The Pit And The Pendulum Poster Original First Release
Poster artwork inspired by artist Reynold Brown.This film was originally banned in Australia in the sixties and thus it was not released for the first time until after 1971 with the associated poster when the censorship ratings changed. Roadshow Australia obtained the rights to the package of AIP films that were finally passed by the censors which allowed them to obtain this film.
The Pit And The Pendulum is a 1961 horror film in Panavision and Pathe Color directed by Roger Corman, starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, and Luana Anders. The screenplay by Richard Matheson was loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story of the same name. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, the story is about a young Englishman who visits a forbidding castle to investigate his sister's mysterious death. After a series of horrific revelations, apparently ghostly appearances and violent deaths, the young man abecomes strapped to the titular torture device by his lunatic brother-in-law during the film's climactic sequence. The film was a critical and box-office hit which led to a further six Poe stories adapted to film,five of them starring Price.Film critic Tim Lucas and writer Ernesto Gastaldi have both noted the film's strong influence to Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975) and Stephen King has described one of Pit's major shock sequences as being among the most important moments in the post-1960 horror film genre.
