Book-To-Movie: Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’

 

Credit: Wikimedia Commons /Arthur Rackham

Warning: This review may contain spoilers. 

It’s time for our monthly Book-To-Movie! For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Normally, we do a Book-To-Movie every fourth weekend of the month. However, because it was necessary for me to make a sudden change of story and movie for review, I had to postpone this month’s post in the series to this fifth weekend. My apologies.

This month’s book and movie review is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the 1961 movie adaptation directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. I truly believe that no one can adapt any of Poe’s gothic horror stories to film in a way that does those stories justice. However, many of Corman’s films come close to doing so. One of his best adaptations of Poe’s short stories is “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Why this movie adapts Poe’s short story so well is mostly due to the tension and surreal style of filming. 

'The Pit and the Pendulum' Short Story

This is one of Poe’s scariest and most intense tales. The protagonist is the narrator, who, as with many of author’s narrating protagonists, is not named. The story begins with the narrator having been brought to a trial in the Spanish Inquisition in which the judges condemn him to a torturous death. He soon finds himself on a block of stone that rises from a deep pit. Above hangs a pendulum that soon descends toward him. He does everything in his power to escape but escape is seemingly hopeless. He manages to free himself from his bindings but there is nothing bridging the pit and so he has no way off without falling to his death. Things get even worse when the metallic walls turn scorching hot and move towards him pushing him closer to the block’s edge. 

This tale is more of a an in-the-moment experience than it is a full story that connects the main character with a background. Again, we are not given his name. We also are not told why he has been brought before the Inquisition. It’s a story that seems to be about an isolated event and so a story without any surrounding context. Which in this case is a good thing. That’s because the story is about isolation. The protagonist has no one, for the most part, advocating for him. He is first brought before his black cloaked judges and oppressors and then finds himself alone, with only rats nearby, in the darkened pendulum chamber on a block of stone in the middle of a seemingly bottomless pit. In this and other ways, the story has a dream-like, surreal quality. The narrator’s whole existence is as if it’s apart from all humanity and in some sort of hell. 

The Movie

Corman’s movie adaptation of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, like his other adaptations of Poe’s fiction, expands on the original story. Because the original story is a short tale and the movie a full-length feature, scenes and characters are added. Even so, he follows the original story’s basic plot well. In this version, the protagonist is Francis Barnard (played by John Kerr) who travels from England to Spain to pay his respects to his recently deceased sister, Elizabeth, the late wife of Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price). When he arrives at the Medina estate, a broken-up Don Medina tells him that Elizabeth died of a disease. However, Barnard doesn’t believe him and so suspects him of being behind her death. Later he learns that Elizabeth died of fright of the castle due to its horrible history but even this he doesn’t believe.

The horrible history of the castle? Don Medina’s father was an Inquisitionist. Medina claims to be cursed by the evil his father did to the Inquisition victims in the torture chamber that lies under the family’s castle. He also believes to be haunted by the ghost of his late wife (played by ‘60s scream queen Barbara Steele).

 

Like many of Corman’s horror movies, the ending is ironic and the characters aren’t who they at first seem to be and end up betraying friends and loved ones. Not only does the ghost of Don Medina’s wife come back to haunt him but the spirit of his own father comes back to possess him. This and betrayal lead to an attempted murder by pendulum toward the end. 

The tension of the film is built up well like that of the original short story. Only instead of that tension coming from one character, it comes from two: Don Medina and Barnard. It comes from Don Medina when he thinks he is going mad from the guilt he feels for his father’s tormenting of innocent victims and from himself believing that he may had unknowingly killed his own wife by entombing her alive. We also learn that when Medina was a child he witnessed his mother’s murder by his father in the torture chamber. The tension also comes from Barnard because of his suspicion of Medina and his ambition to find out the truth about his sister’s death. The conflict between the two characters itself raises that tension even more. 

Many of Corman’s Poe films are filmed in a surreal style conveying Poe’s manner of storytelling. “Pit and the Pendulum” is definitely one of these films. Of the gothic settings and scenes in this movie, the pendulum chamber is the most gothic and terrifying and rightfully so. After all, at least as far as settings go, it’s the black heart of the movie. As the pendulum is lowered toward its victim, in this case Barnard, a continuous mural of black cloaked, Inquisitionists lines the chamber, the figures seeming to glare with their red, demonic eyes down at him. These figures seem to replace the Inquisitionists that are present at the beginning of Poe’s story. The images of the eyes themselves are taken from those in the original story that also stare from the walls at the victim only the figures the eyes belong to are vague to the narrator.  

The surrealism is also generated from the dream-like sequences in the film. These sequences are filmed in a darkened, monochromatic colour, such as green, and are tilted at odd angles—very characteristic of Corman’s horror movies. With imagery such as the mural of black robed figures and the dream-like sequences, the movie conveys the surrealistic style of Poe really good.

Other Movie Adaptations of ‘The Pit’

There have been several other movie adaptations of “The Pit and the Pendulum” both before and after Corman’s. Many of them have either been made by other countries and not released in U.S. theatres or have been made for TV. The latest U.S. movie adaptation for the big screen was a 1991 version that was actually produced in collaboration with Italian producers. I haven’t seen this adaptation but it seems to be more historical-oriented and focuses more on a Spanish witch prosecution. 

There cannot be another Edgar Allan Poe in any medium of storytelling whether prose fiction, film, live theatre or whatever else. His work and style cannot be reproduced because it is too much from his own mentality. However, Corman conveys that style best in which the way he conveys it is a style of his own. Still, the movie can’t substitute for the original prose work. I’ll always prefer to read the original story over watching the film, but the film is one that I would have on my DVD shelf like a book of Poe’s short stories is on my book shelf.

Have you read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”? Have you seen any of the movie adaptations?

Until next time . . .