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 Whip and the Body but a series of events hints that his ghost has started to haunt the castle for revenge. The film credits the writers as Ernesto Gastaldi as Julian Berry, Ugo Guerra as Robert Hugo, Luciano Martino as Martin Hardy. Ernesto Gastaldi has stated that he had written the script himself with Ugo Guerra possibly contributing to some of the story early one while Luciano Martino had no contribution to the script. Gastaldi was shown an Italian print of "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1961) by the producers who requested a similar film to be made. Gastaldi is credited as an assistant