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May 7, 2014 · Note: I’ve excluded films that contain only one claustrophobia-inducing scene (‘Kill Bill: Volume 2’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, etc.) in favor of films that communicate a pervasive sense of claustrophobia from start to finish, ranked in order of confinement. Hold your breath and read on. 25. Moon
- 101 VOTES. The Descent. It's the classic choice when looking for a claustrophobic horror flick. The Descent follows a group of friends who head out to explore an underground cave system and end up discovering horrific beings also living down there.
- 70 VOTES. Buried. Pictures. Ryan Reynolds carries this one-man performance in a role that's a bit unsung for the A-List actor. He plays a trucker who wakes up to find himself buried in a coffin underground.
- 50 VOTES. The Cave. Cave systems are scary. Tight spaces coupled with the unknown of it all are mined for horrific gold in The Cave. The story follows a group of thrill seekers who are hired to explore a newly discovered cave system beneath a Romanian abbey.
- 59 VOTES. As Above, So Below. A found footage movie that's bound to terrify the claustrophobic, As Above, So Below follows an archaeologist who's searching – of all things – for the Philosopher's Stone and learns that it's hidden in the catacombs below Paris.
- The Vanishing (1988) Director George Sluizer's original 1988 Dutch version (not his inferior American remake) is a great chiller, with one of the creepiest, most disturbing endings of all time.
- Taste of Cherry (1997) Abbas Kiarostami's masterpiece takes place entirely inside a taxi, as a Tehran cabbie tries to persuade various passengers to help him violate Islamic taboo and commit suicide.
- Das Boot (1981) Best. Submarine. Movie. Ever.
- Papillon (1973) Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, imprisoned on Devil's Island. A must-see.
R | 93 min | Horror, Mystery, Thriller. 6.2. Rate. 39 Metascore. When a team of explorers venture into the catacombs that lie beneath the streets of Paris, they uncover the dark secret that lies within this city of the dead. Director: John Erick Dowdle | Stars: Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge, François Civil.
- The Boy in The Plastic Bubble
- The Thing
- The Vanishing
- The Abyss
- Misery
- Apollo 13
- Cube
- Stranded
- Panic Room
- The Descent
An iconic made for television drama film about a teenage boy, Tod Lubitch (John Travolta), who has grown up without a functioning immune system and is forced to live his life in a “bubble”, a plastic incubator meant to protect him from the outside world. Although Tod is given a space suit so that he can attend high school classes, his loneliness is...
The seclusion of John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is both a blessing and a curse. It keeps the alien bacteria lifeform contained in the research station at Antarctic — but it also means the researchers living there can’t really get away either. They’re just surrounded by a cold wasteland as they suspect everyone around them as an alien shapeshifter....
A young Dutch couple stops at a rest area area during their road trip vacation to France. Unfortunately Rex’s girlfriend Saskia goes missing during the stop, totally without a trace. This spurs his three-year search for his missing girlfriend. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere until he starts receiving letters from her potential abductor. I don’t want...
There’s trouble at the bottom of the ocean, and a SEAL team is headed down in a submarine to help save the underwater drilling team stuck there. But things quickly turn chaotic when an unknown entity enters their submarine, shaped like a pillar of water. While there are plenty of claustrophobic submarine movies out there, The Abysshas the perfect m...
Cozy cabins and fluffy beds aren’t claustrophobic on their own, but they are when you’re being forced to stay there by someone who will take any means to keep you there. In Misery, author Paul Sheldon gets rescued by a nurse named Annie Wilkes, but it isn’t the rescue he was hoping for. It turns out she’s a rabid fan of his novels and keeps him inj...
A space movie that dramatizes the real events of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970. The crew aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft learn that an explosion has limited their supply of oxygen and electrical power. Aborting the crew’s mission to land on the moon, NASA works to bring the three men (an all star cast of Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon...
People start waking up in a weird cubic room with no memory of how they got there. There are hatches on every wall, floor, and ceiling, but they aren’t the escape they hoped for. Instead, they lead to a seemingly unending series of cubes — some creatively deadly — giving a poignant false feeling of escape. Ask any horror lover for a list of their f...
A sci-fi film set in a futuristic 2020 where the first manned mission to Mars is taking place. Five crew members end up stranded in their spacecraft on Mars. It will take over two years for a rescue mission to reach the astronauts and there is only enough food and supplies for two of the five survivors.
While being in the relative safety of a state-of-the-art panic room might feel like a boon during a home invasion, it starts feeling tiny very quickly. And when Meg’s daughter Sarah (played by Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart, respectively) starts to go into a diabetic coma, she wants to be anywhere but in that panic room. Too bad robbers are in th...
A group of women go on a spelunking trip in the Appalachian Mountains. It’s just supposed to be an active and adventurous girls’ trip, but things quickly descend into terror and madness. The Descentwill get you rethinking any desire you had to explore vast cave systems. Because even the most cavernous cave systems could mean getting lost, or worse:...
Human bones line the walls, the ceilings are low, the tunnels are narrow and the only light source is their headtorches. These elements are already enough to make the audience feel trapped, but the added aspect of the film using a found footage approach means that the sense of claustrophobia is even more overwhelming.
The Nazis, exasperated at the number of escapes from their prison camps by a relatively small number of Allied prisoners, relocate them to a high-security "escape-proof" camp to sit out the remainder of the war. Undaunted, the prisoners plan one of the most ambitious escape attempts of World War II. Based on a true story.
