Book-To-Movie: 1991 Film Version of Poe's 'Pit and the Pendulum'

Credit: Wikipedia

It's the fourth Monday of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This is our first BTM since our new post day began two weeks ago! A couple years back, we did a Book-To-Movie Review of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Pit and the Pendulum". The story’s movie adaptation we went over was the 1961 version directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. In this post’s BTM, we're going to review the 1991 adaptation directed by Stuart Gordon ("Re-Animator", a movie that’s also based on another famous horror writer's work). Gordon's movie adaptation of "The Pit and the Pendulum" does a good job with the setting and creature effects but lacks the horror element. 

I won't talk about Edgar Allen Poe's short story as much here since I do that in detail in the January 2021 Book-To-Movie which you can check out for yourself. So, I'll just stick to a brief synopsis here. Poe's "Pendulum" is about the narrator, who is unnamed, finding himself a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition and gets sentenced to a torturous death. He struggles to escape the inquisitional dungeon and its terrors which climax in the titular device. The Roger Corman adaptation we reviewed was about a noble (Vincent Price) who believes to be haunted for his father's participation in the Inquisition. Gordon's adaptation takes kind of a big twist--it involves witch accusations. A young woman, Maria (Rona De Ricci), is accused of witchcraft, as faithful as she is to God, and is sentenced to be tortured into confessing it to the inquisitionist Torquemada (Lance Henriksen). Her husband (Jonathan Fuller) attempts to rescue her by smuggling himself into the dungeon and so they both must try to escape the horrors of the Inquisition. 

Like the short story and Corman's movie adaptation, Gordon’s version climaxes in the pendulum scene which is the closest it comes to fidelity to the short story. The movie does a great job depicting the morbid setting of the dungeon with its cold stone walls, dark chambers and skeletons laying or hanging around (literally) here and there. The creature effects of risen corpses are convincing for the early ‘90s. However, the acting is a bit inconsistent.

The real problem I had with the movie is that, except for the last fifteen minutes or so, the fright tactics found in any good horror movie were too few. There was not enough suspense or suddenly-revealed irony to raise a viewer’s adrenaline. Along with this, the movie was too swashbuckling romantic adventure with too many humourous reactions from the characters and not enough psychological horror, an element crucial to Poe's stories, including “Pendulum”. This last problem with the movie is far too unlike Corman's adaptation. 

Gordon's "Pit and the Pendulum" is an okay film if you have the patience to wait about an hour and 15 minutes for the horror to begin (which is close to the time the movie ends). But its delayed horror element makes it no match for Corman's version and definitely no match for Poe's short story both are based on.

Newsletter Update

I’m working on the book-in-progress (BIP) portion of the newsletter, “Night Creatures’ Call”, for March. In this edition I’ll be talking about the new short story that I’ve been working on for my upcoming book of science fiction horror, “Bad Apps”. I’m shooting to release the newsletter this Wednesday. Check for further updates at my Facebook page. If you haven’t subscribed to “Night Creatures’ Call”, you can do so for free here. 

Have you read Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, or seen either the Roger Corman or Stuart Gordon movie adaptations? 

Until next time . . .