There are many kinds of horror movie. Every horror film’s primary goal is to scare you, but it could do that with a bloodthirsty monster, a slow-burning psychological story, a pulse-racing slasher movie about a relentless killer – the possibilities are endless.
In 1982, John Carpenter made The Thing, a horror movie utilizing a common human fear: claustrophobia. A bunch of scientists are trapped in an Arctic outpost with an alien creature that can transform into anything – including seamlessly embodying one of them – so tensions among the characters are pretty high. We've found 10 other claustrophobic horror movies to watch if you like The Thing.
Devil
M. Night Shyamalan produced this claustrophobic chiller in which a group of people are stuck in an elevator. As tensions rise between the group and it becomes clearer and clearer that they’ll be stuck there for a long time, it becomes apparent that something otherworldly, and possibly demonic, is at play here.
Shyamalan didn’t direct the movie, but he did manage to slip in one of his signature twist endings, and ironically, a much better twist (if a bit predictable) than most of the movies he actually has directed. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s worth watching for horror fans.
Saw
Saw is mostly set in one room. We get flashes of the characters’ backstories to fill in the gaps and parallel scenes of the investigation into the Jigsaw killer, but most of Saw’s runtime is spent in a grimy, disgusting bathroom where two guys are chained up, another guy is lying completely still, face-down on the floor, and a puppet is telling them about a “game” they’re going to play.
As the movie goes on, there are shocking revelations that lead us to believe that maybe these two guys deserve to be in this situation. Jigsaw insists he’s doing the right thing.
Panic Room
David Fincher has always delivered dark thrillers that evoke a sense of the Hitchcockian with the added benefit of modern filmmaking technologies. The apex of this is Panic Room.
The setup is simple enough: a single mother (Jodie Foster) and her asthmatic daughter (Kristen Stewart) move into a new house with a panic room and find themselves using it when a bunch of criminals break in.
Throughout the movie, the plot thickens, and we begin to realize why they’ve broken into this house in particular, but the central hook of Panic Room is still Foster and Stewart’s riveting lead performances.
The Descent
Neil Marshall struck claustrophobic-thriller gold when he came up with the premise for The Descent. It’s set in the middle of a cave-in – the most terrifying, ominous, claustrophobic situation imaginable – as a group of cavers are confronted with a bloodthirsty species of underground-dwelling mutants with night vision.
The horrifying reveal of the mutants arrives at around the midpoint of the movie, notching up the intensity and setting a rapid pace for the rest of the story. The characters don’t really have a prayer, completely outmatched by these creatures, so it’s just a nail-biting matter of time before they’re all ripped to shreds.
The Hateful Eight
Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 effort The Hateful Eight might have the motifs and visual stylings of a western, but it’s just as much a horror movie as anything else. On a snowy 1870s night, a bunch of strangers are trapped inside a haberdashery in the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out if each other’s stories add up.
Ennio Morricone provided the musical score for The Hateful Eight, but he didn’t bring the grand, sweeping tones he brought to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns; he brought the creepy, paranoia-inducing dread that he brought to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Morricone’s intense score envelopes the whole movie.
Buried
This is about as claustrophobic as it gets because the whole movie is set inside a coffin. Ryan Reynolds plays a truck driver in the Middle East who’s been captured by terrorists and buried alive. He has a cell phone with limited reception and a lighter that’s sucking up his much-needed oxygen, and he desperately tries to get in touch with his embassy so that they can find him and dig him up before it’s too late.
It’s a race against time, with director Rodrigo Cortés taking influence from similarly small-scale thrillers helmed by Alfred Hitchcock, such as Lifeboat and Rope.
Misery
Adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, Misery plays out like the iconic horror author’s worst nightmare.
James Caan plays Paul Sheldon, a writer who has just finished a new novel when his car swerves off the road, and an Oscar-winning Kathy Bates plays Annie Wilkes, his biggest fan who saves him from the wreck and nurses him back to health.
As Paul begins to suspect Annie of foul play, he questions the drugs she’s been giving him and the validity of her claims that she can’t get in touch with his family. It’s a compelling two-hander.
Get Out
Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out isn’t claustrophobic in the sense that it’s set in a coffin or a bunker or a single room. It’s set on a large suburban estate. But it’s isolated by miles of country highways.
Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, an African-American photographer who travels out to a gated community in the country to meet his girlfriend Rose’s (Alison Williams) family. As an audience, we can immediately tell that something’s afoot and terrible things are in store for Chris, and we just want to scream the title at the screen. It’s a masterfully-made, socially-conscious horror opus.
Alien
Initially pitched as a haunted house movie set in outer space, Alien takes us into the distant future, with an astronaut crew on an isolated space station finding a planet with sentient life on it. An alien egg manages to latch itself onto one of the astronauts, hatching from within his chest back on the space station.
The alien grows to ten feet tall in an hour and starts hunting the crew, one by one. Ridley Scott could’ve phoned this movie in when 20th Century Fox hired him to direct it, but he went above and beyond and delivered a mixture of sci-fi and horror that was intense, suspenseful and thought-provoking.
The Shining
Stephen King detested Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of his bestselling novel The Shining. He felt that where the novel was warm in its characters and storytelling, the movie was cold. Kubrick’s visual style is very impersonal and calculated, yet very artistic and richly detailed.
The Shining stars Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a writer who takes a job as a winter caretaker at a hotel, stranded in the Colorado snow for months, alone with his wife and son. As Jack succumbs to writer’s block, he also succumbs to insanity. Before long, he’s seeing ghosts and plotting to murder his family.