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) is even better than its predecessor…The plot is heady stuff, and Roger Corman drives it forward—with wonderful matte shots of the castle perched on the seaside cliff, odd camera angles, the thickest cobwebs in horror-movie history, a spider in the face, and an iron maiden—all before our hero is strapped under the pendulum...in a sequence that still stands one's hair on end." Phil Hardy's "The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror" observed: "If Price's performance is noticeably more extravagant than in the earlier film, this is offset (or matched) by the markedly greater fluidity of camera movement. "House of Usher" seemed unsure