The Pit and the Pendulum

Shot in just 15 days by the master of bargain-basement horror, Roger Corman – and scripted by science fiction author Richard Matheson – this was also the second of his films to be inspired by the works of Poe. Replete with sexual motifs and almost a checklist of Freud's observations on 'the Uncanny', the narrative has Vincent Price as a tortured 16th century Spanish nobleman obsessed by the fear that his wife was entombed alive in his castle's torture chamber – a repetition of somewhat troubled family history. Barbara Steele, playing his wife, embodies all the vagaries and contradictions of Poe's quintessential female to perfection.

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