the Lord of the Pit." In the Koran itself, in Sura (Chapter) 85, "The Celestial Signs", a passage reads: "...cursed were the contrivers of the pit, of fire supplied with the fuel... and they afflicted them for no other reason, but because they believed in the mighty, the glorious God." Poe is also considered to have been influenced by William Mudford's The Iron Shroud, a short story about an iron torture chamber which shrinks through mechanical action and eventually crushes the victim inside. Poe apparently got the idea for the shrinking chamber in the "Pit and the Pendulum" after Mudford's story was published in Blackwood's magazine in 1830. Publication and response "The Pit and the Pendulum" was included in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843, edited by Eliza Leslie and published by Carey & Hart. It was slightly revised for a republication in the May 17, 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal. William Butler Yeats was generally critical of Poe, calling him "vulgar." Of "The Pit and the Pendulum" in particular he said it does "not seem to me to have permanent literary value of any kind... Analyse the Pit and the Pendulum and you find an appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical affrightments." Adaptations Several film adaptations of the story have been produced, including the early French-language film Le Puits et le pendule in 1909 by Henri Desfontaines. The first English-language adaptation was in 1913, directed by Alice Guy-Blaché. The 1935 film The Raven, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, features a pendulum torture device in the dungeon underneath the house of the Poe-obsessed Dr. Vollin, played by Lugosi. The 1943 episode of the radio drama Suspense, starring Henry Hull. The 1961 film The Pit and the Pendulum, directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price and Barbara Steele, like the other installments in the Corman/Price "Poe Cycle", bears minimal resemblance to the Poe story: the torture apparatus of the title makes its appearance only in the final ten minutes of the film. The reason for this is that the story was too short to be made into a feature-length film. The plan was to have a third-act which would be faithful to Poe, while the other two would be written in a manner that the cast and crew hoped would be similar to a Poe plot. A novelization of the film was written