Melancholy Mentor Podcast
Welcome to Melancholy Mentor where classic literature meets the vibrant world of radio plays.
Melancholy Mentor Podcast
Pendulums, Pits, and Price: A Deep Dive Into Horror History
The mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe seems almost as haunting as his gothic masterpieces. We're diving deep into "The Pit and the Pendulum," Poe's terrifying exploration of psychological torture during the Spanish Inquisition. From its 1842 publication to its transformation into a chilling radio drama, we uncover what makes this story endure.
Poe's masterful use of sound, rhythm, and consonance creates an atmospheric dread that perfectly translates to audio storytelling. The pendulum's slow descent becomes a metaphor for impending doom, while the unnamed protagonist's psychological terror exposes our deepest fears. We explore the historical context of the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) that provides the setting for this nightmarish tale.
The 1943 CBS radio adaptation starring Vincent Price represents a golden age of audio drama, capturing the essence of Poe's psychological horror. We also touch on the 1961 film starring Price alongside Barbara Steele, known as "Britain's First Lady of Horror." Our YouTube channel, Melancholy Mentor, features this radio play accompanied by serene coastal footage from Dorset, England. We discuss our creative process, filming techniques, and our mission to make classic literature accessible to modern audiences.
Whether you're a longtime Poe enthusiast or discovering his work for the first time, this episode celebrates the power of short-form storytelling and audio drama. The greatest works of horror often leave the most terrifying elements to the imagination—what visualizations will "The Pit and the Pendulum" conjure in yours?
Send us an email to let us know your thoughts or if you have anything to add at ⏬⏬
info@melancholymentor.com
You can watch the radio drama episode we are discussing on our YouTube channel :
https://youtube.com/@melancholy_mentor
Hello everyone and welcome to Melancholy Mentor, where classic literature meets the vibrant world of radio plays. I'm Fran and I'm joined by Evan from Mystery Mythos. Together, we're your guides on this creative journey. During each episode, we'll dive into stories featured on the Melancholy Mentor channel, allowing fresh ideas to flourish, inspiring you to dream big and unlock your creative potential. Get comfy, open your mind and embrace curiosity. Let's get started.
Speaker 1:Hello, I'm Fran and I'm Evan, and today we're highlighting an episode on our YouTube channel, melancholy Mentor, and the episode is the Pit and the Pendulum. Yes, oh, my, here we go. Let's get into it. The Pit and the Pendulum is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Now, poe was born in 1809 and he perished in 1849. Now we've said a little about Edgar Allan Poe before on this podcast, because we've got quite a few stories by Edgar Allan Poe. I'm a big fan, hence the name Melancholy on the channel, so I do melancholy coaching and Melancholy Mentor is the channel, and it's very heavily inspired by poe and so I used to read a lot of poe when I was younger. Now the melancholy mentor channel is mainly for classic literature, but there is a bit of a crossover into sci-fi and a little bit of a crossover into into horror stories, if they're classic kind of horror stories.
Speaker 1:So that's why we're featuring quite a lot of Poe yeah, yeah so the oh also just want to say that Poe's death was very mysterious. So not only did he write kind of gothic horror, you know, he's american poet and writer. His actual death was shrouded in mystery, and we've spoken a little bit about this on a previous episode as well. So the pit and the pendulum was first published in 1842, so that's rather a long time ago it is, isn't it? I know the narrative follows an unnamed narrator, like an unnamed protagonist, who is imprisoned during the Spanish Inquisition. Now this kind of unnamed narrator or unnamed protagonist is featured in other Edgar Allan Poe stories, yeah, and sometimes there's even his own name woven in there into one of the characters yeah.
Speaker 1:I quite often wonder what his um, what his brain was like. The kind of weaving all this stuff together and putting it together is you know, something else, isn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, absolutely so. The protagonist was in prison during the Spanish Inquisition. Now, the Spanish Inquisition was a powerful institution in 1478. And it was established by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was a religious court. This religious court was established by the Spanish crown to investigate and punish people. Now, these people were suspected of heresy.
Speaker 1:So I just want to put a little disclaimer in herean and myself do not affiliate with any of these opinions or ideas. We're. We're just bringing you the story. We're highlighting the radio dramas and radio plays that are featured on our channel and we like to bring you a little bit of the history behind it, not only the writer and the the radio drama itself, you know, and how we've presented it on the channel, but just a little bit of the history of, maybe, what the writer went into. Or, you know, film adaptations um, we are by no means kind of promoting any kind of religion, although we do like to talk about it.
Speaker 1:We're both very fascinated by religion and other people's religions. Now, I'm an nlp um coach and that's neurolinguistic programming, and in nlp we say there's no right or wrong, there just is. So I'm an impartial observer as such. I like that, yeah, yeah, impartial observer, and so seven. So we're accepting to other people, you know, whatever their beliefs and opinions are, we've got our own. Some of mine are quite strong, um, and their personal kind of beliefs and the way that I like to have my own personal values.
Speaker 1:With this, we're just bringing you a few facts that, like, mostly I've looked up, yeah, a bit of research, a little bit of background story, yeah, and a little bit about what we've got on the channel. So, whatever your religion is, you're very welcome to listen, you're, you know. And so heresy. Heresy is an opinion or a belief that goes against the accepted beliefs or practices of a group or religion. So there you go. It was thought to root out converted Jews and Muslims who might revert back to their original religions, and that's also why I'm saying that. You know, muslim, jew, christian, we're fascinated by religion, very, very interested in religion, and don't actually affiliate to to any of their rope and to whatever. Whatever people choose, yeah yeah definitely yeah.
Speaker 1:So not too sure I would have actually supported the spanish inquisition, but I'm quite sure that, um, a lot of spaniards at the time didn't actually have a choice, so no judgment there either. Um, the inququisition lasted over three centuries, so officially ended in 1834. So back to our protagonist of the story. There's a little bit of spoiler alerts in here for the actual hitting the pendulum story itself, pendulum story itself. So the protagonist of the story endured various tortures, including the psychological terror of a swinging pendulum, fear of falling into a pit, the pendulum.
Speaker 1:So the story is the study of an effect, the effect that terror has on the narrator. It explores themes of fear and despair and the struggle for survival, which is quite prominent in both stories. Yeah, o emphasizes the element of sound by using words, um, that kind of. Basically they rhyme, so it's various forms of literacy, um, consonants. So he repeated similar consonant sounds to um, create a rhythmic effect. And that's the poet in, you see, and he brought that out into his short stories as well. Yeah, yeah, this way of writing emphasised the dark and melancholy themes of his work. Yeah, I know, and we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this was actually a short story that was adapted into various movies and retelling, so they're kind of loosely based on the short story. So we also like to promote creativity, exploration of self-improvement and creativity. So this is a great example of the fact that you do not have to have a whole novel in you to be a writer of story. You can write short stories and quite often as well, even novels are longer versions of an original short story are longer versions of an original short story. Yeah, yeah, the concept was born in a short story and then elaborated upon. So there have been various movie adaptations of the Pit and the Pendulum. Now the one that I've seen, so I'm going to say it's my favourite, but it's the one that I saw when I was younger anyway the first one that I've seen it's a 1961 version starring no other than vincent price.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, I know, also starred barbara still. Now barbara still is an english actress and producer. I believe she lives in america now um, probably, I want to say los angeles but she's known for starring in italian gothic horror films of the 1960s. But she's been referred to as the queen you can like this queen of all screen queens oh yeah, and also britain's first lady of horror.
Speaker 1:Amazing, born in 1937, she's 87 years old. Wow, yes, a little bit about Barbara Steele. We've previously talked about Vincent Price. I'm a big Vincent Price fan. He's no longer with us. Another American actor, wasn't he? Yeah, voice over artist. So a number of our radio dramas are actually voiced by Vincent Price. Yeah, yeah, quite a few, yeah, and Evan's channel, mystery Mythos, is more predominantly sci-fi.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a bit of mystery and stuff like that in there. So mine being classic literature, I mean Vincent Price's voice lends itself very well to storytelling. Oh yeah, just the most amazing voice to listen to. Brilliant, yeah. So the radio drama that we've actually featured on the channel. Have you got any more information about it, evan?
Speaker 2:yeah, I do, actually, and it broadcast out on CBS radio from 1940 to 1962. So it's quite long, quite a long kind of radio show. It was one of the premier programs of the golden age of radio, so I guess that's why it went so long. Yeah, this actual episode was broadcast on january the 12th 1943, starring the amazing vincent price, and it was produced by william n robson and adapted by john dixon. Uh, I've got a little fun fact about it as well. I found out that Alfred Hitchcock directed the suspense audition show, which was an adaptation of the Lodger, which was a story that Alfred Hitchcock had actually filmed in 1926. So there's a little fun fact about that. The video to go with it was filmed by yourself, wasn't it? Yeah, in Port and Dorset, and it's 20 minutes long, this one. So it's just 20 minutes long.
Speaker 1:Quite a nice one a lot of hours are kind of around the 20 minute mark. Some of them go into an hour, I don't know so quite easy to to listen to. Yeah, and by filming what it's mostly me that does it. I take out, um, I take my tripod and um just literally my phone, and film along the coast, um, because I'm actually based on the south coast in england, so I film along the coast. Sometimes I film woodland or just um. I mean, we went on a break to spain, didn't we? Yeah, yeah, did a little bit of filming, yeah. Now, this particular episode that we're highlighting on the channel actually had 79 views, so for us we're very, very grateful. We'd love to see that get more views. It's got the most amazing intro to it, so the voice that actually introduces the story, it just sounds so good and the video that accompanies it literally just shows the seaside. So what we're doing on the channel is we're starting to put on a black screen for sleep version.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We literally just have a black screen, because if people are viewing this via YouTube, then sometimes they don't have the paid version and there's a lot of adverts involved and stuff like that. So, um, the screen won't turn off and still play what they're listening to. So we like to add in a black screen version that will just literally just sit as a black screen, but it's got the audio on it, because the most important thing for us on the channel is is the audio. Yeah, we're still building this podcast. You've listened to previous episodes. Thank you very much. We're still building it.
Speaker 1:So we're working on, you know, getting better at, um, the sound quality and what we actually produce and put out. We're doing this very simply. I've literally just got an old notebook for a laptop. I've plugged a cheap microphone into it and we're recording via zoom. For anyone that's wondering, yeah, then the audio gets taken off and and used and for podcasting and then putting on the youtube channel as well. So I do like to advocate just start the thing, just do it. If you're waiting to write that short story, if you're waiting to do that podcast, to start your business, yeah, do the thing do it because you can improve as you go along.
Speaker 1:That's what I say yeah, it's all a learning, isn't it? Yeah, yeah that's what this is, and we like to bring this um podcast to people so that we can just inspire other people to just get started. Have a go, have a go all right thank you very much for listening. Bye, bye. Thank you for tuning in. Contact us melancholymentorcom. Until next time, keep your minds open and stay curious.
