The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film)
The Pit and the Pendulum is a 1961 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 forbidding 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.
Original 1961 theatrical release poster by Reynold Brown
Vincent Price and Barbara Steele
Barbara Steele as Elizabeth Medina, in one of the film's tinted, nightmarish flashback sequences
A cinema marquee advertising The Pit and the Pendulum in Chicago, Illinois, in 1961
Roger William Corman was an American film director, producer, and actor. Known under various monikers such as "The Pope of Pop Cinema", "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult", he was known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film. Many of Corman's films were low-budget cult films,
Corman in 1978
Corman in 2006
Drive-in advertisement from 1957 for the double feature, Attack of the Crab Monsters and Not of This Earth. Corman films were popular on the drive-in circuit, and generally marketed towards a teenage audience.
Barboura Morris and Susan Cabot in a scene from The Wasp Woman (1959)