The Pit and the Pendulum

The Pit and the Pendulum (1913)

Alice Guy's version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. This film is partially lost.

Date of release
1913-07-09
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (4)
Runtime
16m
Genres
Horror, Drama
Director
Alice Guy-Blaché

Casting

Interesting facts

The Pit and the Pendulum is a three-reel film adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story of the same name, directed, and produced by pioneering French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché through her American company Solax Studios in 1913.

Production

The gruesome quality of the film proved to be a challenge for not only Guy-Blachè, but the entire cast and crew. There was a large number of rats used throughout filming and they proved to be an ongoing burden throughout the shoot. In Guy Blachè's memoir she recalls Darwin Karr's difficulty with working with the rats.

Following the wrap of the film there was the discussion about what to do with the rats. They isolated the majority of the rats and threw a cat in that immediately jumped back out. They then decided the second best course of action was to throw in a bulldog. But the bulldog proved just as futile as he was attacked by the rats. The only way they were able to finally put in an end to the rats was through cudgeling them.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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