The scares and ghoulishness here are ahead of their time, with the titular pendulum proving a perfectly nightmarish set piece.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 20, 2024

The sickening dread this film builds up during a climactic sequence is eventually subverted, but The Pit and the Pendulum still conjures up one last stomach-sinking image to sear into memory before it ends.

| Mar 4, 2024

It’s a moody, stylish, grand looking piece of Gothic horror, even more lavish than his first Poe production... and once again shot in rich, bleeding color and CinemaScope by the great Floyd Crosby.

| Aug 19, 2023

Roger Corman is legendary as a B-movie producer, but his less-heralded gifts as a director are displayed in this 1961 entry in his series of fantasia on themes from Edgar Allan Poe, staged with an elegance that belies the low budget and lurid content.

| Oct 30, 2020

A richly realized, full-blooded ode to horror, dead dreams, duplicity, infidelity, mass-murder and cyclical madness.

| Jul 13, 2020

Exemplary horror. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2020

Roger Corman has evoked a genuinely chilling mood of horror.

| Mar 18, 2020

There are few other cinematic experiences that can imitate the specific pleasure of watching Vincent Price skulk through darkened corridors holding a candelabra.

| Jul 25, 2019

[NEW 2024 REVIEW] Delicious, devilish fun.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 31, 2013

Who wants understatement in a film with dungeons and giant blades?

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2013

The film ends up being very nearly as good [as House of Usher], and better in some respects.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 9, 2011

The title calls out for lustrous Freudian hysteria, and Corman delivers

| Mar 15, 2010

The result is a physically stylish, imaginatively photographed horror film which, though needlessly corny in many spots, adds up to good exploitation.

| May 28, 2008

Vincent Price lording over a giant torture pendulum! Awesome.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2007

It reminds us that flat, colorless character actors look really flat and colorless when sharing a scene with Price.

| Apr 5, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 24, 2005

Corman estabelece uma boa atmosfera de tensão, sendo auxiliado na tarefa pela bela direção de arte e por um Vincent Price mais do que inspirado.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 21, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 5, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2003