The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) on Netflix
NR19611h 20mDramaHorrorMystery
In sixteenth-century Spain, Francis Barnard visits the castle of Nicholas Medina, husband of his sister Elizabeth, to ask how she died. Nicholas blames a blood disorder and gives no details.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.0/1018,907 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Months after the death of his sister Elizabeth, the Englishman Francis Barnard arrives at the Spanish castle where she lived with her husband, Nicholas Medina. Nicholas and his younger sister Catherine say Elizabeth died of a rare blood disorder, and Nicholas stays vague when Francis presses for details. At dinner the family physician, Doctor Leon, calls it heart failure brought on by fright. Francis wants to see the place where she died, and Nicholas leads him into the castle's torture chamber, built in the time of his father Sebastian, an agent of the Spanish Inquisition. Nicholas says Elizabeth grew obsessed with the devices there. Francis does not believe the story and refuses to leave until he learns the truth.
Cast
- Patrick Westwoodas Maximillian
- Mary Menziesas Isabella
- Larry Turneras Nicholas as a Child
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The pendulum's rubberized blade kept getting stuck on John Kerr's chest, so the crew switched to a sharp metalized blade covered in steel paint and wrapped a steel band around the actor's waist where the blade crossed, so it could slash his shirt without cutting him.
- Stephen King rated one of the film's shocks among the most significant horror sequences of the decade, and after seeing it in eighth grade he wrote an eight-page novelization and sold over thirty copies at his school for 25 cents each, until a teacher made him return the profits.
- Vincent Price was so infuriated by critic Stinson's negative review that he broke a 25-year determination never to answer a critic, writing that the review was meant only to hurt and humiliate him; he apparently never sent the letter, filing it in his "Letting Off Steam File".
- Corman had the flashbacks filmed in monochrome because he had read that some psychiatrists believe most people dream in black-and-white; cinematographer Crosby used wide-angle lenses and tilted camera angles, and the sequences were printed on blue-tinted stock then toned red, leaving blue highlights and red shadows.
- Roger Corman deleted a flashback in which Nicholas and Elizabeth rode horses and ate a picnic lunch before filming began, because his theory was that the Poe stories came from Poe's unconscious mind, which never sees reality; instead John Kerr arrives in a carriage against an ocean background.
- In 1968, when ABC-TV bought the film it was too short for a two-hour slot, so AIP had about five minutes of extra footage shot by Corman's production assistant Tamara Asseyev, with only Luana Anders available, her Catherine now confined to a lunatic asylum.
- Because the film's budget was low, art director Daniel Haller could not build the castle sets from scratch; he rented discarded pieces from other studios' backlots and property lofts, including archways, fireplaces and several torture machine props he found at Universal Studios.
