‘I hated the bath scene. They stuck awful little modesty circles on my nipples and they kept floating off’

My Edgar Allan Poe adaptations began in 1960 with The Fall of the House of Usher. I held off doing The Masque of the Red Death, because I felt it had some similarities to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, with its hooded figures, and I might be accused of copying. But it got to the point where it was the best unadapted one left, so I thought I’d go ahead and worry about it later.