Headscratchers / The Pit and the Pendulum

• How, exactly, was Elizabeth expecting that she and the doctor could ever lay claim to Don Medina's fortune? News of her death had already spread as far as England, and her funeral would've had to have been attended by a priest at the bare minimum in order to deceive Catherine and the servants. So how, barring extreme gullibility on the part of the Spanish authorities of the day, was she expecting to claim her husband's property ... which, by standards of the era, would probably have defaulted to the custody of his late uncle Bartholomew's son or some other, more distant male relative, not his wife, in the event of his death or incapacity.
  • Possibly the plan to drive Nicholas mad was going to account for this. Francis says he was sent a letter from Nicholas, so if Elizabeth turns up alive and Nicholas is driven to insanity, they can easily claim he lied or believed she was dead. Francis even says that Nicholas's letter didn't have too many details of how Elizabeth was supposed to have died, and that's why he's travelled all the way to Spain to find out more. Catherine does not normally live at the castle, and says she moved out before Nicholas was even married. So she may not have even been there for the funeral, and arrived afterwards. So Elizabeth and Dr Leon possibly had the following stories ready: a) Nicholas belived Elizabeth was ill and forced the doctor to presume her dead when she wasn't and they went along with it out of fear, b) claim Nicholas put Elizabeth in the crypt believing she was dead and she escaped somehow, having to hide elsewhere in the castle, c) murdered another girl and put her in the crypt to pass her off as Elizabeth, and she had to hide again out of 'fear'. Elizabeth could possibly have hoped to pay off the servants as well once the plan was through, since it's just Maria and Maximilian to account for.
  • It's written into the film that things about Elizabeth's death don't add up - since Nicholas can only say she suffered from a sickness that Francis calls bull on straight away. Dr Leon was allegedly the one who diagnosed her, and he can easily say Elizabeth was fine and the mad Nicholas forced him to say she was ill. So we have one madman with a castle full of torture implements claiming his wife was dead and haunting the place, yet here the wife is alive and well. Things look like they would favour Elizabeth's version of events for whatever story she comes up with.
  • Elizabeth also doesn't seem to be the brightest bulb. If her plan was to fake her death, pretend to be a ghost and drive her husband to madness rather than simply killing him herself - she's clearly not a rational mind.