 It stars Marga von Kierska, Theodor Becker, Karl Bernhard and Julietta Brandt.The film is a tragic romance set in Florence in 1348, just before the first outbreaks in Italy of the Black Death, which then spread out across the entire continent.Lang's screenplay was based on the Edgar Allan Poe story "The Masque of the Red Death", but he heightened the story's sexual tension by making the plague appear in the form of a beautiful seductress.