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 Innocents (1961 film) of the United States and Canada. Bosley Crowther wrote an unfavourable review of the film in "The New York Times" when the film was first shown in New York City in December 1961: "But we fear that old hands long familiar with the traffic and tricks of horror films will feel a bit bored by this screen version of Henry James' famous tale, "The Turn of the Screw", so mild and ingenuous it is alongside others of the genre. And especially do we fear they will be let down by the lucent performance of Deborah Kerr as the supposedly morbid