I wonder why it is that, in gothic horror, the brother and sister who occupy the ancient castle or mansion often have a relationship that would scan as husband and wife if one didn’t know otherwise.  Such is the case with 1961’s The Pit and the Pendulum.

Vincent Price and Luana Anders are the siblings in the old castle.  Anders has been there to tend to him following the death of his wife, played by Barbara Steele.  In flashbacks, we’ll see Steele obsessed with the old instruments of torture in the dungeon.  She seems to find it all very…stimulating.  Now there’s a girl who wanted to get seriously nasty.

Supposedly, an illness took her life.  Instead, what really happened is she managed to shut herself in the iron maiden, an act of incompetence that would be quite a notable accomplishment, as I can’t figure out how that is possible.  Somebody else, however, could have closed the doors on her, and there’s even the possibility floated that it could be the ghost of Price’s father.

You see, when Price was a wee lad, he was eavesdropping on his parents and his uncle in that dungeon, where he sees his father suddenly channel the cruel impulses of his ancestors and kill his wife and brother.  Has Price possibly snapped and now killed his own wife?

Given this is a Poe adaptation, there also has to be a premature burial element, regardless of whether it was in the source material.  I haven’t read the story, so I don’t know.  But I somehow doubt the original story has what we see here, which is the skeleton in Steele’s coffin still has eyeballs in its skull.  Think about it: all other soft tissue apparently dissolved except for those.  Maybe she had two glass eyes.

I found that twice as bizarre because Steele is famous for her own, inordinately large eyes.  Usually, when we say somebody has large eyes, we really mean their lids are shaped in away to reveal more of the sphere.  But I suspect she truly had disproportionately large eyeballs.  They are truly something.

She’s good in this film, but I wish there was more of her in it.  Price, as always, is perfectly cast for this kind of thing.  John Kerr, as the hero, is supposed to be British, but sounds very similar to Sgt. Joe Friday from the original Dragnet, and even barks orders at others as if he was that character.  Antony Carbone is the family physician and he also seems to have come from an area of Europe where they have Bronx accents. 

I want to single out Anders, who had a long career in TV and film, most notably in movies starring Jack Nicholson.  This came as a surprise to me, as she is astonishingly bad in this.  Her energy level could best be described as “heavily medicated”, and her stilted line readings were an endless source of amusement for me.  I usually cite whoever it was who played Sally in the Peanuts Christmas special as the worst voice acting I have heard, but Anders delivers every line as if she is Sally after chugging cough syrup.

What’s odd is she is better in a prologue shot for TV than she is at any given minute of the film proper.  Available as a bonus feature on this disc, she wakes up in an asylum where she was placed after nobody would believe her account of the events we are about to see.  The most baffling element of this scene is there’s a woman seated at the table in the foreground, and I swear that is Steele.  So, if Anders is seeing a dead woman in the nuthouse, then she truly has gone mad.

All of this moot, however, when all that matters is the final scene, where we have the titular plot devices.  This set piece is amazing and perfect in every regard.  The editing finely tunes the tension, resulting in a breathtaking series of shots where the suspense is so taut you could…well, cut it with some sort of sharp object.  A pendulum would probably be overkill.

But there is one more bit which actually concludes The Pit and the Pendulum, and it’s a doozy.  The very last shot is probably less than 10 seconds long, but it is a completely unexpected shock that knocked the wind out of me.  That the film is rather subpar until the one-two punch of the pit and this final moment makes their impact all the greater.

Dir: Roger Corman

Starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, Luana Anders

Watched as part of Shout Factory blu-ray box set The Vincent Price Collection