Francis Barnard (John Kerr) wants to be delivered to the front door of the Medina’s castle, but his driver refuses. So, Barnard makes the last leg of his journey by foot, passing over blasted and twisted landscape. His requests for an audience with Nicholas Medina are greeted with refusals from the butler Maximilian (Patrick Westwood), but Barnard has come too far to turn back now.
When he meets Doña Catherine Medina (Luana Anders) are reveals he is the brother to Nicholas’s now dead wife Elizabeth (Barbara Steele), apologies are made, and admittance granted. Nicholas (Vincent Price) reveals his presence eventually, suspicious and then gracious (though suffering a case of nerves).
Barnard is not asking for the moon. He simply wants answers, and to satisfy his own suspicions about Nicholas’s hand in his sister’s death. How did Elizabeth die? A malady of the blood is the first answer he gets. Then, a victim of the castle’s gloomy atmosphere and history. It is Doctor Charles Leon (Antony Carbone)) who sheds some light on the strangeness at play, revealing Nicholas’ history with trauma and terror of premature burial. His father’s legacy looms over the castle and all who come and go within it like a ghost, controlling things from beyond the grave.
But is he the only spectral influence? Has Elizabeth really gone to the night’s Plutonian shore? When all the guests hear her harpsicord playing or find her room destroyed as from a great tantrum, Nicholas suspects it the work of her restless spirit. Might these mysteries have more mundane answers? Francis Barnard will not stop until he has his satisfaction, but his barrage of questions may only speed along the avalanche of horror that’s been brooding in these walls since the doctor pronounced Elizabeth dead … putting him and everyone in the castle in harm’s way. Roger Corman helms a second helping of Poe-inspired chills and psychological horror with the gloriously gothic picture, The Pit and the Pendulum (1961).
For his follow-up to the international hit, House of Usher (1960), Roger Corman once again teamed up with screenwriter Richard Matheson, cinematographer Floyd Crosby, set dresser/designer Daniel Haller, and composer Les Baxter. The result is another gloriously gothic (dare we saw gloomy in the best sense) fright flick.
The attraction to adapting Poe is easy to see. The man’s works were long out of copyright (cheap) and the short stories were delightful exercises of mood and atmosphere, which could be fashioned into pieces of a longer narrative. A picture like the late-in-the-cycle Masque of the Red Death (1964) actually weaves multiple stories together. The Pit and the Pendulum reserves the titular elements for the climactic scene. Though the source material is essentially a mere incident, fleshed out into a drama of two entwined families, madness, murder, and the horrors of the unspoken but nevertheless acknowledged possibilities of the otherworldly ancient world intruding upon the contemporary one. Here, we find plenty of Poe influence, both using the atmospheric house of Usher to the fears of premature burial to an acute attention to the fragility of the human psychology in the face of relentless terror.
While Matheson would later turn from his horror genre work (much preferring the thriller and fantasy), there is a lot of his passion in this screenplay, as well as some of the themes and motifs that would populate many of the author’s other works. Unfaithfulness—infidelity, in particular—is a topic that certainly finds no shortage of use in Matheson’s work, recurring in novels like Hell House and A Stir of Echoes and Passion Play, as well as shorter works and several teleplays and scripts such as The Raven (1963) or A Comedy of Terrors (1963). Matheson finds something deeply disturbing about characters perverting society’s morals for their own end, and many of his villains are really just remorseless adulterers and narcissists. They do not replace the abandoned code with anything more than hedonism. Such is certainly the case here once the mystery plot is resolved and a grim history repeats itself.
In conjunction with the atmospheric horror yarn about a young man coming to a corrupt old castle and learning secrets that can (and do) break weak minds, there is a kind of funky glorification of artistry. House of Usher had several glorious paintings of the Usher family’s hideous lineage, which Price’s Roderick Usher recounted vile deed for deed. Here, we start with a splash of colors in the opening, colors that washed each other aside without quite mixing into the brown conglomeration they might and probably ought to. However, every frame of the opening half hour features artwork of some kind, be it tapestries that offer windows into a forgotten ancient world, portraits (made by Nicholas Medina, naturally) of his hideous inquisitor and torturer father as well as a lovely one of his deceased wife made decidedly eerie by her seeming lack of eyes. Corman seems to be positioning his paction as both a showcase for night gallery chills as well as one more ghoulish entry in the macabre art world that exists in this historic period. The artistry is not necessarily reflective of the 16th century that the story takes place in, but the anachronisms only go further to showcasing the lengthy timeline humanity has had with darker artistic efforts. From the 20th century that the picture was shot in, to the 16th century of the story itself, to times more ancient still. One tapestry might be bucolic in its direct subject matter, but the fraying edges and aging effects imposed upon it reflect the years it has hung in this spot lends it a morbid kind of commemoration of times long past and never to return.
Much of the cast is impeccable.
The always enjoyable Vincent Price delights in two roles. Much of the screen time is spent as the fragile, almost child-like Nicholas Medina, and Price sells this despite the fact that his height alone should have him towering over the rest of the cast. As well, in a flashback sequence, he plays the wonderfully wicked Sebastian Medina as well, torturing his wife Isabella (Mary Menzies) and Bartolome (Charles Victor) while a young Nicholas (Larry Turner) watches. The latter character feels like a bit of a dress rehearsal for the Prince Prospero character he will play in Masque of the Red Death.
Barbara Steele is always luminous on screen. Here, she does not arrive in person for a good third to half of the film, and then only in flashback. But her character’s portrait and unseen presence is felt throughout the picture. And when she comes on stage, she is glorious and terrifying as we expect from the queen of her era’s screen screams.
Luana Anders is charming as the sister who knows some of the story and finds out more. And Antony Carbone offers some dry reads of the material in his roles as source of information and member of the mystery.
John Kerr, however, plays things stiffer than necessary. His character has a stick up the posterior for much of the film (and rightfully so), and Kerr seems to want to make this a visible part of his performance by remaining ramrod straight and growling his lines. However, any nuance or characterization is overwhelmed by the artificiality. He doesn’t convince us that he’s a character so much as a stand in for the audience to get the information it needs to carry on.
Although some audiences will find the horrors of the picture rather quaint—it is not as gory or visually gruesome as the films and television get these days—there is nevertheless a wonderful evocation of gloomy, gothic atmosphere. Much of this would go on to be aped in other gothic horror pictures of the period, including Italian pictures like The Blancheville Monster (1963) and The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962). The stylish turns would influence countless horror pictures and dark dreamers that followed. Folks like Mario Bava would not repeat what Corman and company did here, but use it to inspire pictures like Kill, Baby … Kill! (1966)
Although critics at the time did not want to appreciate the picture on its own terms and its craftsmanship, American International Pictures would nevertheless reap plenty at the box office. Enough to green light six more Poe adaptations (well, technically five more Poe stories and an H. P. Lovecraft yarn shoved into Poe drag). The French got what Corman was doing, treating the young director to retrospective showings of these exemplary pictures. Despite whatever critical appraisals (and dismissals) they endured, The Pit and the Pendulum and the other Poe pictures ultimately won a young director an appreciation for giving entertaining material to his audiences. In his memoir, Corman recalls the picture taking in about ten times its budget–$2M on a $200k shoot. The film is so wonderfully produced that it appears to be a much bigger budget than what it really was. Sometimes smoke and mirrors really can make a memorable difference.
One of the technical cheats I rather love involves the actual pendulum itself. Built in full scale, it swings with such menace and reality. However, the actual device was slower than Corman wished. So, he claims to have removed every other frame from the shots of its swinging across camera in order to make it appear twice as fast as it was. A simple enough solution transforms the tool into nightmare fuel.
The Pit and the Pendulum has been re-evaluated, lauded, and analyzed by many a film critic since the days of its release. It even got an appearance on the Criterion Channel as a part of their Grindhouse Arthouse module. While the shocks might not be there for an adult audience versed in contemporary horror, it still has plenty of interesting material and some solid performances for a contemporary audience to enjoy.
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The Pit and the Pendulum is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD editions.
Writing for “The Atmosphere Is Heavy in Here: The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
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