The Pit and the Pendulum

Corman didn’t have much money, but you don’t need much money with Poe. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge loves darkness because it’s cheap, and that feels like grist for a maxim in adapting Poe to the big screen. He provides the scenario, the pitch; you go from there, and that’s what Roger Corman did. He made sure to cork the bat, enlisting Richard Matheson—who excelled with short forms, as his work on The Twilight Zone would attest—to write the script, and Vincent Price to star as Nicholas Medina, a descendent of a torture-chamber enthusiast (objects like belts beloved by old-school abusive dads would be scoffed at in this family) who inherited these implements and lives in a moody, seaside castle (roiling waves helping to boost atmosphere) where his newly dead wife, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele), haunts him.

Or does she? You know what they say about history repeating itself, and hot damn does it ever across the Medina generations. Corman ranked “The Pit and the Pendulum” as a top-three Poe story along with “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Adapting “Masque” was deemed too costly at first. Corman next pick was “Pit,” but “Usher” went first on account that it was thought less grisly, which would help audiences find their footing. Solid plan, given the grisliness to come. And though the titular showcase of The Pit and the Pendulum is kept under blood-soaked wraps until close to the end, it delivers, with special thanks to art director Daniel Haller. The low budget ensured that sets would need to be composited from what the team found, and this requirement of ingenuity served them well.

Sometimes with Poe adaptations, the filmmaker provides a tag with words to the effect of, “Inspired by a story from Edgar Allan Poe,” and while Corman forgoes the clarifying footnote here, the fevered mood of the piece makes these intentions clear.            

Price was the ideal lead to hitch the Poe buckboard-of-death to; he’s erudite and sinister, cunning and a victim (or a convincingly self-styled victim). You’re never certain—until you are—whether he’s the monster in this picture or having monstrous things done to him, or a bit of both. In disposition and makeup, he aligns with the urbane fellow who leads Fortunato deeper into the catacombs with a promise of some Amontillado, but while also projecting the persona of a senile-before-his-time, defeated man. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you Vincent Price was a ham. Corman understood him to be a form of cinematic centrifugal force, and if there was to be a Poe cycle, it had to start with Vincent Price.

The tinted sequences look like they’ve been untimely ripped (let’s get some Macbeth in here, because Corman’s Poe films always had an element of the Bard as well, at his most thunderous) from the Nosferatu/Cabinet of Dr. Caligari/Häxan outtakes chest. Tension perpetually lurks around the corner of a darkened corridor in the film, much as it did in William Castle’s 1959 film House on Haunted Hill, which also had Price in the centrifugal-force type of role. We’re never at ease.

Wide-angle lenses are used to accentuate mental, emotional, and spiritual/moral distortion with corresponding visual versions. Corman rehearsed the troupe before the cameras rolled. And while he didn’t know yet that a series had been officially launched—after all, the thing could have bombed—it’s plain that Corman took the care to do this movie right. When The Pit and the Pendulum proved to be big box office, Corman had his foundation for a series that holds up as among the most impressive in horror-movie history and has also done a great service in furthering the pop-culture appeal and staying power of Poe, the idea, the brand, and the cinematic concept. 🩸