Underground environments don't mix well with the human psyche. Maybe it's the darkness, maybe it's the sense of claustrophobia, maybe it's the fear of being Buried Alive, or maybe it's something intrinsic to the underground itself... but whatever the cases, voyages Beneath the Earth have a worrying habit of driving spelunkers insane.
Much like Ocean Madness, Polar Madness, and even Space Madness, a key aspect of this particular variant of environmentally-induced insanity is often defined by an inability to escape. Unlike the other three, however, Subterranean Sanity Failure often works much faster, and it's entirely possible to find sufferers cracking up within days — or even hours — though long-term examples are not unknown.
The madness itself takes many forms, from travelers who give into hysterical panic to troglodytes gripped by hallucinations... and in some especially unfortunate cases, the pressures of being trapped underground can actually make pre-existing mental conditions even worse.
Will likely overlap with Cabin Fever if multiple characters are trapped in a single underground location. Can also overlap with Go Mad from the Isolation if the person is trapped alone. See also The Morlocks, for when a population of people turn into a twisted Human Subspecies from spending way too long underground.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Enigma of Amigara Fault: Exaggerated; when an earthquake uncovers a strange number of human-shaped holes in the mountain, people are immediately drawn to it, becoming inspired to fit themselves into the holes — and once inside, they cannot escape, but can only continue forwards into the depths. And even after witnessing this nightmare in action, people keep entering, the tunnels driving them to deranged obsession and inspiring terrifying nightmares in people who resist. Worse still, the nightmares reveal that the people inside are left howling in claustrophobic terror as they continue helplessly onwards, even as the tunnels get narrower and narrower. On the other side of the mountain, the exit points for the tunnels can be found; those who emerge from them have been stretched and warped into nightmarish figures. And somehow are still alive throughout.
Comic Books
- Batman: After gaining the shape-shifting powers of the other Clayfaces, Basil Karlo is defeated when Looker uses her psychic abilities to overwhelm him, causing him to melt into the earth. As a result, he ends up trapped in a cavern deep beneath Gotham with nothing to do but recite lines from his old films and absorb quartz from the cave walls. Eventually, the catastrophic earthquake of No-Man's Land opens a path to the surface, allowing him to climb to freedom... by which time, Karlo — already a psychopathic narcissist — is even crazier than usual, a fact that he goes on to demonstrate by brutally murdering several people who were trying to rescue him. Oh, and all that quartz has made him even stronger than before.
Fan Works
- In The Land of What Might-Have-Been, the Childlike Researchers are housed in an underground research facility known only as the Creche, and because of their wildly fluctuating ages, they aren't allowed to leave except on official business. As a result, mental illness is very common even among those of them who still possess adult personalities: one Researcher suffered a breakdown from constant claustrophobia and tried to claw his way through a concrete wall in a desperate attempt to see the sun again, ripping out most of his fingernails before the nurses were able to subdue him.
Films — Live-Action
- The Descent features the team of cavers beginning to crack up as the pressure of being trapped underground and menaced by subterranean monsters stacks up: Holly becomes so frenzied to escape that she sprints wildly ahead without bothering to check for pitfalls, Rebecca starts screaming for help even though there's nobody that can help them, while Juno and Sarah turn Blood Knight against the Crawlers. The film ends with Sarah parting ways with reality, smiling vacantly at a hallucination of her daughter as the Crawlers close in on her.
- In Threads, the Emergency Council are trapped in their bunker when the apocalyptic nuclear war brings Sheffield Town Hall down on top of their exits, leaving them trapped underground as they wait to be rescued and struggle to control the situation. In the days that follow, dwindling supplies, worsening conditions, and escalating stress weigh heavily on the Council, and many of them are reduced to screaming at each other over the slightest disagreement, to the point that even the radio operator ends up barking abuse at the people trying to rescue him. By the time the rescuers break through the rubble, the bunker ventilation has failed, and the entire Council has suffocated to death.
Literature
- The short story "The Beast in the Cave", written by a young H. P. Lovecraft, has a tourist get lost in Mammoth Cave. As his torch runs out, he hears bestial footfalls in the pitch darkness approaching him. He manages to strike at the creature with a rock, dealing a mortal blow, only to discover, after being rescued, the beast was actually a human that had degenerated into a malformed, ape-like troglodyte after getting lost in the cave long ago.
- Caitlin Starling's The Luminous Dead revolves around the protagonist exploring an incredibly dangerous cave system that's killed everyone else who's tried it, with only a Voice with an Internet Connection for company. The stress and isolation involved quickly begin wearing on her, both of which are only heightened as everything starts going wrong. Sanity Slippage results: she begins hearing her dispatcher's voice when she isn't speaking, she starts glimpsing people who shouldn't and can't be there, and worst of all, she knows she's losing it but still can't tell what's real and what isn't.
- A downplayed example in The Perilous Gard, where an entire community of people are living underground in caves. They occasionally feel something they call "the Weight" when they look upward and see masses of rock above them and feel an uncontrollable panic that they're about to be crushed or suffocated. When the heroine (who has been kidnapped by the underground people) first feels this claustrophobia they explain that it's common but that it passes, and one learns to live with it and just overcome the bad moments. (Incidentally, this is a realistic treatment of a long-term condition that sometimes flares up, in that it is more frightening the first time it happens, but once people are aware of the warning signs, they can manage it even though it remains unpleasant.)
Live-Action TV
- The final season of Cheers featured a story arc where Lilith has an affair with a colleague named Dr. Pascal and goes to live with him in an underground eco-pod. Unfortunately, Dr. Pascal turns out to be claustrophobic and goes mad while underground: he fakes a letter to Frasier asking for a divorce and gains an imaginary friend, and after Lilith escapes, he tracks her down and takes the gang hostage.
- M*A*S*H: In the episode "C*A*V*E", Colonel Potter has the 4077th evacuated to a nearby cave when the camp is shelled. Having claustrophobia, Hawkeye does not handle the move very well and eventually volunteers to take a patient needing more advanced surgery back to the camp to operate on the patient even though the camp is still under fire.
Music
- The Buoys recorded "Timothy", written by Rupert Holmes in 1970. The song describes a mine cave-in that traps three people. The concluding implication is that two survivors murdered and cannibalized the third, the eponymous Timothy, and repressed all memory of it out of guilt. "Timothy, Timothy, where on Earth did you go? / Timothy, Timothy, now why don't I know?" Amusingly the record company insisted the third member of the trio was actually a mule in an effort to get rid of any implications of cannibalism in the lyrics.
Tabletop Games
- In The End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse, the post-apocalypse stage of "Under The Skin" features the Earth being carpet-bombed with nuclear weapons in order to wipe out the parasites and their hosts. The uninfected populace survives in a worldwide network of shelters deep underground, but most citizens are forced to live in communal barracks with terrible food and no rights, and the only inhabitants who will ever see the sun again are scientists — or exiles. Consequently, one possible suggested event for the Shelter features a resident finally cracking up under the strain and attacking their neighbours.
- Out of the Abyss: The player characters are stuck in the subterranean Death World of the Underdark at the same time as a demonic incursion spreads madness and (even more) monsters into its caverns. The module makes extensive use of a Sanity Meter — PCs could suffer short- or long-term madness from eerie encounters, pervasive magic, the stress of deprivation, or more, and will meet many insane NPCs along the way.
Video Games
- 60 Seconds!: In the game's survival phase at the underground shelter, insanity is one of the various negative status effects that family members can get, usually when they're unable to do something for entertainment over a long time. Insane members have risk of destroying items in the shelter, and may escape out into the nuclear wasteland if they remain like that for too long.
- Dragon Age: Origins:
- During your voyage through the Deep Roads, you can stumble upon Ruck, a dwarven scavenger that's been left a paranoid, territorial wreck after weeks spent stranded in the underground ruins. Quite apart from spending most of that time alone, he's been surviving by eating the Darkspawn dead, becoming Tainted in the process.
- Hespith, one of the last surviving members of Branka's doomed expedition through the Dead Trenches, can be found insanely chanting a twisted nursery rhyme. Part of her apparent insanity is due to a strange illness that's left her delirious, but also due to trauma experienced down in the lowest reaches of the Deep Roads, for the poem is being used in a failing attempt to cope with the things she's had to endure — including being forced to eat several of her comrades. She's actually being transformed into a Darkspawn Broodmother, and she knows it; her friend, Laryn, has already completed her transformation and become an insane monstrosity — hence why Hespith opts to kill herself rather than meet the same fate.
- Invoked in Fear & Hunger, where the titular Dungeon of Fear & Hunger has been cursed to sap the mental (as well as physical) fortitude of those who enter it abnormally quickly. Unless precautions are taken, characters in the dungeon can begin to go mad within minutes.
- In RimWorld, your colonists (unless they have the Undergrounder trait or have cave-dwelling as part of their beliefs) can go stir-crazy from living in caves and mountains for too long. It also leaves them vulnerable to giant insects.
- In The Secret World, almost every single underground area in the game will feature people losing their minds at some point:
- Blue Ridge Mine was struck by one of several disasters in 1979 when several miners began turning up dead of foul play. Despite accusations leveled against the local Wabanaki, it eventually became clear that the murders could only have been committed by fellow miners, courtesy of something in the mine itself driving them insane. As it turns out, the cause is actually the Gaia Engine under the mountain... and the Dreamer imprisoned within it.
- In Egypt, the Atenist sacred site known as the Ankh is essentially a huge underground temple dug by the Pharoah Akhenaten in order to access a reservoir of the Filth. Atenist pilgrims would often descend into the Ankh itself in order to expose themselves to it, gradually driving themselves insane from Filth exposure the deeper they went. A few of these ancient cultists remain in the lake of Filth at the bottom of the Ankh, all of them are insane to point of no longer possessing human identity. In the present, Dr Klein has followed in their footsteps by growing so obsessed with the Filth in these underground chambers that he was willing to use it as a drug, slowly going even crazier in the process.
- The underground Roman Baths in the Carpathian Mountains were initially built to serve the needs of a Cult Colony worshipping Deus Sol Invictus; however, the Romans quickly found that the hot springs they thought would feed the baths were actually a wellspring of the Filth. Almost everyone in the community ended up being infected and driven mad: mutated into Filth shades, many they still congregate in the ruins of the bathhouse today. Not too far away, another Gaia Engine is buried in one of the mountains.
- A visit to Tokyo reveals that Sarah has been trapped in the ruined subways of Kaidan District ever since the terrorist attack during the game's intro. Since then, her proximity to all the eldritch weirdness going on down in the subways has left her mind stuck on an endless replay of her first day there — hence the Justified Tutorial that players experience at the start of the game. Because she hasn't been able to escape the subways or the effects, she's teetering on the brink of madness by the time you meet her again, and her diary entries indicate that she's barely been able to maintain a grip on her own identity as a result of her experiences.
- Until Dawn:
- A visit to the abandoned sanitorium reveals that the nearby mines suffered a disastrous cave-in during the 1950s, leaving several miners trapped underground for weeks. Though all of them were ultimately rescued and taken to the sanatorium for treatment, their time underground had left the "Miracle Men" in a very fragile mental state, and notes left by the staff indicate that some of them even tried to bite them. Further investigation reveals that the mine owners lied about the number of trapped miners in order to conceal the fact that not all of them survived: the miners were forced to resort to cannibalism while trapped, unleashing the curse of Blackwood Mountain and beginning their transformation into Wendigos, hence the attempted biting.
- Late in the game, it's discovered that Hannah Washington was trapped in the mines for several months, growing increasingly desperate as injuries, starvation, and being hopelessly lost in the tunnels took their toll. In the end, Hannah dug up Beth's corpse and ate most of it, sparing the head out of sheer guilt. Before long, she became a Wendigo as well, her sanity noticeably disintegrating as her transformation got underway.
- In the finale, Josh Washington is dragged underground by the Big Bad and trapped in the mines, resulting in a bevy of psychological problems catching up with him — not helped by the fact that Josh can earlier admit to being terrified of isolation. Before long, he's started hearing voices, seeing visions of his dead sisters, and being menaced by giant illusory pig heads. In the event that he survives the game, Hannah drags him even deeper into the mines, leaving him alone with the Wendigo's Cannibal Larder — eventually driving him to succumb to his demons and begin his own transformation...
Web Videos
- Internet Historian: In "Man In Cave," Floyd Collins is depicted gradually breaking down over the course of his time trapped in Sand Cave, to the point that exposure leaves him delirious and incoherent at least twice, his ongoing psychological collapse dramatized via a horrific nightmare sequence involving Floyd being dragged underwater by a subterranean Eldritch Abomination. This comes to a head when, after five days underground, Floyd begins making nonsensical pleas of two potential rescuers in a desperate attempt to keep them from leaving as the cave is about to collapse and he doesn't want to be left alone in the darkness.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: In "Red Starved", Finn, Jake, and Marceline accidentally get trapped in the buried ruins of the Sand Kingdom. After Jake accidentally eats the red erasers Marceline was saving for food, she starts to go feral and threatens to suck Jake's blood. Jake retaliates by trying to cook and eat Marceline, and when Finn catches him in the act, Jake confesses he was going crazy from the stress.
- Played for Black Comedy in the BoJack Horseman episode "Underground". While Mr. Peanutbutter is hosting a fundraising party for his campaign in the California gubernatorial election, his entire mansion suddenly plunges deep underground due to an earthquake caused by oil fracking operations in his (literal) backyard. 10 days pass, and with food, water, and oxygen slowly running out, all of the party guests trapped inside (including multiple Hollywood celebrities and employees) quickly grow violently insane and start fighting with each other for dominance. Jessica Biel even murders Zach Braff by setting him on fire and whips up most of the other survivors into following her fire-worshiping cannibal cult. They are rescued the next day, and agree to never mention these events again.
- The Ghost and Molly McGee: Exaggerated in "Lock, Stock, and Peril". When the rest of Molly's family gets locked in the basement, they manage to turn into Crazy Survivalists in a matter of hours, fighting with each other and hoarding supplies (flashlights for Pete, bottled water for Sharon, and leftover Halloween candy for Darryl).
- Milo Murphy's Law: In "The Undergrounders", Milo, Zack, and Melissa are trapped in an unfinished part of the subway system, and find a society of people there who have gone insane from the isolation.
