Pit And The Pendulum (1961)

Year: 1842

IMDb Rating: N/A/10

Genres: Talk-Show, Short story, Horror

Directors: N/A

Cast: Keith Chawgo, Rod Labbe, Vickie Rae

The 1842 short story from Poe is about a man's torment in prison during the Spanish Inquisition although Poe does skews historical fact to fit the fabric of his story. The short story uses the senses to instil fear into the reader unlike is previous work which dealt more than supernatural. The death anxiety that the narrator experiences ingrains itself into the mind of the reader. In 1961, with a script by Richard Matheson, Roger Corman send ferore into Edgar Allan Poe would star Vincent Price, Barbara Steele and John Kerr. The film would be a huge influence with Italian horror with Bava's The Whip and the Body and Argento's Profundo Rosso. Stephen King has stated that this is one of the most important films of 1960's horror.

"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe and a work of horror fiction. It was first published in 1842 in the literary annual The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, and is set very loosely during the Peninsular War between Spain and Napoleonic France (1808–1814), although it invokes the feared Inquisition of earlier centuries. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story inspires fear in the reader via its heavy focus on the senses, such as sound, emphasizing the inescapable reality of the coming doom. In this it is unlike Poe's stories which invoke the supernatural. The tale has been adapted to film several times.

The 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.