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) cast…Roger Corman has evoked a genuinely chilling mood of horror." "Variety" noted, "The last portion of the film builds with genuine excitement to a reverse-twist ending that might have pleased Poe himself...a physically stylish, imaginatively photographed horror film…" The "Los Angeles Examiner" said it was "…one of the best "scare" movies to come along in a long time…skillfully directed by Corman…with Vincent Price turning in the acting job of his career…." Brendan Gill of "The New Yorker" felt it was "a thoroughly creepy sequence of horrors..." "Time" called the film "a literary hair-raiser that is cleverly, if self-consciously, Edgar Allan