The Pit and the Pendulum at the Palace BY PETER ROBINSON
If I hadn’t become a crime writer, I think it most likely I would have written horror or science fiction. I certainly did when I was a teenager; then, after many years of poetry, I turned to crime. While Poe’s stories of “ratiocination” featuring Auguste Dupin never really thrilled me (even back then I just couldn’t believe in that OurangOutang!), his tales of mystery and imagination enthralled me from the start. And I came to them first through the films of Roger Corman, many of them scripted by the excellent Richard Matheson.
In England in the early 1960s there were three ratings for films: U, A, and X. The first was general admission, for an A film you had to be accompanied by an adult, and you had to be over sixteen to see an X film. X ratings weren’t reserved for films about sex and violence but were applied to just about every exciting horror and science fiction film that came out in that golden age-from
Luckily, though, there was one local fleapit, incredibly named the Palace, where the old woman in the ticket booth didn’t really care how old you were. At twelve or thirteen, I was tall enough that I could pass for sixteen there, or so I thought. At any rate, she took my money and let me in without a second glance. I can still recall the sense of excitement and anticipation I felt before the lush red velvet curtains parted. I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, seeing something forbidden-at least to kids my age-and I had no idea what wonders to expect. My previous horror and science fiction experiences had included
When the curtains opened, the swirl of colors was much like that of light shows I was to see later in the decade, but at the time, combined with a quirky, contemporary score, it was just enough to set the juices flowing. This was going to be weird. Then came the impossible castle on its hill, surrounded by a ring of mist, and the coach driver who would only take his passenger so far. (Quickly developing a taste for these horror films, I also devoured everything Hammer produced around the same time and got used to seeing such openings over and over again!) But it wasn’t so much the castle and the cobwebs and the dungeon and the strange colors and the distortion used in flashbacks and dream sequences that made me squirm in my seat. Poe, I discovered through Corman, was a master of morbid psychology, master of the language of grief and loss and how they could lead a man (usually Vincent Price) to madness beyond the grave.
The Pit and the Pendulum at the Palace
Of course, in retrospect, it’s hard to say how much I understood at the time. Probably the whole element of adultery that underpins the tale was lost on me, though the hints of illicit sex and debauchery certainly weren’t- heaving cleavage was as much a feature of the Corman films as it was with Hammer-and the way Elizabeth expresses her fascination with the torture chamber, rushing around feverishly, touching the implements with a kind of sexual longing, was both disturbing and exciting. I knew about the Spanish Inquisition (though this was several years before it was immortalized by Monty Python) and its tortures-the Iron Maiden, the rack, and the rest- but perhaps the adult relationships were somewhat lost on me.
Certainly there are moments of pure shock-the opening of the stone tomb to reveal the skeleton of a woman who had obviously died trying to claw her way out, the reappearance of Elizabeth in the flesh, the revelation of the “ultimate torture device” itself, and the heavy swishing sound it made as it got faster and faster. (Apparently, Corman cut every other frame to get this effect.) But mostly it was atmosphere, the unspoken, the hint of terrible mysteries beyond the grave, a world where people are condemned to relive terrible acts or suffer the ancient curses of their ancestors, and the realm of the opium dream/nightmare that Corman fashioned from Poe’s story. And of course, you couldn’t go home after seeing any of these films without being absolutely terrified of being buried alive.
No doubt I slept uneasily that night, but the next day I went out and bought
And I went back to the Palace. I went to see
The Masque of the Red Death
THE “RED DEATH” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal-the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven-an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the
