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
Quatermass and the Pit set at Riverside, enabling a sense of time having elapsed that would not have been possible in an all-live production. Made just before videotape became general at the BBC, all six episodes of "Quatermass and the Pit" were preserved for a possible repeat by being telerecorded on 35 mm film. This was achieved with a specially-synchronised film camera capturing the output of a video monitor; the process had been refined throughout the 1950s and recordings of "Quatermass and the Pit" are of high technical quality. The serial was repeated in edited form as two 90-minute episodes, entitled "5 Million Years