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
Gothic film audience response" characterize Gothic films like they did the literary works. "The Encyclopedia of the Gothic" said the foundation of Gothic film was the combination of Gothic literature, stage melodrama, and German expressionism. In "The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction", Misha Kavka says Gothic film is not an established genre, rather contributing Gothic images, plots, characters, and styles to films. These elements are often found in "the broader category of "horror"". Kavka quotes William Patrick Day's definition of the Gothic, "[it] tantalizes us with fear, both as its subject and its effect; its does so, however, not primarily through characters