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NO ONE WILL EVER ENTER THIS ROOM AGAIN

After Roger Corman & Stuart

Gordon’s adaptations of The Pit and

the Pendulum (1961/1991)

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The colors spill as if from a wound,

bright paints leaching into the dark

frame (itself unnervingly liquid).

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Starring Vincent Price / And                                            Vincent Price And / Barbara

Steele / And Barbara Steele                            One Laughs / While the Other Screams

One Screams / While the Other Eats         A Painting of the Scenery / And Whispers

Your wifemother’s Name / Playing        Your husbandfather’s Name / Harpsicordly

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Roger Corman’s opening credits

announce not blood but a sensory

wound: vision infected and

transformed by trauma. A job of the

credits, to define the external

boundaries of the film’s fiction, is

undercut: these colors become the

tints of the characters dark fantasies

and dreams: purple, red, blue, and

yellow floods which overtake these

visions as the characters recount or

relive them. The boundaries of the

frame run, drip, mix, projected onto a

white sheet.   

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