The Pit and the Pendulum (2009) - 4/4

Poe this is not. But then, what Poe adaptation ever is? From Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) through Roger Corman's classic Poe films, Poe has been to cinema what he was to the Symbolist poets: a wealth of symbols with which to manifest the subconscious. David DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum is perhaps the farthest of all incarnations from Poe's original narrative, but it falls in that same tradition of manifesting the subconscious.

Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a very short story about a man strapped beneath a bladed pendulum on a platform surrounded by pit. He reflects upon the mechanism as it swings gradually closer until he is rescued by soldiers in the last moment. Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum involves the mechanism, but locates it in the neglected family torture chamber around which the melodramatic story is constructed. DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum just about dispenses with the mechanism altogether. The pendulum is a pocket watch in the hands of the mad hypnotist Jo-Beth Divay. She's experimenting with the permanent removal of all pain and fear through hypnosis. Unfortunately, her techniques involve causing extreme pain while under hypnosis. She leaves that part out of her ads, however, which promise superior physical performance in athletic endeavours. Hence the collection of beautiful bodies, both male and female, that submit to her experiments.

To some extent, the point of The Pit and the Pendulum is the enjoyment of beautiful bodies. A nearly five-minute scene of two exquisite male bodies wrestling in tight, black underwear makes this point clear. One of this men has a shaved head and larger muscles, whereas the other is more lithe and 'cute.' Another attractive man strips to his underwear to lift weights. He resembles a figure from an El Greco painting, elongated and darkly beautiful. The two gorgeous young ladies never strip, but their scant clothing and beautiful faces offer plenty to the eyes. One is a model blond beauty. The other is a porcelain-skinned redhead with one eye seemingly smaller than the other; the quirk, easily perceived as an imperfection, makes her all the more stunning. Jo Beth as well has a sophisticated beauty, not to mention cheekbones you could chop vegetables on. She strips down to just her panties and boots, offering a slightly older woman's tight, dainty body for display. There is also a callow blond man and his handsome suitor, both of whom can be seen in underwear. Their appearances are more boyish, particularly the blond. These people are nice to look at. They give visual pleasure. And all in different ways. There should be a body for everyone to appreciate in this cast. The connoisseur should appreciate them all. As they are all athletes, there is a good reason they are all toned. So one needn't feel manipulated. One is free to enjoy the forms.

The reason enjoying the bodies is important is because The Pit and the Pendulum is a psychosexual horror film that significantly involves taking pleasure in beautiful bodies. DeCoteau sublimates violence and horror into sexual pathology. The title of Poe's story, after all, can just as easily be able the female and male genitalia. The vagina is a pit and the penis is a pendulum. The young athletes of the film enjoy and appreciate one another's bodies as much as the audience. Just about everyone in the film "swings both ways" like a pendulum. In the two-day stay at Jo-Beth's manor, most do end up exploring at least one other person's body or expressing a desire to do so. The two young women engage each other sexually, two of the young men engage each other, and two other men get to have physical contact with the women. It is only Jo-Beth who is unable to enjoy the bodies. She is either absent or at a distance.

The vagina becomes a dangerous pit and the penis a dangerous pendulum only in the face of repression and oppression. Jo-Beth is trying to remove the experience of pain from her subjects and is herself unable to experience pain; but the experience of pain and the experience of pleasure are intimately linked. They are two sides of the pendulum. Jo-Beth thus becomes the monstrous center of the psychosexual horror. While she watches the muscular men wrestling, she begins to strip and fondle herself. She does so not out of enjoyment of the bodies or the erotic value of their grappling, but from the increasing violence and the potential for death. Her only sexual satisfaction comes from inflicting extreme pain in hypnotic sessions. She suffers from loneliness as she seeks a partner who can take infinite punishment, but finds there is no such being, no-one like her or no-one like she imagines herself to be at any rate. She is, in some sense, the patriarchal standard of female desire, without pleasure of her own; her desires are perceived as dangerous and destructive. As Linda Williams argued, horror films permit female desire only to "demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be." (1) At the same time, her sadism is a masochism. The fulfillment of her desire is co-extensive with the destruction of her desire. She desires most of all a man who is like her, but realizing that man destroys him. Her only pleasure is therefore in the destruction of her own potential source of pleasure. Denying herself gratification compulsively is the only means to gratification she has. It is an endless cycle of masochism and from the masochism comes the sadism.

Jo-Beth is a generally fascinating character. She's the only character really more than just body. Her personality is large, her subjects' small; her sexual persona dwarfs them. When they first meet her they line up in her den obediently, awaiting their turn to speak. One would expect these beautiful bodies to be totally confident, but they are strangely childlike before her, like Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz before Hamlet. Sexuality oozes from her as they do from a sexy schoolmistress. Her sexual energies dominate them. Yet she herself is unable to enjoy her own sexual potency except through sadism. She has a number of terrific monologues that reveal something of her depths, particularly a lollipop-aided speech about the glory of mechanical clocks and a discourse about cactii. Like Vincent Price in Corman's Poe films, she has these odd quirks, like collecting cactii and clocks. Though actress Lorielle New is not the thespian Vincent Price was, she has great screen presence and sexily channels Price in the peculiar role with success.

Besides Jo-Beth's monologue, the clock motif carries on throughout the film. Clock faces are superimposed over each hypnosis scene. Jo-Beth explains that each person has an interior pendulum, like the pendulum of a mechanical clock, that is continually moving one toward the pit of death. Poe's story is thus interpreted as not just about sex, but about mortality. Jo-Beth sees her project as being about conquering death, as if she can stop the internal pendulum and thus hold off the pit indefinitely. Many of the characters, moreover, engage in risk-taking behaviour, such as storm chasing; this is what in psychoanalytic terms is death drive behaviour. Sex is the recourse for immortality. While these beautiful people can and do have recourse in sex, Jo-Beth, only finds sexual gratification in death.

The hypnotism in The Pit and the Pendulum is also interesting in its own right. The mad hypnotist is a cinematic villain that goes back to the first horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dr. Caligari himself keeps Cesare the Somnambulist in a perpetual hypnotic trance. Each adaptation of Trilby also includes the evil hypnotist Svengali. In Karl Freund's The Mummy, Imhotep uses hypnosis. In Preminger's noir thriller Whirlpool, Jose Ferrer plays a fiendish hypnotist. Pit, however, is the first film I've seen to postulate an out-of-body experience for the hypnotized subject. The 'soul' under hypnosis descends. We see the 'soul' walk downstairs, descend into some catacombs presumably beneath the manor. This may be the titular pit. It also gives the sense of a descent into the subconscious and a bubbling up of subconscious desires, uninhibited by moral concerns. Perhaps freedom from pain and fear is a sort soullessness.

If you want a straight-forward narrative, DeCoteau's The Pit and the Pendulum is not offering it. DeCoteau isn't even trying to give a classical narrative. An extremely prolific director, not unlike Takashi Miike and Jess Franco, he can afford to make offbeat titles as he has done with this screenplay from Simon Savory. The Pit and the Pendulum is a descent into the subconscious, into psychosexual terror. Had this film been made in the silent era, with only necessary dialogue and the offbeat monologues retained for intertitles, it would be regarded as a classic today. Made in 2009, it is a good example of what interesting work is being done in low-budget, independent horror.

(1) Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks."