The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film) The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film) The Pit and the Pendulum is a 1961 horror film in Panavision and Pathe Color 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
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film) 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." Stephen King felt that one of the film's most powerful shocks—the discovery of Elizabeth's hideously decayed corpse—had a major impact on the genre and served as one of the most significant horror sequences