The Pit and the PendulumWilliams, Lucy Chase. The Complete Films of Vincent Price, Citadel Press, 1995. . As Williams notes, the actual onscreen title was "Pit and the Pendulum". is a 1961 American horror film 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 foreboding 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 his lunatic brother-in-law during the film's climactic sequence.
The film was the second title in the popular series of Poe adaptations released by American International Pictures, the first having been Corman's House of Usher released the previous year. Like House, the film features widescreen cinematography by Floyd Crosby, sets designed by art director Daniel Haller, and a film score composed by Les Baxter. A critical and box-office hit, Pits success convinced AIP and Corman to continue adapting Poe stories for another six films, five of them starring Price. The series ended in 1964 with the release of The Tomb of Ligeia.
Film critic Tim Lucas and writer Ernesto Gastaldi have both noted the film's strong influence on numerous subsequent Italian thrillers, from Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body (1963) to Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975).Lucas, Tim. Video Watchdog Magazine, issue #74 (August 2001), p. 55. Review of The Pit and the Pendulum DVDGastaldi, Ernesto. Interviewed by Tim Lucas in Video Watchdog Magazine, issue #39 (May–June 1997), p. 28–53, "What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood in the Scripts of Ernesto Gastaldi?" Stephen King has described one of Pits major shock sequences as being among the most important moments in post-1960 horror film.
Plot In 1547 Spain, Englishman Francis Barnard visits the castle of his brother-in-law, Nicholas Medina, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his sister, Elizabeth. Nicholas and his younger sister, Catherine, offer a vague explanation that Elizabeth died from a rare blood disorder three months earlier; Nicholas is evasive when Francis asks for specific details. Francis vows not to leave until he discovers the truth behind his sister's death.
Francis again asks about his sister's death during dinner with the family physician, Dr. Leon. Dr. Leon tells him that his sister died of massive heart failure, literally "dying of fright". Francis demands to see where Elizabeth died. Nicholas takes him to the castle's torture chamber. Nicholas reveals that Elizabeth became obsessed with the chamber's torture devices under the influence of the castle's "heavy atmosphere". After becoming progressively unbalanced, she locked herself into an iron maiden, and died after whispering the name "Sebastian" one day. Francis refuses to believe Nicholas's story.
Francis tells Catherine that Nicholas appears to feel "definite guilt" regarding Elizabeth's death. In response, Catherine talks about Nicholas's traumatic childhood. Their father was Sebastian Medina, a notorious agent of the Spanish Inquisition. When Nicholas was a small child, he explored the forbidden torture chamber when his father entered the room with his mother, Isabella, and Sebastian's brother, Bartolome. Hiding in a corner, Nicholas watched in horror as his father repeatedly hit Bartolome with a red-hot poker, screaming "Adulterer!" at him. After murdering Bartolome, Sebastian began torturing his wife slowly to death in front of Nicholas.
Dr. Leon later informs Catherine and Francis that Isabella was not tortured to death; instead, she was entombed behind a brick wall while still alive. He explains, "The very thought of premature interment was enough to drive your brother into convulsions of horror." Nicholas fears that Elizabeth may have been interred prematurely. The doctor tells Nicholas that "if Elizabeth Medina walks the corridors of this castle, it is her spirit, not her living self."
Nicholas believes that his late wife's vengeful ghost is haunting the castle. Elizabeth's room is the source of a loud commotion, now ransacked and her portrait slashed. Her beloved harpsichord plays in the middle of the night. One of Elizabeth's rings shows up on the keyboard. Francis accuses Nicholas of planting the evidence of Elizabeth's "haunting" as an elaborate hoax. Nicholas insists that Francis open his wife's tomb. They discover Elizabeth's putrefied corpse frozen in a position that suggests she died screaming after failing to claw her way out of her sarcophagus. Nicholas faints. Dr Leon swears that he believed Elizabeth was dead when they interred her body. Later, Francis tells Catherine that he is sorry that he was right about Elizabeth's death, as he now realises that it was not Nicholas' fault.
That night, Nicholas – now on the verge of insanity – hears Elizabeth calling him. He follows her ghostly voice down to her tomb. Elizabeth rises from her coffin and pursues Nicholas into the torture chamber, where he falls down a flight of stairs. As Elizabeth gloats over her husband's unconscious body, her lover and accomplice, Dr. Leon, appears. They had plotted to drive Nicholas mad so that she could inherit his fortune and the castle.
Leon confirms that Nicholas "is gone", his mind destroyed by terror. Elizabeth taunts her insensate husband, but then Nicholas suddenly begins laughing hysterically while Elizabeth and Dr. Leon recoil in horror. Believing himself to be Sebastian, he replays the events of his mother and uncle's murders, mistaking Elizabeth for Isabella and Dr. Leon for Bartolome. Nicholas slams Dr. Leon against a pillar and seizes Elizabeth, repeating his father's promise to Isabella to torture her. After dealing with Elizabeth, Nicholas attacks a fleeing Dr. Leon, who falls to his death in the pit while trying to escape.
Francis, having heard Elizabeth's screams, enters the dungeon. Nicholas also confuses Francis for Bartolome and knocks him unconscious. He straps him to a stone slab located directly beneath a huge razor-sharp pendulum. The pendulum is attached to a clockwork apparatus that causes it to descend fractions of an inch after each swing, closer to Francis' torso. Catherine arrives just in time with Maximillian, one of the Medina family's servants. After a brief struggle with Maximillian, Nicholas falls to his death. Francis is removed from the torture device, bleeding but still alive.
The three survivors–Francis, Catherine, and Maximillian–leave the torture chamber, and Catherine vows that no one shall ever enter it again. Unbeknownst to them, a still-living Elizabeth, gagged and trapped in the iron maiden, watches helplessly as the door is closed and locked forever.
Cast Vincent Price as Nicholas / Sebastian Medina John Kerr as Francis Barnard Barbara Steele as Elizabeth Luana Anders as Catherine Medina Antony Carbone as Doctor Leon Patrick Westwood as Maximillian Lynette Bernay as Maria Larry Turner as Nicholas as child Mary Menzies as Isabella Charles Victor as Bartolome
Production Development 20th Century Fox had announced plans to film the story in the late '50s, along with versions of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", but the films were never made.
When Roger Corman's House of Usher was released in June 1960, its box office success took AIP's James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff by surprise. Corman admitted, "We anticipated that the movie would do well... but not half as well as it did." According to Richard Matheson, "When the first film was a hit, they still didn't consider doing a Poe series. They just wanted another movie with a Poe title fixed to it."
Corman felt Poe's two strongest stories after "Usher" were "The Masque of the Red Death", and '"Pit and the Pendulum". He considered making the former but was worried about similarities between the story and The Seventh Seal (1957), so he decided on adapting the latter."Masque of the Red Death (1964) – A Retrospective" By Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique, November 20, 2007 accessed 20 August 2014 However Samuel Z. Arkoff said it was his and James H. Nicholson's decision to make Pit as the second Poe film "because it was a lot more graphic and in the second place, The Masque of the Red Death would have needed a dancing troupe that would have been quite expensive. In all those early Poe pictures we had relatively few actors, so when we did finally make Masque of the Red Death we went to the UK where it would be less expensive to do it."Lawrence French, "The Making of The Pit and the Pendulum", The Pit and the Pendulum, Bear Manor Media 2013
Screenplay Matheson's script freely devised an elaborate narrative that barely resembled Poe, with only the finale having any similarity at all to the original short story on which the film was based. Corman noted, "The method we adopted on The Pit and the Pendulum was to use the Poe short story as the climax for a third act to the motion picture... because a two-page short story is not about to give you a ninety-minute motion picture. We then constructed the first two acts in what we hoped was a manner faithful to Poe, as his climax would run only a short time on the screen."Di Franco, J. Philip (editor). The Movie World of Roger Corman, Chelsea House Publishers, 1979.
Matheson's screenplay included a flashback to a time immediately preceding Elizabeth's illness, featuring Nicholas and Elizabeth horse riding and eating a picnic lunch. Corman deleted the sequence prior to filming because he felt it violated one of his major theories regarding the Poe series: I had a lot of theories I was working with when I did the Poe films... One of my theories was that these stories were created out of the unconscious mind of Poe, and the unconscious mind never really sees reality, so until The Tomb of Ligeia, we never showed the real world. In Pit, John Kerr arrived in a carriage against an ocean background, which I felt was more representative of the unconscious. That horseback interlude was thrown out because I didn't want to have a scene with people out in broad daylight. The screenplay was modified from its original draft form during the film's shooting. Price himself suggested numerous dialogue changes for his character. In the script, when Francis Barnard is first introduced to Nicholas, the young man asks about loud, strange noises he had heard a few moments earlier. Don Medina responds: "Uh... an apparatus, Mr. Barnard. (turning) What brings you to us?" Price penciled in the suggestions "that must be kept in constant repair" and "that cannot be stopped". Later in the screenplay, when Nicholas recalls his father's chamber of torture, Price devised alternate explanations for Sebastian Medina's violence. During Nicholas' death scene, after falling to the bottom of the pit the character originally had dialogue at the point of dying, asking in a voice of horror, "Elizabeth. What have I done to you? (beat) What have I done to you?" The camera was to then cut directly to Elizabeth's face trapped in the iron maiden. Corman decided to jettison the lines, believing that the film should remain purely visual at that point and dialogue would ruin the power of the scene.
Filming The Pit and the Pendulum was announced in August 1960, and filming began 4 January 1961.
According to Lucy Chase Williams' book, The Complete Films of Vincent Price, the shooting schedule was fifteen days, and the film's budget was almost $1 million. Corman himself has said that the film's actual production cost was approximately $300,000.Fischer, Dennis. Horror Film Directors, 1931–1990, McFarland & Company, Inc., 1991. McGee, Mark Thomas. Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, McFarland & Company, Inc., 1988.