The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
This refers to thrillers where someone is held prisoner by a captor. The drama of the story centers around their attempts to escape from confinement, where suspense rides a rollercoaster around the building up of hopes and seeing them dashed.
There have been a number of films about people imprisoned by psychos, serial killers and backwoods hicks. A popular variant came during the Torture Porn fad where people were imprisoned in locked rooms and forced to participate in cruel and sadistic games.
Of more recent has been the Conceptual Containment Thriller, which seeks to confine a person or persons in as small a place as possible – a coffin, an elevator, a tree, a tent, a phone booth – for the duration of the show.
The topic is discussed in more depth in the essay Imprisonment Thrillers
An imprisonment thriller with a difference, a work of Japanese BDSM erotica where a young teacher is imprisoned and erotically tortured. Quite out there and different to anything Western erotica turns out
Variant on the Mad Relative Locked in the Attic/Cellar film made as part of the British horror cycle. Unfortunately, this plods where it should have developed tension
Four girls come around imprisoned in a mysterious facility with amnesia to find they are being subject to mysterious experiments. Not to be confused with the DC Comics super-villain
This is one of the most twisted films I have ever come across in recent years in which a couple have their home invaded by a clown who makes them into his sexual playthings
Kim Ki-Duk film about the strangely tender relationship that grows between a mute thug and a woman he forces into prostitution
This is the British equivalent of a Backwoods Brutality film in which Tony Curran is a towtruck driver who traps and kills motorists to salvage their belongings
Fine and underrated film in which a family find themselves imprisoned in their home and then start receiving instructions through the tv pushing them to further and further extremes
Thriller from the screenwriter of Buried that seeks to imitate that film’s containment drama in having three characters trapped inside an ATM booth by a killer outside
A variant on Buried, which had Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin for the duration, featuring a girl trapped in an elevator as it conducts high-speed rises and drops, all before a bizarre left field SF ending
Unexpectedly excellent film where an elderly Satanist couple abduct a pregnant woman in order to incarnate their grandson in her unborn child. This deflates the cliches in a series of alternately funny and wild twists
This highly charged work about race issues received a very mixed critical reception but I liked it for its clever M. Night Shyamalan-esque twistiness that messes with storytelling convention
Michael Polish is one of the underrated American directors. Here an amnesiac Wes Bentley wakes up a prisoner of a wonderfully chilling Kate Bosworth who insists that she is his wife
Survival thriller in which a woman is abducted by a man but affects an escape where she must then make a harrowing run through the woods while pursued by him
From the director of the Terrifier films, a horror anthology in which a babysitter and kids sit down to watch a mysterious videotape on Halloween night. The first screen appearance of Art the Clown