For the last few years, I have used October to give myself a viewing assignment: a different horror film each day. Now that I have escaped the real life horror of New Zealand’s public service, I intend to write a piece inspired by each film.
My third film is Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961).
When I sat down and read the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe (thanks to a gift from a colleague several workplaces ago), I was surprised by the the small scale of each of the stories. Like many millennials, my exposure to his work initially came from The Simpsons, especially the adaptation of The Raven in the first annual Treehouse of Horror anthology (RIP James Earl Jones). But even via this five-minute animated adaptation, his stories built up a reputation in my mind of a sort of grandeur and classiness that is not supported at all by his grimy little short stories and poetry. Sure, they’re clearly the work of a classically educated, if troubled, writer but they tend to be gnarly little accounts of unlucky characters who find themselves in very contained sticky situations (more often than not, buried alive).
I think this reputation is largely owed to Roger Corman’s (RIP) series of film adaptations of Poe’s work. Prior to this month, I’d only seen the (absolutely luscious) The Masque of the Red Death so decided to check out five of his other Poe adaptations, all starring Vincent Price.
Much like Masque, The Pit and the Pendulum is sumptuous. The only thing bigger than the sets is Price’s performance. The glorious campness he brings to so many roles may not read as sexually threatening as it did to mid-20th Century viewers but it fits the tone of the film like a glove. As he minces around this ornate Spanish Inquisition-era castle telling lie after lie to his bereaved guest, one can’t help but to root for him. The film loses its colour the further it descends into the castle with the ghastly images on the wall of the torture chamber bringing to mind the Ati Forberg illustrations of my version of the story.
Describing his first Poe adaptation, House of Usher, Corman said “The world of Poe was the world of the unconscious… I thought it could be recreated better within the artificial confines of a stage than it could be in broad daylight.” I can’t argue with the man’s results but the unconscious world of Poe’s own The Pit and the Pendulum (a few pages of text set entirely within a torture chamber) is a world away from Corman’s one. It’s really barely an adaptation at all, using the literary prestige of the source material as a jumping off point for a film that’s much closer to the gothic horniness of the films Hammer was putting out at a similar time.
To be fair, this is what makes the work of Edgar Allan Poe so ripe for the big screen. Each story features a scary central image that filmmakers throughout history have built vastly different films around and Roger Corman is far from the worst offender. Afterall, The Pit and the Pendulum features both a pit and a pendulum (albeit in the final 10 minutes). On the other hand, I have recently seen two films titled The Black Cat (by Edgar G. Ulmer in 1934 and Lucio Fulci in 1981). Both claim to be inspired by the Poe story of the same name but you really have to squint to see any sort of connective tissue. The earlier film barely features a cat at all!
And I like all of these films a great deal. In my view, some of the best adaptations are by artists who bring something completely new to the source material. Think of all the great films based on works by Roald Dahl where his misanthropic bigotry is improved by the human touch of a Danny DeVito of a Wes Anderson. Conversely, the only thing I can stomach written by Aaron Sorkin is The Social Network, in which his sickening belief in America is tempered by the cynicism of David Fincher.
If you want a faithful adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe story, then the Simpsons’ version is probably the closest you’re going to get.