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 facetious) of having it placed on the site, and it had appeared, without attribution, as an item of trivia in the 1836 "Southern Literary Messenger", a periodical to which Poe contributed. It does not appear, however, that the market was ever built as intended. Charles Baudelaire, a French poet who translated Poe's works into French and who viewed Poe as an inspiration, said that the building on the site of the Old Jacobin Club had no gates and, therefore, no inscription. "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a study of the effect terror has on the narrator, starting with the