#pit and the pendulum
I am not adept at taking decent selfies. Have a clear shot of bunnies instead, below. From when I was clearing out my camera roll.
Celebrated by doing more or less the same stuff I do every week:
- slept in on a Sunday thanks to blackout curtains
- drank out of an Edward Gorey mug
- wore last night’s Killstar t-shirt until I bathed behind a Gashycrumb Tinies shower curtain
- queued a list of male goth characters (check out the female one)
- listened to dark wave
- read a murder mystery (A Room Full of Bones)
- currently watching classic horror (The Pit and the Pendulum) with fam
Forever and always, Edgar Allan Poe remains ho-rror’s greatest author. With all due respect to cosmic Howard Phillips and kingly Stephen, Poe’s lugubrious literature is unmatched in both influence and fear. He is the Shakespeare of scare; the Tolstoy of terror. Besides maybe Dracula, no other name conjures the demonic and devilish quite like Edgar Allan Poe. To goths, ghouls, and those who find comfort in the creepy, Master Poe is a kindred spirit. Lugosi avenged him in 1935, Jeffrey Combs played him on stage, and the Munsters owned a pet raven in his ho-nor. Even Homer Simpson quoted the Tomahawk Man in his inaugural Halloween special. Poe is the patron saint of the macabre, and we salute him now with a truly sensational film based on his work, 1961’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
We could go on and on about this particular film. Does it star a deliciously hammy Vincent Price? Indeed. Is the stainless Barbara Steele simply unforgettable in a part we won’t dare spoil? You better believe it. The visuals? Spectacular. The script? Brilliant. We will certainly discuss all of that in the future, but since Poe’s birthday was this month, we want to focus on the Poe-tic aspects. And if you ask us, this is the best cinema has to offer when it comes to Poe.
Roger Corman’s Poe films adapted the gloomy writer’s work with varying degrees of accuracy. Some were fairly close to the original stories (“The Masque of the Red Death”), others used the source material as a jumping-off point (“The Raven”), and one was actually a Lovecraft tale with a Poe tit-le (“The Haunted Palace”). Is “Pit…” on the faithful end? Well… sorta. If we are talking purely on terms of plot, Corman’s “Pit…” only resembles Poe’s in the sense that it includes a pit and a pendulum. However, Poe’s yarn was vague and short: there is simply no feasible way to eXXXpand it into a full-length feature. Screenwriter Richard Matheson ingeniously adapted not just the eponymous tale but the pervading themes of Poe’s entire bibliography.
Corman’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” may not adhere to that particular piece, but to say it ignores Poe is downright false. It’s undeniably pastiche more than adaptation, yet it captures the essence of Poe better than many slavish retellings. Love is lost, madness grows, and even a potentially mundane sequence is tinged with a certain graveyard poetry. There are those who may find the film’s brand of ho-rror a bit melodramatic, but who was more melodramatic than Poe? In the telltale storyteller’s tradition, the Gothic here is as grand as it is melancholic.
You will likely encounter movies that follow Poe’s words to a greater eXXXtent, but I doubt there is one that feels more like Poe than this ‘60s chiller-diller. As one of those weird Wednesday Addams kids who grew up on Poe’s work, I can tell you that this film evoked the same sense of wonderful dread I felt reading those tales of mystery and imagination. Through Corman’s filmic fright, Poe lives!
Here it is, creeps:
