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 career in a 2003 television documentary, cited "Quatermass and the Pit" as perfecting "the notion of the science-fictional detective story". Newman also discussed the programme as an influence on the horror fiction writer Stephen King, claiming that King had "more or less rewritten "Quatermass and the Pit" in "The Tommyknockers"". After "Quatermass and the Pit" Kneale felt that it was time to rest the character. By the early 1970s he had decided there were new avenues to explore, and the BBC planned a fourth "Quatermass" serial in 1972. The BBC did not proceed with the project, and Kneale's scripts were