The Pit and the Pendulum Charles III and Charles IV only four persons were condemned. The Inquisition was, however, abolished during the period of French intervention (1808–13). The original source of the pendulum torture method is one paragraph in the preface of the 1826 book "The history of the Inquisition of Spain " by the Spanish priest, historian, and activist, Juan Antonio Llorente. relating a second-hand account by a single prisoner released from the Inquisition's Madrid dungeon in 1820, who purportedly described the pendulum torture method. Most modern sources dismiss this as fantasy. One theory is that Llorente misunderstood the account he heard; the prisoner
The Pit and the Pendulum (1913 film) said "the sets are remarkably realistic and this is especially true of the dungeon filled monastery, into which the luckless hero is dragged and in which, before he is released, he is tortured with fiendish ingenuity. The film was initially believed to be completely lost to time; however, there is one surviving reel at the Library of Congress. The Pit and the Pendulum (1913 film) The Pit and the Pendulum is a three-reel film adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name, directed, and produced by pioneering French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché through her American company Solax