At the end of the 1961 movie based, somewhat loosely, on this story by our Dear Edgar, Elizabeth, played by the Queen of all Scream Queens Barbara Steele, is gagged and trapped in the iron maiden, watches helplessly through the bars as three survivors step back out through the door to the torture chamber, which is then is closed and locked forever. This final scene is filmed from her point of view and brings to a chilling end to the movie that is somewhat etched in my memory from when I saw it many years ago.

Aside the wonderful Barbara Steele, the movie also features the immortal Vincent Price turning in one of the great roles of his career. The movie is something of a masterpiece of the horror genre with many a horror trope born of it. The movie was the second of eight movies based on Poe’s stories to be adapted, in a series that began with ‘House of Usher’ made by American International Pictures between 1960 and 1964, all but one of which stared Vincent. ‘Pit’ was also the most successful movie the studio ever produced. Which isn’t bad for a movie that has only a passing relationship with the sorce material…

Then again don’t they all.

You are probably aware by now that I and fond of the occasional tenuous link. So here is a rather tenuous link to the rather tenuous bluffers fact at the end of the The Mystery of Marie Roget about Italian horror movies. After ‘the Pit and the Pendulum’ Barbara Steele went on to become a major star in those same Spaghetti horrors. Which much like Spaghetti Westerns had something of a boom period in the 60’s and early 70’s. Italian Horror was very much the place to be…

But all that aside, the movie version of The Pit and the Pendulum, wonderful though it is, merely draws a little upon the original story. Indeed the first two thirds of the movie has no direct relation to the story at all. In essence the movie merely takes some of the horrific imagery from the original text and reproduces it in celluloid. In fairness to the screenwriters involved it would have been hard to make a movie based solely on the original story not least because a great deal of the story takes place in pit black darkness, and in the head of the only real character in the story and unnamed Englishman who falls afoul of the Spanish Inquisition.

This is where Poe’s story begins, with the narrators trial, a trail he doesn’t fully understand, not least of of the things he doesn’t not understand is what he stands accused of. Aside been English in the Spanish city of Toledo. Whatever his crime he is sentenced to death, and then falls unconscious as he is dragged to the place of execution. He awakens in darkness and it is here the horror of his situation comes home to him.

The Pit and the Pendulum is very much a phycological horror story. Some might, not incorrectly, say it is the titular phycological horror story. It is written to raise the heart rate, to put the reader on edge. Something it does rather too well. It is a technique that has been copied by many, layering on the neurotic fear, one layer at a time. Building the sense of hopelessness. The condemned narrator is tortured with his ever nearing demise. first in the darkness of a room he feels his way around, in the center of which is a gaping maw if a pit, a pit that will not kill those who fall into it, but will break their bones and leaving them in a state of lingering agony for many days until they finally die.

By luck more than judgement he avoids that fate only to awaken strapped to a table, while above him a crescent blade swings back and forth with metronomic precision. and after each swing it drops one notch lower. The narrator is faced again with his demise, a demise that is unescapable as time is the ending of us all. The pendulum measuring out time is a dark metaphor. Time will kill us all…

Of course, he escapes this doom in the end, which is almost a shame. This ending doesn’t ruining the story by any means, but somehow the bleak darkness of the movies ending is better. the narrator of Poe’s story survives these tortures and is freed when the French take Toledo. Give me Barbara Steele locked in an iron maiden watching he last hope extinguished any day… But I am not a glass half full kind of writer, I am more the glass is empty and your dying of thirst kind of writer…

This is hardly the first horror story Poe wrote, and certainly not the last, it is however the one that raised the bar, that made the phycological elements of the telling more important than the story itself. Pervious tales had elements of horror layered over the story. In this story the horror is the story. It is dark and all consuming that way. It is why it can get under a readers skin. Why a reader starts to feel the terror of the narrator as their own. Up to this point in Poe’s career, the story was unique and it is a style that many modern writers have tried to emulate. Lovecraft build his whole career on attempts to emulate this story.

It is a perfect tale in that respect, in that it does exactly what Poe set out to do. It gets under your skin, and crawls about…

A FLOCK OF RAVENS FULL OF DARK INTENT

Should you read it: Yes, when you are alone, in a dark room , by a single lamp… Alone with your heart beat…

Bluffers fact: In 1969 our dear queen of all scream queens Barbara Steel married a writer call Poe. James Wilber Poe , a screenwriter known for ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ ‘Around the world in 80 days’ and ‘they Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ among others. He was not in any way related to our own Dear Edgar as far as I can tell. Which was something of a disappointment as I spent a good hour trying to find out if this was the case, just because it would have made a better bluffers fact…