The Pit and the Pendulum - 1961 (Vincent Price)

Poe's story is very simple. A man condemned by the ongoing Spanish Inquisition in Toledo is imprisoned in a darkened cell with a deep pit into which it is expected he should fall. When he becomes aware of and manages to avoid the pit, he is drugged and awakens to find himself strapped to a table under a razor-sharp pendulum aimed at his heart. The story revolves around the mindset of an individual placed in a hopeless situation, despair upon despair at the thought of freeing himself. The movie includes the pendulum scene near the end, but the rest of the story is fleshed out. As producer/director Roger Corman explained:

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The method we adopted on The Pit and the Pendulum was to use the Poe short story as the climax for a third act to the motion picture, because a two-page short story is not about to give you a ninety-minute motion picture. We then constructed the first two acts in what we hoped was a manner faithful to Poe, as his climax would run only a short time on the screen.

-From Di Franco, J. Philip (editor). The Movie World of Roger Corman, 1979

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A second noticeable deviation between story and film is that Poe set his story in the early 1800s, evidenced by the protagonist's rescue by General La Salle during the liberation of Toledo from the hands of the Inquisition, a true historical event that took place in 1808. In the movie, the setting is switched to the 16th century, evidenced by the date on the crypt of Elizabeth Medina (Barbara Steele): 1517-1546.