"The Pit and the Pendulum and Hope" shares a common quality of Jan Svankmajer's earlier work: its use of live-action. Svankmajer, generally speaking, was an animator: a filmmaker who made use of everyday objects as well as antiques and other junk to create surreal stop-motion shorts. This film is indeed surreal (the source material also was, although I heard it too long ago to be able to remember the whole thing) yet it is not about stop-motion at all, preferring to focus on the object of darkly depicting Poe's story. Not a bad thing necessarily, just very much similar to how his earliest shorts were filmed - little stop-motion, more live-action centered - and it's interesting to see him directly adapting a story without incorporating a large amount of his own animated additions.
In terms of pulling off the darkness of the story, Svankmajer succeeds masterfully. The setting of the film itself is reason enough to view it: an underground cavern full of man-made corridors. The camerawork is another large plus, as the film shows with a sense of impending doom, the pendulum swinging back and forth, and also carries the following events from the POV of the protagonist (which I rather liked). Strangely, there is no intense music, just the natural sound, which might be a plus in the long run even if it seems sort off cheap and careless at first. All in all, the film's main goal seems to be about visual interest through its intriguing camerawork and setting. It is not necessarily terrifying for a modern horror fan, but very well made as it is and worth seeing.
