The Scarlet Plague that biographers and critics have called a "professional decline", from September 1912 to May 1916. In this period, he stopped writing short works and shifted to longer works including "The Abysmal Brute" (1913), "John Barleycorn" (1913), "The Mutiny of the Elsinore" (1914), "The Star Rover" (1915), among others. "The Scarlet Plague" was later reprinted in the February 1949 issue of "Famous Fantastic Mysteries". Jack London was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Masque of the Red Death". Both Poe's story and London's fall into a genre of apocalyptic fiction featuring a universal plague that nearly
The Masque of the Red Death (1964 film) Red Death" back, because of the similarities, but it was really an artificial reason in my mind," he later said. Eventually he decided to go ahead and do it anyway. Another fact in the delay was that Corman had a great deal of trouble coming up with a screenplay he was happy with. Drafts were written by John Carter, Robert Towne and Barboura Morris, but Corman was not happy with any of them. There were also a number of rival adaptations of "Masque" being mooted around this time. The Woolner Brothers announced a film based on the story as did