Watch THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM With Vincent Price’s Daughter Victoria and the Movie Geeks June 30th in St. Louis

ESC Tours Presents a screening of THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM with Victoria Price, the daughter of the film’s star Vincent Price and the author of Vincent Price, a Daughter’s Biography. Co-hosting the event with Victoria will be Tom Stockman, editor of We Are Movie Geeks and director of Vincentennial, the Vincent Price 100th Birthday Celebration. The event takes place Saturday June 30th at 7pm. Seating is limited so get your tickets soon. Tickets can be purchased HERE. A yummy variety of food from Schlafly’s kitchen is available as are plenty of pints of their famous home-brewed suds.

Join Tom Stockman of We Are Movie Geeks and Vincent Price’s daughter Victoria Price for a fun movie night at Schlafly’s Tap Room. Tom and Victoria will present The Pit and The Pendulum(and other movie surprises) along with fun conversation about the life and film career of St Louis native Vincent Price.

Victoria Price is an author and inspirational speaker. As the author of Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, Victoria is an entertaining lecturer who appears and speaks at horror conventions and film festivals around the world.We Are Movie Geeks’ Tom Stockman is an expert on the life and career of Vincent Price. As the force behind the world famous St Louis Vincentennial in 2011, Tom knows as much as anybody about the Master of Menace, Vincent Price.

This promises to be a unique and fun movie event!

Not much of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story which shares its title is on screen besides the eponymous torture device, but thanks to a deft screenplay by Richard Matheson, a pitch-perfect performance by Vincent Price, sure handed direction by Roger Corman, and the inspired casting of Barbara Steele, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM is an epic helping of gothic grand guignol that deserves its place on the top of this list. Vincent Price’s Don Medina is a much more lively than his Roderick Usher form the previous year. Price was often accused of overacting, but his frantic scenery-chewing was the correct style for this material. The casting of the otherworldly Barbara Steele shows that American International was properly impressed with her horror debut in the previous year’s BLACK SUNDAY (as they should have been), the Italian film they distributed and this was her stateside debut. Steele is something to behold in THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, slinking and smirking like a deranged cat around the torture chamber, driving Price and the audience to delirium. Steele wasn’t long for Hollywood though. She fled the set of an Elvis film the next year and returned to Europe where she starred in a string of unparalleled gothic horrors. Corman’s camera stays in time to the berserk performances of his two horror stars, as he experiments with odd lens techniques and hallucinatory framing and you’d never guess that THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM was shot on for only $200,000 as it is consistently dazzling to look at with spooky color camerawork by Floyd Crosby and imposing art design by Daniel Haller. Stock footage of the climactic torture sequence would later find its way into the 1966 spy spoof DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE, which also starred Vincent Price as well as GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI (also 1966). THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM is a fantastic and fascinating viewing experience that just keeps getting better with age.