Poe's popularity has lead to a large number of commercial films based on his stories. The most familiar series, a string of low-budget films produced by American International Pictures, was made in the early 1960s by director Roger Gorman and featured such classic and familiar horror-movie actors as Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and John Carradine. The Pit and the Pendulum, released in 1961, featured Vincent Price in a slick and highly polished film in which Price thinks he is his own father, the most vicious and cruel torturer of the Spanish Inquisition. Although the film bears little resemblance to the original Poe tale, in terms of its tone and technique, it is a cut above the usual adaptations of Poe's stories. (May) A more recent motion picture version of the story, 1991's The Pit and Pendulum, tells the tale of a woman accused of witchcraft because she...