The Pit and the Pendulum (1991 film) The Pit and the Pendulum (1991 film) The Pit and the Pendulum (released on DVD in the United States as The Inquisitor) is a 1991 American horror film directed by Stuart Gordon and based on the eponymous short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The film is an amalgamation of the aforementioned story with other Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", and it also appropriates the anecdote of "The Sword of Damocles", reassigning it to the character of Torquemada. In 1492 Spain, Grand Inquisitor Torquemada leads a bloody reign of terror. Opposed to the use of torture by the Church, Maria speaks
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film) those early Poe pictures we had relatively few actors, so when we did finally make "Masque of the Red Death" we went to the UK where it would be less expensive to do it." Matheson's script freely devised an elaborate narrative that barely resembled Poe, with only the finale having any similarity at all to the original short story on which the film was based. Corman noted, "The method we adopted on "The Pit and the Pendulum" was to use the Poe short story as the climax for a third act to the motion picture... because a two-page short story