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) it did. My only consolation…is that it is the second-greatest box-office attraction in the country." Price apparently never sent the letter, placing it instead into his "Letting Off Steam File". The film's critical reputation has continued to grow over the years, and it is now generally held to be one of the best entries in Corman's Poe series. "Time Out" has opined, "Corman at his intoxicating best, drawing a seductive mesh of sexual motifs from Poe's story through a fine Richard Matheson script." In "The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural", Timothy Sullivan wrote: ""The Pit and the Pendulum"