The first movie scene that left Stephen King traumatised: “I have never forgotten”
Even people who dedicate their lives to horror are capable of being scared shitless, although Stephen King was still a ways away from becoming one of the genre’s favourite sons when he witnessed a scene that instantly seared itself into his psyche and refused to leave.
These days, it probably takes a lot to leave him quaking in his boots from sheer terror. For the last half a century, King has earned his livelihood from striking fear into the hearts of readers, selling hundreds of millions of books and spawning dozens of film and television adaptations of his bibliography.
He’s created monsters that are figurative, literal, and metaphysical, human and demonic, and conjured ghosts, ghouls, and creatures from the four corners of his imagination. With that in mind, it’s reasonable to assume it took something truly special to leave an unforgettable impression on an impressionable King.
Instead, it was one of the many loose Edgar Allan Poe translations mounted by B-movie savant Roger Corman in the 1960s. One of the best ever at rubbing two pennies together and stretching them into a dollar, the prolific producer knew that quick, cheap, cheerful, and chilling horror flicks were one of the easiest ways to guarantee a profit.
Within the space of four years, he’d brought House of Usher, Tales of Terror, The Premature Burial, The Raven, The Haunted Palace, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia to the screen, most of which starred Vincent Price. However, alongside his childhood friend Chris Chesley, it was the other of the octet that made a lasting mark.
“The one that affected Chris and me the most deeply was The Pit and the Pendulum,” King wrote in On Writing. “Written by Richard Matheson and filmed in both widescreen and Technicolour (colour horror pictures were still a rarity in 1961 when this one came out, Pit took a bunch of standard gothic ingredients and turned them into something special.”
Inspired by Poe’s 1842 short story of the same name, Price was naturally on hand as the suspicious husband of a recently deceased woman, leading her brother to find out what really happened to his sibling. In fact, King went so far as to call it “the last really great studio horror picture” before George A Romero turned the genre upside down several years later with Night of the Living Dead.
He would have only been a month shy of turning 14 when The Pit and the Pendulum was released in cinemas, and the big reveal caught him completely off guard. “The best scene, and the one which froze Chris and me into our seats, depicted John Kerr digging into a castle wall and discovering the corpse of his sister, who was obviously buried alive.”
It wasn’t just the twist that knocked King for six, though, but the way it was shot: “I have never forgotten the corpse’s close-up,” he said. “Shot through a red filter and a distorting lens which elongated the face into a huge silent scream.” It’s incredibly tame by modern standards, but for a teenager, it was enough to cause sleepless nights.
