Princes-of-Horror

In my critique of the 1961 film The Pit and the Pendulum, I acknowledged that adapting a short story into a feature-length film is a tricky process. When the source material is so short that it can be read in a single sitting, it is usually (though not always) necessary to elaborate or add to the existing plot, or in some cases to tell a completely different story with similar themes. The Pit and the Pendulum definitely falls into this latter category, whereas House of Usher, a film released a year earlier, actually shares much more in common with the source material, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the s