A Review of "The Pit and the Pendulum"

“Until now no one has dared to film this …… the most diabolical classic of all time!” The films of Roger Corman, mainly his adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe with Vincent Price in starring roles, are a lesson in how to make a horror movie on a shoestring budget without really showing it. Elaborate sets, period costumes, and of course, clever acting and camerawork make projects like The Pit and the Pendulum stand the test of time and a real treat to watch. Like the others, it is loosely—and I mean loosely—based on the short stories by Poe, and deals with madness in some form. Price plays a widower who is the son of a cruel torturer and executioner of the inquisition whose wife has been dead less than a year, and whom he thinks was buried prematurely. He lives in a grand castle with only his servants, and his sister temporarily, until his wife’s brother (John Kerr) arrives to question him on her cause of death. The reason his friend, a doctor, divulges is that she was literally scared to death, and Price’s character believes her ghost walks the halls to torment him for making her stay at such a dark castle during their marriage. However, is it really her ghost, or someone playing a cruel trick on him? Like all Poe stories and film adaptations, we eventually find out the cause of such madness. Price is a little bit more over-the-top than his subdued performance in The Fall of the House of Usher, but it works here, when combined with the dreary setting concocted by Corman, and the life of trauma his character had to go through in seeing his mother and uncle killed in front of him by his father when he was very young. The director was a maestro at getting cheap productions together and giving them the aura of grandeur. The climactic scene at the end of the movie must have been suspenseful, terrifying, and shocking to audiences at the time, and like all other Price-Corman tandems, this too will long be regarded as a classic. Also starring Barbara Steele and Luana Andrews. Final Verdict: Trophy Case.

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