The Pit and the Pendulum

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) is a Gothic horror you can watch online on iFILM — Roger Corman's adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's story, with Vincent Price at his most unsettling as the tormented nobleman Nicolas Medina.

Francis Barnard arrives at a clifftop castle to find out how his sister died. Her husband Nicolas gives no straight answers. He barely speaks, barely sleeps — a man undone by the memory of what his father, a Spanish Inquisitor, did to their own family in the dungeons below. Now Nicolas is convinced history has repeated itself, and the castle's sealed torture chamber holds the truth.

For its time, the film's saturated reds, slow-swinging blade and mood of inescapable dread were genuinely bold — Corman stretched a thin Poe story into a visual template that American horror would borrow for years. It plays less like a plot and more like a slow descent into someone else's nightmare. Stream The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) online on iFILM.