The Movie

The Pit and the Pendulum, a stop-motion short film directed by Marc Lougee, is seven minutes of Gothic fun.

What started as a birthday present for Lougee's personal friend Ray Harryhausen, a pioneer in the stop-motion business, turned into a short film that won numerous awards, and has been shown in over 70 different film festivals.

Following along with the short story written by Edgar Allen Poe, Lougee’s The Pit and the Pendulum is dark and foreboding. A man has been sentenced to prison during the Spanish Inquisition. He awakes in his cell with an iron mask on his head, confused and alone. Finding a deep pit in the middle of his cell doesn’t help his situation.

Since the movie is only seven minutes long it’s hard to write an extensive review about it. I loved the animation. It reminded me of the old episodes of Celebrity Deathmatch. I would’ve liked to see a longer version of this movie. Only a few lines of the story are actually spoken to narrate the film.

The Special Features

There are a lot of special features on this disc though, an hour and forty-five minutes worth. There are quite a few interviews with people that were involved. I loved the interview with Marc Lougee, the director, and him talking about making the film. He goes in depth about how the film was created. It started as thumbnails (tiny drawings on the side of a script), from there it moved to storyboards, which are digitized and become what is called an animatic. The animatic is basically the entire movie animated with storyboards, and then the film can be built around the storyboards.

The entire animation process took six weeks. Six weeks to make a seven minute movie. It really is amazing what goes into the making of a stop-motion movie.