‘Pit and The Pendulum’ or — Nobody Expects The Spa… Oh, You Get The Idea.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: It’s the 16th century and a young man arrives at a foreboding and ominous castle. There he meets Vincent Price who seems to have a personality liable and prone to flux, possibly due to a family darkness that hangs over both Price and his sister. Soon people are refusing to eat because of existential ennui, secret doors are discovered, bloodied hands open coffins from within, there’s red candles, cobwebs, the dead might not be so dead after all and all this whilst ol’ Vincent, playing multiple roles, gradually loses his shit. This must be a Corman/Poe film! Except this time the castle also doesn’t burn to the ground.
None of these are criticisms and part of the fun of watching these films is just how Corman, and screen-writer Richard Matheson, keep finding new slants for all these ideas. Like a lot of pasta dishes, it’s amazing how many unique variations they can concoct out of the same basic ingredients. And ‘Pit and The Pendulum’ (1961 — oh, and it seems one of the first things to be sliced off was the definite article in the title) certainly has its own distinct and nightmarish personality.
Once again, this tale is an infernal contraption driven by repressed sexual trauma with the childhood witnessing of adultery and its retribution. This trauma must be kept hidden, like vast terrifying machines gathering dust in the cellar of our subconscious; yet can we also resist the urge to keep from tending them, keeping them functioning through some perversion that they might one day be activated again? Most traumatic experiences secretly desire revenge so let’s keep those blades nice and sharp just in case we get the chance to use them.
Not that it’s all doom and gloom as you can almost feel events teetering on the brink and wanting plunge into the pit of full-blown comedy, given the suitable nudge. For example, when Francis arrives at the castle looking for his sister he is informed that his brother–in-law (Price) is resting in his room, never mind that from behind his door is coming the most horrific screeching and grinding noises. And this is him resting? Maybe he has a squeaky mattress. Likewise the line “But my brother doesn’t play the harpsichord!” gets me every time. I can understand why Corman took Poe into comedy territory after a couple of films playing it straight as the temptation must have been too great to resist.
Yet this is still, first and foremost, a scary and unnerving film with Corman building the terror with his incredibly efficient and effective directing (he really knew how to compose a shot) and even though the story starts quite slow it builds to one of the best endings in his cycle of Poe films. And it’s not just Poe that Corman is riffing on with a number of other influences brought in including human pin-cushion Barbara Steele from Mario Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’ (1960) getting punctured by spikes yet again, ‘Psycho’ (1960) and even a large helping of Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques’ (1955). ‘Pit’ would then go on to be hugely influential itself, especially in terms of Italian horror, specifically Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’ (1975). And let’s not forgot (even though I’d like to) the ‘Saw’ franchise and all those “murder by various contraptions” flicks that took the central idea and ran it into the ground.
But it is the sense of macabre style, narrative clarity and that elusive élan that can come from working fast and quick that distinguishes ‘Pit and The Pendulum’. It might not be my favourite of Corman’s Poe cycle films but it’s a damn good one and one that, like the rest, has a deceptive psychological depth to it. It’s not the physical chasm below us or the glistening metal razor above us that we should fear but that dark pit of our soul and the vengeful, thirsty blade that swings inside all of us… actually hang on, on second thoughts it could be the 30ft swinging metal blade. Yeah, that’s definitely scarier.
