyrics follow the storyline.

• The post-hardcore band Thrice effectively re-tells the story in the song "The Red Death", on their album The Illusion of Safety.

• Gothic metal band Theatre of Tragedy sampled the 1964 Vincent Price film on the song "And When He Falleth" on their album Velvet Darkness They Fear.

• The Red Death is a metal band from Upstate New York whose name is derived from the title disease and released albums on Metal Blade Records and Siege of Amida/Ferret Records.

• Italian progressive rock band Mad Puppet made a song called "The Masque of the Red Death" on their début album Masque, which closely follows the storyline as well.

• The guitarist Michael Romeo of Symphony X released an instrumental titled "Masque of the Red Death" which appears on his 1994 solo album The Dark Chapter

• Italian singer-songwriter Eros Ramazzotti has a song, "Lettera al futuro" ("Letter to the future"), included in his 1996 album Dove c'è musica, whose lyrics are essentially a very concise retelling of the events in the story. Unlike other singers and bands, however, Ramazzotti does not conclude the story, preferring instead to draw his own conclusions from it. As the song is set in the present, his mentioning in the lyrics of "the bad wind of an horrendous disease" was interpreted at the time as a reference to AIDS, mainly by music journalists who were not familiar with Poe's story.

• The Conte Fantastique of André Caplet is based on Poe's The Masque of the Red Death.