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Mikey Madison plays twin sisters in A24’s The Masque of the Red Death, and she expects the film to reach audiences in 2027. Asked about it by ScreenRant while promoting The Social Reckoning, she said, “I think next year, definitely. I’m so excited for people to see that.”
Charlie Polinger wrote and directed the film for A24 and Picturestart, following The Plague, and principal photography began in Budapest in February. Léa Seydoux joined the cast in January, with Franz Rogowski and Benedict Wong added the month after. Seydoux has genre history with David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, and Wong was part of the ensemble in Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Madison, who played Amber Freeman in Scream before Anora won her an Oscar, told ScreenRant the medieval setting made the shoot “something completely different than I’ve ever done before.”
Polinger Calls It a Dark Comedy
Poe published “The Masque of the Red Death” in 1842 as a short story about a prince who seals himself and his court inside an abbey while a plague empties the country outside, and about the figure in red who gets in anyway. Polinger told Bloody Disgusting his version sits “definitely more in a dark comedy world,” built on a maximalist tone and the same interest in how a group turns on itself in a sealed room that ran through The Plague. Madison called the result “at times very slapstick and very dramatic and interesting and weird.”
Bloody Disgusting reports that Madison’s twins are sisters split by class, one raised inside the prince’s circle and one living among the poor, with Seydoux as a scheming lady-in-waiting. A24 has confirmed none of that, and no official synopsis has gone out.
Vincent Price Played the Prince in 1964
Roger Corman got here first. His Masque of the Red Death came out in 1964 with Vincent Price as Prince Prospero, the seventh of the eight Poe adaptations Corman made for American International, and Nicolas Roeg shot it at Elstree Studios in England. Corman and his writers turned Prospero into a practicing Satanist running a cult inside the abbey, a detail Poe never wrote. It worked anyway, which is the argument for reworking a familiar horror property at all.
A24 has not announced a release date for Polinger’s film.