The Pit and The Pendulum – a scene lives on in my mind

The 1960s had so many scary movies. They were not full of blood and gore; rather, they took you to the edge and let your imagination fill it in. Vincent Price and Ray Milland starred in so many. My friends and I would go to double features for $.50 cents ($.25 per movie). Godzilla or King Kong didn't scare me. I always felt sorry for the creatures who were being shot at.

The dark, eerie movies that were the precursor to Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and The Outer Limits.

If you want to be frightened, watch The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, and John Kerr. It is set in 16th century Spain where Francis, a young Englishman is trying to find out what happened to his sister, Elizabeth, who died mysteriously.

I was quite young but loved scary movies and never had nightmares, so I was allowed to see them. The movie is eerie and dark, and the castle is creepy without special effects or CGI. Vincent Price plays Elizabeth’s husband and, together with his younger sister, Catherine, concocts a story about the death of his wife that doesn't make sense. Francis insists that he is staying until he finds out the truth.

Nicholas takes Francis to the castle’s torture chamber and says that Elizabeth was totally obsessed with the torture devices, so much that she locked herself into the “iron maiden.” The story continues with Nicholas recounting a horrific tale of his horrid father, who was an agent of the Spanish Inquisition. He tortured Nicholas’ mother, Isabella, while Nicholas was secretly watching, and then entombed her alive.

The many scenes of the torture chamber and those torture instruments, the iron maiden, and the swinging slicing-knife pendulum are frightening. Catherine saves Francis from being cut in half by the pendulum after Nicholas ties him under it. Her now insane brother falls to his death. Catherine vows that no one will ever see the torture chamber again.

But the climax has stayed with me all these years, having seen the movie as a 10-year-old. The movie ends (as I recall) with a woman locked in the iron maiden, her eyes silently following visitors walking past her, and unable to scream for help. The image has never left me.

Elizabeth was gagged inside the iron maiden, and no one but her dead husband, Nicholas, knows it! AND….Catherine now plans to seal up the torture chamber.

Shivers creep up me as I remember it and write this story. See the movie!

           Copyright © 9/14/2026 by Andrea O. Corwin