The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film)

1961 film by Roger Corman

The Pit and the Pendulum is a 1961 horror film directed by Roger Corman, starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, and Luana Anders. The screenplay by Richard Matheson was loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story of the same name. Set in sixteenth century Spain, the story is about a young Englishman who visits a forbidding castle to investigate his sister's mysterious death. After a series of horrific revelations, apparently ghostly appearances and violent deaths, the young man becomes strapped to the titular torture device by his lunatic brother in law during the film's climactic sequence. The film was the second title in the popular series of Poe adaptations released by American International Pictures, the first having been Corman's House of Usher released the previous year. Like House, the film features widescreen cinematography by Floyd Crosby, sets designed by art director Daniel Haller, and a film score composed by Les Baxter. A critical and box office hit, Pits success convinced AIP and Corman to continue adapting Poe stories for another six films, five of them starring Price. The series ended in 1964 with the release of The Tomb of Ligeia. Film critic Tim Lucas and writer Ernesto Gastaldi have both noted the film's strong influence on numerous subsequent Italian thrillers, from Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body (1963) to Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975). Stephen King has described one of Pits major shock sequences as being among the most important moments in post 1960 horror film. When Roger Corman's House of Usher was released in June 1960, its box office success took AIP's James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff by surprise. Corman admitted, "We anticipated that the movie would do well but not half as well as it did." According to Richard Matheson, "When the first film was a hit, they still didn't consider doing a Poe series. They just wanted another movie with a Poe title fixed to it." However Samuel Z. Arkoff said it was his and James H. Nicholson's decision to make Pit as the second Poe film "because it was a lot more graphic and in the second place, The Masque of the Red Death would have needed a dancing troupe that would have been quite expensive. In all those early Poe pictures we had relatively few actors, so when we did finally make Masque of the Red Death we went to the UK where it would be less expensive to do it."

The critical and popular success of The Pit and the Pendulum persuaded AIP's Arkoff and Nicholson to produce more Edgar Allan Poe based horror films on a regular basis. The films that followed, all directed by Corman, were Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963, actually based on the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Tim Lucas has argued that the film had a large impact on many Italian horror films that followed. Lucas noted, "It takes Corman's Freudian theories even further with a nightmarish flashback sequence that plants the seeds of Nicholas's breakdown, and would prove particularly influential on the future course of Italian horror — an influence that can be seen even in productions of the 1970s (Deep Red) and 1980s (A Blade in the Dark)." Screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi acknowledged that Ugo Guerra and Elio Scardamaglia, the producers of Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body (1963), had "shown me an Italian print of The Pit and the Pendulum before I started writing it: 'Give us something like this', they said." When asked if another of his films, The Long Hair of Death (1964), was inspired by Corman's film, Gastaldi replied, "Yes, of course! The Pit and the Pendulum had a big influence on Italian horror films. Everybody borrowed from it." King later wrote, "Following the Hammer films, this becomes, I think, the most important moment in the post 1960 horror film, signaling a return to an all out effort to terrify the audience and a willingness to use any means at hand to do it."

In 1968, when the film was sold to ABC TV for television airings, the network noted that the film was too short to fill the desired two hour time slot. They requested that AIP extend the film's runtime. Approximately five minutes of additional footage was subsequently shot by Corman's production assistant Tamara Asseyev.