Iron and Steele – The Pit and the Pendulum

It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing left to see.

– Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum¹

Is it possible to star in a film without appearing in it? For the first hour of The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961) its putative star Barbara Steele is visible only as a silent, wraithlike mirage in flashbacks, her image smeared with Vaseline and stained with would-be psychedelic colour filters. She is audible only as a disembodied voice, echoing down dank stone hallways wreathed in cobwebs and crawling with albino rats. Cast in the role of a dead woman, she is truly present only as a rather naff Gothic portrait that looks like a reject from Picasso in his Blue Period. Although Steele does appear eventually and even speaks a few lines, her role is an exercise in ‘stardom as absence’ to rival the title character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), who is spoken of unceasingly but never seen. Or the doomed Cousin Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1959), who exists as a natty white summer suit, worn by an uncredited Spanish actor and photographed exclusively from behind and in long-shot, while Elizabeth Taylor shrieks interminably into the camera.

In what was only her second major film role – after La Maschera del demonio (Mask of the Demon, Mario Bava, 1960) – it was already clear that Barbara Steele was anything but a conventional star. One of her most ardent fans, the feminist fantasy author Angela Carter, wrote a vampire tale called “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979) which was inspired by her chilly necrophiliac allure: “She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity…Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.”² A male movie critic like David J Hogan describes her in terms that are less poetic but no less unhealthily obsessed. As a living embodiment of “beauty vs. horror, sexuality vs. decay” Barbara Steele was seen as “the ideal dream girl of paranoiacs who imagine hideous menace lurking behind every pretty face.”³

A film that stars (or even purports to star) Barbara Steele does not so much grant her an opportunity to act as provide a setting that allows her to emit her own eerie and otherworldly glow. Early on in The Pit and the Pendulum, another token of her presence is her sapphire ring left behind on the keyboard of a spinet, after strange, ghostly music is heard in the dead of night. The gem is quite obviously paste. (This is a Roger Corman production, after all, and the budget ranges from minimal to nil.) But none of that matters as the camera swoops in for a close-up – and bathes it in a flood of crimson light. The cool blue depths begin to glow bright red, as if the jewel were actually bleeding. This ring is not just a bauble, a trophy. It is a distillation of Barbara Steele’s essence in lustrous crystalline form: at once radiant and lifeless, seductive and scarifying, aglow with pale moonlight and soaked in fresh-spilled blood.

None of this, needless to say, has anything whatsoever to do with Edgar Allan Poe’s original story from 1843, which concerns an unnamed prisoner confined to a cell by the Spanish Inquisition and terrorised by a gaping black pit, a swarm of hungry rats and an iron blade that swings down from the ceiling and threatens to slice him into something that resembles carpaccio. It is an allegory of claustrophobic doom and abrupt, unmotivated reprieve, “excruciatingly sensational as sound, motion and touch blank out thought.”⁴ A dazzling and entirely literal film of the story was made in French a few years later as Le Puits et le pendule (The Pit and the Pendulum, Alexandre Astruc, 1964) with Maurice Ronet as the much-tormented hero. In the last few minutes of the Corman film, it takes a good deal of manoeuvring to get the actor playing Steele’s brother (John Kerr) into anything like the same predicament. Kerr plays it with a sullen pout befitting a high-school football star who gets grounded on the night of a keg party.

What stands out, apart from the oblique and belated presence of Barbara Steele, is a gloriously grandstanding performance by Vincent Price as her increasingly deranged husband, whose father was the Grand Inquisitor who built the torture chamber that provides the necessary climax. Here as in his other Corman/Poe films, his acting is a mode of exaggeration that transcends mere theatrical ham. It has been said that certain female actors – Bette Davis in All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1950) or Meryl Streep in Florence Foster Jenkins (Stephen Frears, 2016) – resemble ‘drag queens’ without ever having been men. Conversely, Price may be the one male actor to show all the hallmarks of ‘drag’ without ever impersonating a woman. It says a lot that he and Steele are innately convincing as a couple, regardless of the fact we almost never see them together. They are united in their shared hyperreality.

In describing Corman’s trademark Gothic mise-en-scène, Carlos Clarens writes of how “film after film accentuates the putrid, the mouldy, the dusty”⁵ and The Pit and the Pendulum pushes that aesthetic to its extreme. While his film of The Masque of the Red Death (1964) is a prismatic rainbow of colour, The Pit and the Pendulum takes place in a world of stark greys, sombre browns and dark crepuscular blues. The exceptions are the blood-red candles that light the gloom, the blood-red hangings that drape Barbara Steele’s chamber – which has been preserved, Rebecca-like, exactly as it was before her death. The winding labyrinth of stairs and tunnels evokes the 18th century “Carceri” etchings by Giovanni Piranesi, described by Aldous Huxley as “metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt.”⁶ This description of those iconic images might almost be a write-up of the film itself.

In the oppressive visual web that is The Pit and the Pendulum, Barbara Steele is far more than just a mere star. Half-glimpsed, half-heard and only rarely seen, she is the deadly but seductive spider who lurks at its very heart.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 USA 78 mins)

Prod. Co: American International Pictures Prod/Dir: Roger Corman Scr: Richard Matheson, from the story by Edgar Allan Poe Phot: Floyd Crosby Mus: Les Baxter Ed: Anthony Carras Prod Des: Daniel Haller

Cast: Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, Luana Anders, Antony Carbone, Patrick Westwood

Endnotes