Time called the film "a literary hair-raiser that is cleverly, if self-consciously, Edgar Allan poetic." The Hollywood Reporter described it as "...a class suspense/horror film of the calibre of the excellent ones done by Hammer...It is carefully made and has full production values...Vincent Price gives a characteristically rococo performance..." The Monthly Film Bulletin was negative, writing that the production values "cannot prevent a strong impression of déjà vu", and that Kerr, Anders and Carbone were all "glumly wooden" in their performances. Charles Stinson of the Los Angeles Times was notably unimpressed by the film: "The uncredited scenario violates Poe's gothic style with passages of flat, modernized dialogue…But the pecadilloes of the script pale beside the acting…Price mugs, rolls his eyes continuously, and delivers his lines in such an unctuous tone that he comes near to burlesquing the role. His mad scenes are just ludicrous. The audience almost died laughing." Price was so infuriated by Stinson's negative review that he wrote a letter to the critic, saying, "I find I must break a 25-year determination never to answer a critic. Since your review of The Pit and the Pendulum was obviously not meant to be instructive, and therefore constructive, but only to hurt and humiliate, I'm sure you would enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that it did. My only consolation…is that it is the second-greatest box-office attraction in the country." Price apparently never sent the letter, placing it instead into his "Letting Off Steam File". The film's critical reputation has continued to grow over the years, and it is now generally held to be one of the best entries in Corman's Poe series. Time Out has opined, "Corman at his intoxicating best, drawing a seductive mesh of sexual motifs from Poe's story through a fine Richard Matheson script." In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, Timothy Sullivan wrote: "The Pit and the Pendulum is even better than its predecessor…The plot is heady stuff, and Roger Corman drives it forward—with wonderful matte shots of the castle perched on the seaside cliff, odd camera angles, the thickest cobwebs in horror-movie history, a spider in the face, and an iron maiden—all before our hero is strapped under the pendulum...in a sequence that still stands one's hair on end." Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror observed: "If Price's performance is noticeably more extravagant than in the earlier film, this is offset (or