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) at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. The critical and popular success of "The Pit and the Pendulum" persuaded AIP's Arkoff and Nicholson to produce more Edgar Allan Poe-based horror films on a regular basis. The films that followed, all directed by Corman, were "The Premature Burial" (1962), "Tales of Terror" (1962), "The Raven" (1963), "The Haunted Palace" (1963, actually based on the novella "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H. P. Lovecraft), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964), and" The Tomb of Ligeia" (1965). Tim Lucas has argued that the film had a large impact on many Italian