40 Fun Facts About The Pit and the Pendulum

Which animals gnaw through the strap binding the narrator in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum?

Rats swarm over him by the hundreds, some pressing their cold lips to his own, while he forces himself to lie perfectly still.

Which feared tribunal sentences the narrator to death at the start of The Pit and the Pendulum?

The Spanish Inquisition of Poe's tale owes little to history: the elaborate tortures he describes have no parallel in the real tribunal's records.

Which horror star played the tormented Nicholas Medina in the 1961 film of The Pit and the Pendulum?

Vincent Price also played Sebastian Medina, a notorious agent of the Inquisition, and the film out-earned House of Usher, its predecessor in the series.

Which poem made The Pit and the Pendulum author Edgar Allan Poe a sensation in January 1845?

The Raven became his most famous poem, and he later explained, step by step, how he built it in the essay The Philosophy of Composition.

After the pendulum fails, how do the Inquisition's agents try to force the narrator into the pit?

Red-hot walls close in until he has not an inch of floor to stand on, and he is toppling at the brink when the rescue comes.

In The Pit and the Pendulum, the descending blade is set to cross which part of the bound narrator?

His heart is the target, and he works out that the blade will merely fray his clothing for several minutes before it cuts flesh.

Which thirst-inducing food becomes the narrator's escape tool in The Pit and the Pendulum?

Spiced meat was served deliberately: his water pitcher had been taken away, so every mouthful made his thirst worse.

In The Pit and the Pendulum, which painted figure, usually shown with a scythe, holds the blade?

Father Time normally carries a scythe, so the narrator takes the swinging blade for part of the painting until he sees it move.

What shape is the razor-edged steel blade that swings in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum?

A crescent about a foot across, horns pointing upward, hangs from a heavy brass rod; the narrator also calls it a scimitar.

On waking in total darkness in The Pit and the Pendulum, what does the narrator fear he is inside?

A tomb is his first thought, so he gropes forward with hands outstretched, relieved when they meet only empty air.

The Pit and the Pendulum author Edgar Allan Poe died mysteriously in which East Coast city?

Baltimore is where he was found semiconscious and in great distress in October 1849; the cause of his death has never been explained.

The Pit and the Pendulum author Edgar Allan Poe is widely credited as a pioneer of which genre?

Detective fiction in English is usually dated to his 1841 tale The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which introduced the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin.

What does the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum set down in the dark to mark his starting point?

A strip of his robe, torn from the hem, serves as the marker; the same ragged hem later trips him and saves his life.

What happens to the blade in The Pit and the Pendulum the moment the narrator slips his bonds?

It is drawn up and away through the roof by an unseen force, proving to him that his every movement is being watched.

Which instruments are heard in the final moments of The Pit and the Pendulum, just before the rescue?

Trumpets sound amid a hum of human voices and a grating like a thousand thunders, the first sign that soldiers have stormed the prison.

In The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator calls the pit a symbol of which dreaded place?

Hell is his own comparison, and rumor held the pit to be the Ultima Thule, the farthest extreme, of all the Inquisition's punishments.

What does the condemned narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum briefly see as angels sent to save him?

Tall candles, seven of them, stand on a table in the court; as he sickens they turn into spectres with heads of flame that offer no help.

Which city, famed for its sword steel, holds the dungeon in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum?

Toledo, whose steel was once rated the best in Europe, had a permanent Inquisition tribunal from 1485, and the narrator recalls dark rumors of its dungeons.

Unlike many Edgar Allan Poe tales, The Pit and the Pendulum contains no trace of which element?

The supernatural never appears: Poe builds the terror from real sensations such as darkness, thirst, heat and the sound of the blade.

Who catches the fainting narrator at the edge of the abyss as The Pit and the Pendulum ends?

General Lasalle was a real French cavalry commander, nicknamed the Hussar General, who was killed leading a charge at Wagram in 1809.

In The Pit and the Pendulum, the cell the narrator first takes for stone masonry is plated in what?

Iron, or some similar metal, covers the cell in huge plates, and the seams between them are the angles he felt while groping in the dark.

When light finally reveals the dungeon in The Pit and the Pendulum, what shape does it prove to be?

Square, and only half as large as he had reckoned: in the dark he had doubled back on himself and counted the same stretch twice.

Besides his head, which part of the bound narrator stays partly free in The Pit and the Pendulum?

His left arm is loose only from the elbow down, just enough to reach the dish on the floor and lift food to his mouth.

What sound does the great blade make as it swings through the air in The Pit and the Pendulum?

A hiss accompanies every sweep, and Poe echoes it in the prose with sibilant words such as cessation and scimitar.

What does the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum decide about the last pitcher of water he drains?

It was drugged, he reasons, because a deathlike sleep overcomes him at once and he wakes bound to a wooden frame.

What does the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum hear when he drops a stone fragment into the pit?

A splash comes only after many seconds of rattling echoes, telling him that the shaft is deep and ends in water.

Which feeling does the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum say triumphs even on the rack?

Hope makes him flinch from every sweep of the blade, he realises, even though death would come as a relief.

Which painted figures, their colors blurred by damp, cover the cell in The Pit and the Pendulum?

Fiends and skeletons cover every surface, images the narrator puts down to the grim superstition of the monks.

The four-line epigraph that opens Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum is written in which language?

Latin verses head the tale, described as a quatrain written for the gates of a market on the site of the Jacobin Club in Paris; the market built there never carried the inscription.

Which director made the 1961 film The Pit and the Pendulum as the second of his Poe adaptations?

Roger Corman shot it in fifteen days on rented sets; the torture device of the title appears only in the final ten minutes.

Which horror creator's Netflix Poe miniseries includes an episode called The Pit and the Pendulum?

Mike Flanagan built The Fall of the House of Usher from several Poe works, naming six of its eight episodes after his short stories.

The Pit and the Pendulum author Edgar Allan Poe was born to two actors in which Massachusetts city?

Boston was home only briefly: by the age of three he had lost both parents and was taken in by the merchant John Allan of Richmond, Virginia.

Which Finnish symphonic metal band opened an album with the epic The Poet and the Pendulum?

Nightwish put the five-part, Poe-inspired piece first on the 2007 album Dark Passion Play, their first record with singer Anette Olzon.

Poe likens the long strap binding the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum to which horse tack?

A surcingle is a strap that fastens around a horse's girth; because the narrator is wound in one unbroken length, a single cut would loosen it all.

The French army's arrival sets the end of The Pit and the Pendulum in which war of Napoleon's era?

The Peninsular War ran from 1808 to 1814, centuries after the Inquisition's height, so Poe's history is as loose as his torture chamber is invented.

Which Philadelphia holiday annual first published The Pit and the Pendulum, in its volume for 1843?

The Gift was a Christmas and New Year's present book, so the volume dated 1843 appeared in autumn 1842; Poe lightly revised the tale for a magazine reprint in 1845.

Which Irish poet dismissed The Pit and the Pendulum as a tale with no lasting literary value?

W. B. Yeats thought Poe vulgar and judged that this tale worked on a reader's nerves with cheap physical frights and nothing more.

Which I Am Legend author wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film of The Pit and the Pendulum?

Richard Matheson invented nearly the whole plot, since Poe's short tale could supply only the climax of a feature-length film.

Which pioneering woman director made the first English-language film of The Pit and the Pendulum?

Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman to direct a film, produced the three-reel picture in 1913 through Solax, the American studio she ran herself.

At his sentencing in The Pit and the Pendulum, what color do the judges' lips seem to the narrator?

White, whiter than the sheet he is writing on, he says, a detail that quietly reveals he lived to tell the tale.