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
Urban Gothic a literary form by Ann Radcliffe in novels such as "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789), "A Sicilian Romance" (1790) and "The Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794). It also included Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1818) and John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819), which helped found the modern horror genre. This helped create the dark romanticism or American Gothic Fiction of authors like Edgar Allan Poe in works including "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) and "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842) and Nathaniel Hawthorne in "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) and "The Birth-Mark" (1843). This in turn influenced American novelists