“And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum
The last time I saw Roger Corman's version of The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) was over 16 years ago. I know this because I wrote a capsule review about it here back when I was using this blog as a notepad. It is not my favorite of the Poe films, but on re-watching it this morning I think it's the film that really nailed the Poe films in place as a cultural force. It's also a film that follows a rule of sequels insofar as its first half is exactly the plot of Corman's House of Usher, and some of the specific story beats are also identical. Corman isn't traditionally thought of as an auteur, but at least while he was making his Poe films, he totally was one. Once the film sheds House of Usher, it winds up gathering a number of other trends loose in the genre and creating a unified theory of Gothic filmmaking circa 1960. It's a hugely influential film, not least because it looks to the Italians and one-ups them at their own game. Corman even borrowed Barbara Steele to drive home the point.
The plot of The Pit and the Pendulum re-frames House of Usher as an elaborate con game. As in House of Usher, an outsider arrives at a crumbling manor house, this time in Spain a few years after the Inquisition. This is the castle of Don Nicholas Medina and his sister, Catherine. The outsider is one Francis Barnard, the brother of Don Medina's wife, Elizabeth. He has heard second hand that his sister is dead and has come to investigate the circumstances. As in House of Usher he is at first refused entry. The master of the house is not receiving visitors. Catherine overrules the manservant and brings Barnard in. Catherine guides Barnard to his sister's tomb, and they are abruptly greeted by Don Medina himself. He has been maintaining an "apparatus" down in the old dungeons. Don Medina is a wreck. The death of his wife has unnerved him and he mopes around the castle in mourning. Barnard does not buy the story he has been told about his sister's death, and the arrival of the attending doctor does not ease his skepticism. Elizabeth, the doctor says, died of a heart attack brought on by extreme fright. Meanwhile, Catherine fills in the family history to explain her brother's nervous condition. Don Medina's father, Sebastian, was an inquisitor who believed his wife was unfaithful to him with his own brother, Bartolome. He imprisoned them both in the torture chamber below the castle and tortured them both to death. Young Nicholas witnessed it all. This embarrasses Barnard, who regrets suspecting Don Medina. Even so, there are strange things happening at the castle. A harpsichord is heard late at night, seemingly with no player. The maid claims to have heard Elizabeth's voice in her old bed chamber. After Elizabeth's chamber has been vandalized, Barnard is convinced that Don Medina is unconsciously acting out as Elizabeth's ghost himself. For his part, Don Medina is certain that Elizabeth haunts him because she was buried alive. The doctor orders an exhumation, and the household discovers that Don Medina's fears are true. Catherine then tells Barnard that Nicholas's mother was not, in fact, tortured to death, but buried alive as well. Nicholas is lured into the dungeons through the castle's secret passage by a voice that sounds like Elizabeth, only to make a horrifying discovery. It drives him mad and he takes up the identity of his father, revealing his father's most terrible creation down in the pit: a razor-sharp pendulum, and he has mistaken Barnard for his uncle Bartolome in his madness...
AIP heads Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson had no intention of making a series of Poe films at the outset, but when House of Usher struck the mother lode at the box office, there was no question that they would make another one. Corman had two scripts ready to go. One of them was The Masque of the Red Death, which Corman delayed because of its similarities to Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Arkoff and Nicholson greatly preferred The Pit and the Pendulum because it was heavier on the scares and easier to hype to a drive-in audience there for the red meat. As a commercial decision, this was the correct way to go. They gave Corman $300,000 to make the film, up from the $200,000 for House of Usher, but still not a large budget. Corman, for his part, sent Daniel Haller out to other studios to buy up sets that were being retired or that were just waiting around in scene docks. He paid pennies on the dollar for these and Haller worked magic with them. This film looks many times more expensive than House of Usher and outclasses some of the rip-offs of Corman's films that were already starting to appear. The look of the early Poe films set the benchmark for such films, but they often lacked Haller and cameraman Floyd Crosby, who were unusually creative. And Pit and the Pendulum was wide. Its aspect ratio was 2.35:1 Panavision, which puts it in the same epic visual register as the likes of Spartacus or Ben-Hur. The widescreen photography didn't cost much extra and made for a film that looked like many times more expensive than it actually was. Corman's imitators didn't understand any of this. No one else coming out of low budget genre cinema in the late 1950s/early 1960s had Corman's instincts and taste.
The production as a whole finds Corman flexing his muscles a bit. He jailbreaks some of his dream sequence effects and applies them to the blank reality of his story. One particular shot of Don Medina after he loses his mind not only tints the frame red, it distorts the image, skewing it sideways. And he continues to compose the frame in depth. I complained about the way Corman put the camera in a fireplace in The Masque of the Red Death, and here he does it again with the same intent of foretelling perdition for its characters. He moves the camera a lot more than he did in House of Usher, which shows off the space in which the story takes place to advantage. Corman and Haller are also creative with special effects. This isn't really a special effects movie, per se, but Corman has greatly enlarged the space around the pendulum so that it really is eye-deceivingly vast. In close shots, the walls of the set have been painted to suggest the souls of the damned. In wide shots, Corman has used matte paintings to extend the space. This is vastly more convincing than the matte painting of the castle rising above the shots of Big Sur that begin the movie. The early Poe films preferred an "on-set" frame of reality both for budgetary reasons and because Corman thought of interiors as a stand-in for the unconscious mind. The shots of churning surf outside are a conspicuous exception to this. Corman thought the footage suggested psychological chaos. I may grouse about the matte painting for the castle, but I like the composition of the title card for this film enough that I've included it at the head of this post. All of the Corman Poe films had striking graphic design to go with Les Baxter's atonal scores. Corman also spends more money on actors for this film. This has a cast twice the size of House of Wax, even if the secondary characters are not as charismatic as its leads.
Vincent Price was solidifying his reputation as the Prince of Horror by 1961, so it's a surprise that his character early in the film is so utterly pathetic. This is not a replay of Roderick Usher, even though Medina's role in the story is essentially the same. Instead, we get a man who has been ground down, and whose ultimate fate is not his fault. He is not a classic Gothic hero with a fatal moral flaw. If anything he's a victim, his mugging as the insane Don Sebastian not withstanding. The change from whipped puppy Nicholas to demonic torturer Sebastian prefigures the possession theme in The Haunted Palace. Corman was always frugal, even with character traits. What's unusual about The Pit and the Pendulum is that it is the first of Price's films to pair him opposite an equally ascendant horror actor in Barbara Steele. This was the first major film she made after Black Sunday, and Corman recognized her potential as a femme fatale immediately. Her presence is all the more striking for being largely absent from the film until the last twenty minutes or so (she appears in the flashback sequences, too, but she has no dialogue in those). Steele acts as a much darker version of Laura Hunt from the film noir, Laura. She's a presence staring out of a painting that has a significant role in the plot before returning from the dead, so to speak. Corman and Matheson surely knew the allusion given that Laura was Price's favorite of his own films. Price and Steele wouldn't make another film together, but both of them moved to the forefront of the genre after this picture. The rest of the film's cast gets swamped by these two.
This is among the least faithful of Corman's Poe adaptations. Almost everything in the first two acts is invented out of whole cloth. Corman's intent was to use the actual short story for the last act while padding the material with faux Poe in the first two. In this film, practically nothing of the story survives except for the title device, put to different use here. In rereading the Poe story for this review, I note that the Stuart Gordon film from 1991 is closer to the Poe original, though that's a relative thing. Corman and Richard Matheson don't even bother with the Napoleonic setting, preferring to recycle the story beats of their previous collaboration. When the film ultimately storms off in its own direction at roughly the fifty minute mark, it takes advantage of its position post-Psycho by reworking one of Hitchcock's key scenes when the cast discovers that Elizabeth has indeed been buried alive. The image they present is, if anything, even more grotesque than Mrs. Bates's slow turn in the flailing lamplight in Psycho. This scene was a shock in its day, and a shock even when I first saw the film in the early 1980s. Of all of Corman's Poe films, this one is the meanest. Other films that have placed major shocks early in their running time have been harmed by their eagerness. I always think of Val Lewton's The Leopard Man when filmmakers try this gambit, and how no ending that film can possibly concoct is more horrible than the stalking of Theresa Delgado in the first act. This was a danger that Corman took on by placing the exhumation before the one hour mark. It's a testament to the design of the film that its final effect is even more ghastly than the exhumation scene. The payoff has a whiff of E. C. Comics to it, with its unfaithful femme fatale getting her poetically just comeuppance in the end. Presumably, Corman saw possibilities in Barbara Steele that Mario Bava only guessed at. The AIP poster for Bava's Black Sunday invites the viewer to "STARE INTO THESE EYES!" but this film takes such an act of looking to another level. The last shot of Barbara Steele's eyes carries a multi-megawatt jolt even now. It is so sharp and so brutal an ending that no one who has seen the film ever forgets it. I certainly never have.
Welcome once again to the October Horror Movie Challenge. This year's challenge is once again linked to my friend Dr. AC's annual Scare-a-thon. This year's beneficiary is International Rescue Committee, which helps mitigate humanitarian crises all over the world. The crisis in Gaza is currently foremost in their efforts. Donations at the link.
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