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) we carefully planned the whole production in advance of starting the cameras. Thus, when we moved into the studio for fifteen days of scheduled shooting, we didn't have to start making decisions. Because of our pre-production conferences with director of photography Floyd Crosby and art director Daniel Haller, everyone knew exactly what to do, barring any last minute inspirations on the set. To create the flashbacks revealing Nicholas' traumatic experiences, Corman and Crosby attempted to shoot them in a manner that would convey to the audience the character's horror in dredging up nightmares trapped in his subconscious. Corman insisted on