Enclosed Space

Certain genres of fiction depend on forcing the characters into some kind of enclosed space they cannot leave at will. The plot of these usually depends on the tensions among the characters and their efforts to get out.

The different settings of this kind are usually strongly associated with particular genres. Examples:

• The submarine: Home to an entire Sub-Genre of war films. Archetypal example: Das Boot.
• The space ship/station: Often seen in sci-fi horror, like the Alien films or the System Shock games. For added scare factor, it may be a Ghost Ship.
• The underwater base works much like the above. The film The Abyss and the game BioShock feature such locales.
  • A sub-type is the sunken/capsized ship on which the heroes are trapped in air pockets and must make their way out. The Poseidon Adventure is the archetypal example.
• The Arctic base: Also similar to the space station. Seen in The Thing from Another World and its more-true-to-the-book remake The Thing (1982).
• The mansion isolated by adverse weather: Extremely common in murder mysteries.
• There's also the train, appearing in Murder on the Orient Express and The Last Express.
• The deserted/private/uncharted island: So common it's often passed over. Drop-in of viewpoint characters via shipwreck or plane crash is almost required.

• The isolated base in a hostile, dangerous location: You could leave the walls of the fortress and trek out into the Wild Wilderness. But either the hostile enemy lurking everywhere or the harsh terrain/fauna will kill you. So you hunker down behind the walls and hope you make it to the end of your tour of duty.

Note that the setting of a Bottle Episode does not count as an Enclosed Space unless the characters are forced to remain where they currently are. Compare Locked in a Room and Locked in a Freezer.

Supertrope to Snowed-In. Subtrope of Closed Circle. Horror versions may overlap with Trapped-with-Monster Plot.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Doctor Zero's foe Marid is an immortal Jerkass Genie who wants to escape humanity and their wishes, but can’t leave Earth and its energy field. Or, at least, not without technological help. Unfortunately, he's not too concerned about the consequences for Earth if, for example, his escape bid triggers World War III.
• The Eternals (2006) series established that Eternals can't leave Earth's solar system. That's not much of a restriction by human standards, but after half a million years of immortality it's starting to grate for some of them.
• In Miracleman the dead humans resurrected by Mors are limited to London or, in one case, to a single room - outside of that area, their android bodies will shut down. One issue involves an attempt to escape this restriction.

Films — Live-Action

• The movie Cube takes place in a maze of cubical rooms no more than 15 feet in diameter.
• Living Dead Series:
  • In the original Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the remake, the cast is trapped in a mall. Not the worst, or smallest place to get trapped, eh?
  • Not to mention the farm house in Night of the Living Dead (1968)
  • Or the nuclear bunker in Day of the Dead (1985).
• The movie version of the board game Clue
• House on Haunted Hill (1959) and its remake.
• Buried is so enclosed it never leaves the coffin the main character has been buried alive in.
• In 1408 after the hero has been in the room for a while the door simply refuses to open. Going out the window doesn't work, and there's something horrible in the ventilation ducts, so that's out. Oh, and the room actively hates him.
• The crew of Triangle is trapped on a Ghost Ship with a mysterious killer.
• Panic Room: Meg and Sarah are trapped in the panic room to hide from the burglars. The burglars can't simply take what they want and leave because the loot they're after is stored in the panic room occupied by the pair. They also barricade the rest of the building to keep the new owners from escaping.
• In the opening scene of Walled In, a little girl named Julie wakes up to find herself trapped in what turns out to be a hollow building column that is about to be filled with cement.

Literature

• The Michael Crichton novel (and movie technically based on the novel) Sphere featured the underwater base version.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream does this in an underground complex (inescapable because it's the only habitable place on Earth).
• The only reason that the crime in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was not a complete success is that the train was blocked by immense snowdrifts, making movement impossible for several days and allowing Hercule Poirot to investigate and solve the crime.
• Again from Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None / Ten Little Indians is set entirely on "Indian" Island, which is isolated from the outside world on account of bad weather and (?) a holiday on the mainland. As the people on the island are murdered one by one, the sense of terror in isolation grows.
• One of the Haruhi Suzumiya light novels is set in a mansion where they are trapped not only by bad weather but by an alien god that can warp space and time.
• After The Hole by Guy Burt. The characters intend to spend a few days locked up together in a basement at their school after term, as an experiment. Inevitably the person who's supposed to let them out doesn't come back... Also made into a film, The Hole.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Subverted because Nemo lets the Power Trio explore lands where an escape would be more dangerous than Nemo's "hospitality" in the Nautilus.
• In Andre Norton's Forerunner Foray, Ziantha as D'Eyree is trapped in their city as her powers fail, which may lead to her being fed to the Lurla.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • The "Base Under Siege" version of the trope is common in the show, particularly during the Second Doctor's era (1966-69).
  • "Midnight" features the Doctor and some tourists stranded in a bus which they can't leave due to the fact that the titular planet's surface is murderously uninhabitable. Uninhabitable, that is, except to beings who seem to come straight out of a nightmare.
• The iCarly episode "iSam's Mom" features scenes of Sam and her mom (and later, Carly) in a small room in the psychologist's office while being forced to communicate and make up. In this episode we learn that Carly is highly claustrophobic.
• Lost:
  • The show counts as the deserted island variant for most of the series (especially the early seasons), and contains many, many more specific examples. The abundance of Dharma Initiative bunkers (commonly called "hatches") provide plenty of opportunities for characters to end up alone together. The most prominent examples of this take place in the Swan hatch throughout season two, particularly the episode Lockdown, in which the blast doors trap Locke and Ben in there. And even when people weren't physically trapped, they were often bound by the duty of regularly pushing the button.
  • And there's a deliberate in-universe example in the season three episode The Brig, in which Locke traps Sawyer and Anthony Cooper in the eponymous brig of the Black Rock, hoping they'll get to talking about their pasts, resulting in Sawyer murdering Cooper. It works.
• In an episode of Robocop The Series, the title character is thrown into a trash compactor by a group of thugs. He escapes through sheer force of will, although it takes a third of the episode to accomplish it.
• Sanctuary uses this often, usually the monster-of-the-week is the thing that's trapped them, but they occasionally use the weather. Also seems to like cutting them off from their gadgets, which leaves them to outsmart whatever it is (before it kills them).

Tabletop Games

• The game Earthdawn justifies a large number of dungeon-like structures in the game world with its backstory of humanity driven into underground shelters by a rising tide of eldritch horrors swarming the world, a tide which has subsided enough to allow some of the survivors to venture forth — and explore/loot the shelters of those who didn't make it.

Video Games

• Chzo Mythos:
  • The series makes use of this trope in all of its four component games. In the first, you're stuck in a mansion. In the second, you're stuck on a spaceship, in the third you are trapped in a Hell Hotel, and finally the fourth which takes place in a underground complex.
  • The third game, Trilby's Notes, is being rather sadistic about it. You can go outside the hotel, but if you try to walk away from it, you will always come back, presumably because of the evil influence inside the hotel.
  • If you play the tie-in Interactive Fiction for the fourth game, you will learn that there is a perfectly safe exit behind the locked door in the room with the security desk and the petroleum barrel. Theo, the Player Character, remains unaware of this throughout the whole game, and never gets around to asking Trilby, a character capable of cracking ANY lock, to open the door.
• The vaults in the Fallout universe worked like this for most of their existence. First extreme radiation from the nuclear fallout kept people from leaving, later some were kept from leaving by ignorance, suppression, or deranged experiments.
• Parts of horror games can be like this, such as:
  • This occurs towards the halfway point of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica. Once Claire and Steve escape from Rockfort Island with the cargo plane, Alfred Ashford catches up in short order and drops a Tyrant in the cargo hold. Your only option is to kill the monster because there is quite literally nowhere else to go.
  • Fighting the Verdugo in Resident Evil 4, set deep underground after you have just fallen down a pit and the elevator is out of power. Then, when you turn on the power to bring up the elevator, the door locks shut, trapping you in a much smaller room with even tighter corridors, and now the monster is really trying to get you.
  • Rapture from BioShock is an underwater city composed of airtight skyscrapers interconnected by tunnel systems. The city streets and locales are all entirely indoors, creating a rather claustrophobic atmosphere (even in the larger wide-space chambers) for what is supposedly a utopian city.

Visual Novels

• Most of the action of Ever17 takes place in an underwater theme park that is slowly falling apart.

Webcomics

• Fleep spends all but a few strips confined to the interior of a concrete-enclosed phone booth.
• There is no known exit to the Tower of God, but it's inside is self-preserving and vast. Urek Mazino still wants to get out.

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