The Walls Are Closing In

You mean you don't have a Bat-Wall Brace in that Utility Belt!?

"One thing's for sure: We're all going to be a lot thinner."

— Han Solo, Star Wars: A New Hope

The Hero finds himself in an empty room, and then the walls start closing in, threatening to squash our hero from the sides.

Like its Sister Trope, Descending Ceiling, The Walls Are Closing In shares many of the same functions and tends to show up in the same situations. This Death Trap can be decorated with Spikes of Doom to look even more menacing, and it can be used hand-in-hand with Descending Ceiling on a Conveyor Belt o' Doom (usually with one coming right after the other in sequence). It may also be subject to a type of a Magic Countdown; no matter how much time the heroes take, the walls are just far enough for them to escape, even moving back between shots.

Common ways for heroes to escape this vicious trap is to find a means to brace the moving walls, wait for their Sidekick to find a way inside and get them out Just in Time before the walls would have surely crushed them, or a combination of the two.

This was commonly used as a stock Cliffhanger in Film Serials of the 1940s, and has appeared frequently in such works. If this occurs in a Video Game, it may be an Escape Sequence.

Compare Advancing Wall of Doom, when the hero has to outrun a single moving wall; and there may exist some overlap between the two tropes if the Death Trap is only one moving wall.

See Also Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom where a character has to run a gauntlet of smashing objects without getting hit by any.

Not to be confused with Deadly Walls.

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Examples:

Advertising

• GEICO: The following ad is being condensed for your viewing convenience.
• A Pokémon Red and Blue commercial had a creepy bus driver take a bus full of Pokemon to a car compactor. In goes the bus, out goes a Game Boy with the Pokemon trapped in it.
• Happens near the end of Sega Saturn's "Theater of the Eye" commercial, when it implies that playing the console will make you lose control of your sphincter.

Anime & Manga

• One Piece: In the Dressrosa arc, Donquixote Doflamingo does this with his Birdcage technique, a wall of sky-to-ground Razor Floss that he erects all around the island of Dressrosa. When things start getting dire for him, he begins to slowly shrink the Birdcage to slice up everyone inside it. Additionally, Pica's ability allows him to do this with the castle walls.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, Yugi falls into a pit trap that soon has the walls closing in. He narrowly avoids being crushed.

Asian Animation

• Mechamato: Amazeey's first labyrinth challenge has Amato, Deep, Mara and MechaBot require to find the correct book while the library shelves gradually close in on them until they do so.

Comic Books

• Gotham City Sirens
  Poison Ivy: Please tell me the walls aren't going to move together.
  Catwoman: The walls are moving together.
  Poison Ivy: Of course they are.

Fan Works

• In Exposition this is used to kill Voldemort after all of his Horcruxes have been disposed of.
• Sonic Mania: The Novelization: Eggatha, Eggman's niece, tries to dispose of Team Sonic by dropping them into the Flying Battery's trash compactor. Tails puts a stop to it by destroying the electromagnet controlling the compactor with Dummy Ring Bombs.

Film — Animation

• Ice Age did this with a glacier.
• Ice Age: The Meltdown played with this, and had numerous scenes where giant ice walls and cliffs split in half and move away from each other, usually to impede the cast or have an advancing Giant Wall of Watery Doom arrive.
• There's a visually similar scene in The Incredibles, as Mr. Incredible races to get out from between two closing walls of lava.
• In Rugrats In Paris The Movie, during the "Chuckie Chan" scene, Chuckie falls through a trapdoor while trying to outrun the ninjas and lands in a room with spiked walls closing in on him.
• Referenced in Toy Story 2; while the toys are trekking through the air vents, Buzz 2 hears a rumbling noise (from an approaching elevator) and believes the walls are closing in.
  Buzz 2: Quick, help me prop up Vegetable Man or we're done for! [lifts Potato Head up]
  Potato Head: Hey, put me down, you moron!

Film — Live-Action

• Army of Darkness sees Ash thrown into a pit containing a few demons that he has to fight, as well as this particular Death Trap just to make things more exciting. He escapes by hanging onto the chain powering the closing walls as it moves up.
• Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh: Grace tries to kill Deedee in a trash compactor but winds up caught in it, instead.
• In Bloody Homecoming, Steve is killed when he hides under the retractable bleachers in the gym, and the killer then causes them to retract into the wall.
• In the 1946 film The Curse Of The Wraydons (a.k.a. Strangler's Morgue), the murderer Philip Wraydon is crushed by the converging walls he has set in motion to crush the hero, Jack Wraydon.
• Another non-lethal parody in Ernest Scared Stupid when Ernest fell in the garbage truck and his dog activated the compactor. Ernest tries to keep the walls from closing in and even removing the batteries fails. He gets rescued trapped in compacted garbage.
• Escape Room (2019) opens with a man trying to get out of a library themed room with a slowly advancing wall, fireplace and everything, forcing him to solve the puzzles to get out before the wall crushes him to death.
• The 2007 Spanish film Fermat's Room featured this, with the twist that the victims had to correctly answer logic or math puzzles to stop the walls from advancing.
• J-Men Forever. Agent Spike of the J-Men goes to answer the telephone, only to have a sliding gate with Spikes of Doom shut on him and an Advancing Wall of Doom push Spike up against the spikes. However a montage at the end of the film shows all the resourceful J-Men are Not Quite Dead. In this case Spike used his revolver to act as a wedge between a spike and the advancing wall, until it broke open the gate and he could escape (the scene being gag-dubbed is a classic Cliffhanger Copout as he didn't have the room to do that before).
• A variation occurs in Jurassic World Dominion when Maise Lockwood is climbing a ladder surrounded by a safety cage when a Giganotosaurus clamps its jaws on it and starts squeezing them shut, with its teeth as the Spikes of Doom. Fortunately it loses patience and just rips off and throws aside the cage, giving Maise the moment she needs to finish climbing.
• Krull includes the spiked walls version, and a gruesome death for one man who could have escaped but went back for his cherished knife.
• In, Nothing but Trouble, Chris and Diane are menaced by a wall moving in to crush them while they're sneaking around the Valkenheiser estate.
• The Raven (1935) has a Torture Cellar with one such room.
• Combined with Slow Doors in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, when Alice is forced to stop and fight a zombie as she's racing through the heavy blast doors to the Elaborate Underground Base.
• The final trap in Saw V involves this. Not only does Strahm fail to escape it by climbing up to the ceiling, but the scene graphically shows the perils of trying to "brace yourself" to stop the walls, as the bones splinter out of Strahm's limbs. Furthermore, in a flashback in Saw VI, Hoffman retracts the walls and looks over what's left of Strahm before taking his remaining hand. It's really not a pretty sight. Word of God stated that, when they made the trap, they made it with the intent of showing just how graphic it could really get.
• Soul Mates (2023): The first challenge room has two walls rapidly closing in on the two leads until they quickly use a touchscreen and sift through several pages of legalize in a few seconds to agree to become "participants" on Soul Mates.
• The trash compactor scene in Star Wars: A New Hope is a standout depiction of this trope but also a Shout-Out to the cliffhanger serials that George Lucas would watch as a kid, which very much inspired a lot of the story-telling in the original trilogy. It's also the inspiration for this trope's redirect, Trash Compactor Scenario. The Star Wars Musical even has a whole song about this scene called "The Walls are Closing In".
• Superman: The Movie offers a variant in the subway tunnel where Luther keeps his hideout: a section of platform wall that pushes outward suddenly, shoving a police detective into the path of an oncoming train.
• Terry and the Pirates: This is combined with Spikes of Doom in episode 11 when Terry and Pat are locked in a trap, with the walls closing in—the walls threatening to push them into the Spikes of Doom pit that occupies the center of the room.
• There's a non-lethal parody in Toys, where Robin Williams' character and others find themselves in a room that keeps getting smaller as square sections of wall close in one at a time. It's meant to convey that General Leland is expanding other areas of the toy factory for his own nefarious purposes.

Film Serials

• The Batman Chapter 13, "Eight Steps Down," ends with Batman stuck in a "spiked-walls" variant of this Death Trap, which is cut away from just before the walls are about to crush Batman with no hope in sight for rescue. Then, the beginning of Chapter 14, "The Executioner Strikes," shows Robin appearing much earlier during the same scene with more than enough time to slip Batman a crowbar to brace the walls moving in.
• The Mysterious Doctor Satan has an Advancing Wall of Doom version that he implies is more often used to encourage people to talk, but in "Chapter 11 — Death Closes In" Dr. Satan has no issue using it for a more lethal purpose when masked superhero The Copperhead falls through the Trap Door, and we have the expected cliffhanger as the hero is seemingly crushed against the bars of his cell and collapses out of sight. In the next chapter it's revealed The Copperhead collapsed out of relief as the moving wall hadn't got near him. Once More, with Clarity we're shown that he held his pistol (with a shiny metal cigarette case as a reflector to aim it) outside the bars of his cell so he could shoot the mechanism controlling the wall. His sidekick then arrives to open the trapdoor and let him out of the cell.

Literature

• Alex Rider, in Stormbreaker, gets trapped in a car inside a crusher in a junkyard. He's able to squeeze out the window and climb out.
• Animorphs used this in "The Separation". Visser Three used a moving wall because he thought the group were Andalites, who hate enclosed spaces.
• The Give Yourself Goosebumps book One Night in Payne House has the walls closing in on you when you encounter the Pink Room, and need to have brought the right item to free yourself.
• The Goosebumps book One Day At Horrorland features a house of mirrors that ends in a room where this happens. The floor drops out at the very last second.
• The Iron Shroud by William Mudford concerns a prisoner confined in a chamber where the walls and ceiling slowly contract, day by day, through mechanical means, to the point of eventually crushing and enveloping the victim, thus metaphorically becoming his iron shroud.
• Older Than Radio: The archetype is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842), in which the moving walls are red hot and push the victim into the pit.
• In Secret of the Sixth Magic, debtors in the city of Pluton are condemned to death if no one will pay off their creditors to buy them as slaves. This being a fantasy world, the method of execution is magic-powered: they're sealed inside an unbreakable cube, which then magically gets smaller... and smaller... and smaller.
• In the Star Quest juvenile sci-fi by Terrance Dicks, our heroes are captured by robots preparing for a Robot War. As a demonstration they release Kevin into a Mobile Maze, but he refuses to play and just sits down on the spot. So they try to frighten him by making the walls and ceiling shrink to a coffin-sized box, but he refuses to break, so they have to send in Robot Soldiers to fire at Kevin to get him moving.
• There are a number of callbacks to the trash compactor scene in Star Wars Legends. In The Thrawn Trilogy, Luke heads into one and as the walls close in he hopes that Mara, who is controlling the trash compactor and previously stated her desire to kill him, won't let her hatred overcome her. She stops the walls a meter apart, and he rock-chimneys up and saves her boss.

Live-Action TV

• Used for the Animated Credits Opening of 1990, a political drama about an increasingly oppressive Great Britain.
• The Adventures of Superman:
  • Superman, Lois & Jimmy are trapped in a concrete bunker, with Supes out of commission due to a Kryptonite ray. Then the walls start closing in. Luckily there happened to be a discussion of hypnotism earlier in the episode. Superman hypnotises Lois, which somehow makes him able to levitate her. Her body stops the walls, and Jimmy is able to climb up to the top and redirect the Kryptonite ray.
  • In "Drums of Death", the Villain of the Week tries to use a wine press to dispose of Perry, Perry's sister, and Jimmy. Superman arrived and tore apart the bars, allowing them to escape.
• Batman (1966) (the 1966 TV series): In Catwoman's first appearance, she subjects Batman & Robin to the Spikes of Doom version (see picture at top of page). But the walls stop just before they'd impale Batman, and anyway the spikes are made of rubber. She was just toying with him. (It wasn't the Cliffhanger of the episode.)
  • This was an homage to an actual cliffhanger◊ from the 1943 The Batman (Serial).
• Bunk'd: This happens in the Escape Room in "Queen of Screams" when the group fails to put in the right code to get out.
• Although it was never shown in the series itself due to the limitations of puppets, one of the paintings forming the backdrop to the Closing Credits of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons showed the title hero desperately running through an ever-narrowing spiked corridor.
• CSI: NY: In "Death House" the team are investigating a penthouse that has been converted into a series of elaborate Death Traps. Hawkes gets trapped in a small metal room where the walls start closing in on him.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The War Games". Like the TARDIS, the villains' SIDRATs are bigger inside than out. But if necessary, the interior can be made to shrink, invoking this trope on anybody inside.
  • In "The Girl Who Died", a moving wall on the Mire ship is used to push the Viking warriors into the corridor where their testosterone is harvested.
• Lampshaded in the short-lived 1990 Dracula: The Series. The heroes stumble into the spiky version of one of these traps while sneaking around Alexander Lucard's castle, and escape because one of them had seen how to defeat it in an old movie. Later on, Dracula is showing an invited guest around the place, they come to the (now empty) trap, and he says something like "Do you like it? I saw it in an old movie, and I just had to have one!"
• Estate of Panic played with this trope in the trash compactor, the study (along with a Descending Ceiling), and the wine cellar (coupled with Spikes of Doom).
• One of the challenges in the Japanese Game Show Dasshutsu Game DERO! (as well as the American counterpart Exit (2013)), where teammates are placed in a room with padded walls on 2 opposite sides. The players have to lock in answers to two-way questions, each question correctly answered by every player earns the team a point. After the team gets a certain number of points, one person is released to play the "Key Box Challenge" - pick a key from a plexiglass box with two arms extending into it and drop the key through a tube through the bottom of the box. Then they have to quickly run through a corridor (the walls of which are also closing in) to reach the safe zone. Repeat the Key Box Challenge for everyone else. In the American version, the last team player to not be released/finish the challenge in time is also "squashed".
• Get Smart. Max gets stuck in a room with the walls closing in on him. Luckily, CONTROL had given him a pen with the strength of a steel girder, keeping the walls far enough apart to keep him alive.
• Played for laughs in Just Roll With It. When they were trapped in an elevator, the audience voted for them to do a dance floor game. After Blair finished, it was revealed that failure to succeed was for the elevator walls to close in, much to the surprise of all involved. Each participant who failed their dance moves caused the walls to move closer in.
• Kamen Rider Gaim: Sid/Kamen Rider Sigurd is killed when Roshuo, leader of the Inves uses telekinesis to turn a solid cliff face into one of these.
• The New Avengers: In "The Deadly Angels", Steed and Purdey are trapped in a room with the walls closing in to crush them. They end up in extremely close quarters before Gambit manages to switch the machinery off.
• One episode of The Paul Hogan Show featured a series of sketches in which someone is murdering Australia's greatest sporting stars. Squash player Geoff Hunt was killed when the murderer slowly cranked in the walls of his squash court, causing him to be crushed.
• RoboCop: The Series placed the title character in a trash compactor. When air pressure almost reached 2000 PSI, a flashback gives Robocop inspiration, allowing him to push back the walls.
• Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman faced these every so often:
  • In "Fausta, The Nazi Wonder Woman", Steve Trevor is the bait to lure Wonder Woman to her doom. The engine pushing the walls together isn't a match for Wonder Woman
  • In "The Man Who Made Volcanoes", Diana falls into a pit and the walls close in. They didn't account for her transforming into Wonder Woman and breaking the wall.

Music Videos

• The Cardigans' video for "Erase/Rewind" shows the band in such a room, and is blatantly inspired by Star Wars. It has two versions: the original one with the Downer Ending, and the 13th floor edition where they save themselves (it's named because it has additional scenes from the movie 13thFloor, which the song was used in).

Pinballs

• The "Strait Jacket Escape" illusion in Theatre of Magic requires the magician to escape while trapped between two spiked walls closing together.

Podcasts

• In the Red Panda Adventures book The Pyramid of Peril, the Red Panda, the Flying Squirrel, and the Stranger are making their way through an ancient, deathtrap filled Egyptian cavern when one of their adversaries' mooks sets off such a trap in the dead center of a long hallway. Their main enemy is far enough back to get out of the hall in time. The mooks are not so fortunate. As for the heroes, while the walls of the labyrinth are high, the ceiling is significantly higher and the Panda and Squirrel have Static Shoes that enable easy Wall Crawling, so they merely grab the Stranger, run up to the top of the walls and run along those to make it to the goal first.

Theme Parks

• The Dungeon of Terror haunted house from Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights had a room with pliable walls that shrunk enough that the walls could touch the guests.

Video Games

• In Breath of Fire II, the party is nearly killed by such a trap. Rand holds the walls apart long enough for the rest of the party to escape, but he soon finds his strength fading... His mother Daisy finds him and pushes him out of the trap, taking his place and sacrificing herself.
• In Cave Story, the walls of Ballos' chamber close in when the hero and Curly Brace defeat him for good. They would be crushed if not for Balrog.
• Crystal Crazy has walls closing in in the Bonus Waves.
• In Cuphead, if you stall in pursuing the Devil's skeleton down a hole (with the "GO" arrow pointing downward), the walls of fire will close in on you and push you in by burning force.
• The very first scene from the Famicom Disk System game Dead Zone takes place in a trash compactor (with bits and pieces of broken robots strewn all over the floor), and then the walls start closing in after several proper commands have been given. When the player uses the move command (ウエ) several times and the screen changes to the compactor's ceiling, the player must get out by opening the grate on the ceiling before he is crushed.
• Appears in Distorted Travesty where The Artist tries this to kill Jerry after he sides with The Darkness.
• Most late-model Final Fantasy games have this trope, sometimes with only one moving wall in the Death Trap. The wall is a living creature, and must be defeated before it crushes the party.
  • Final Fantasy IV has a bad guy trapping the heroes in one of these during a cutscene as they try to escape his lair after taking him out. Palom and Porom, the two cute Half Identical Twin kid mages, sacrifice themselves to save the others by turning themselves to stone and stopping the walls.
  • And another sequence where the moving wall is actually a monster called the Demon Wall, and you actually have to fight it to the death as it advances. If it advances all the way, it starts spamming the special move Crush, an Always Accurate Attack that instantly kills whoever it hits, and significantly faster than you can revive your party members.
  • Final Fantasy XII has two Demon Wall enemies. The first one you fight presents a twist — it is powered up and offers you little time to defeat it, but it is fortunately a Skippable Boss and you are meant to flee the battle by using the door that it would crush you against, and instead fight the second wall in the next room. The second one (the one you must defeat) is much weaker and offers much more time to win. If so desired, you can come back later in the game to rematch against the first wall. Unless you've done a lot of Level Grinding, in which case you can just off the first one right away and pick up a weapon that you're not intended to have at that point in the game yet (still not quite the Infinity +1 Sword though, but it is one of the games many, many Disc One Nukes).
• The first God of War has a variant in that one wall moves, except it won't hurt Kratos like an Advancing Wall of Doom but will crush him against the magic enemy barrier if the player doesn't kill all the Mooks fast enough. The second game plays this straight with two walls.
• In Hades, Tisiphone incorporates this into her boss fight. The walls of the arena close in more the more damage she takes, to the point that the final size of the arena is about the length of Varatha.
• Half-Life:
  • In Half-Life, a pair of HECU troopers captures Gordon and tosses him in a trash compactor, which he then escapes via conveniently stacked up garbage.
  • The Expansion Pack Half-Life: Opposing Force has two trash compactors that look even more like the Star Wars one.
  • Half-Life 2 has a section in Nova Prospekt where a corridor of Combine Walls closes in and threatens to crush you unless you find a way out.
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, there is an obstacle course you have to pass through to reach the title location. One of the obstacles is a room with walls which close in on you, although you rather boringly beat them by simply running through the room fast enough.
• In Infernal Runner, you can curse your pixelated body if you aren't fast enough at jumping off the slide leading into the crushing-walls trap, since death will be your only escape.
• The Waste Disposal area in the Kingdom of Loathing "Bugbear Invasion" challenge path, as an extended Star Wars homage, has these, and frequently warns you that the walls are coming closer. Unlike some of the game's warnings of this nature, these are not a case of Take Your Time - if you don't solve the area's puzzle in time, you are crushed and get Beaten Up for a while.
• In It Takes Two, at one point during the Cuckoo Clock chapter the two protagonists are dumped in a room where a wall slowly avances towards them, eventually squishing them after a short amount of time. The solution is for May to place a clone right next to the moving wall, so that she can teleport beyond it as it moves. Back there, she'll find a lever to lower the floor and let Cody through.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In Ocarina of Time, there's a room in the Shadow Temple where rickety wooden spike-walls slowly close in on you. No worries here, though: if you have Din's Fire, you'll be fine.
  • The Ancient Ruins, the sixth dungeon in Oracle of Seasons, has a large room with obstacles that must be crossed before its walls crush the player. The trap is activated by grabbing the big red rupee. If Link fails to make it to the exit in time, he dies instantly regardless of how much life he has.
• Adam Cadre's Lock and Key, a game about designing a foolproof dungeon, includes this trap. If you add the Spikes of Doom, it turns out they were poorly made and hit each other, breaking the trap and allowing the prisoner to simply climb past.
• Mario Party: Island Tour has a minigame called "Squish You Were Here", players have to avoid closing walls for 60 seconds or until one player does not get squashed flat by finding a wall that will not close completely. The walls reopen and get faster each time.
• Mega Man 4 has the series' first example with Dust Man's trash compactor stage.
  • In Mega Man Zero, Aztec Falcon is fought in a trash compactor stage as well. It's different in the fact that you aren't the one being crushed, it's another Reploid. And you only have 75 seconds to beat the guy.
  • Mega Man X2 has several sequences where you have to climb up between walls before they crush you. There's actually a robot who triggers this; if you kill it first (try charged-up Sonic Slicer), the walls won't move. Alas, there's no such trick for the similar traps in Mega Man X3 and Mega Man X7.
    • Those same walls show up in the Megaman X segment of Distorted Travesty 3, only the situations become more difficult then in X3.
  • Mega Man X4 has one in the opening stage, which you can accidentally drop down right before the boss fight. It does contain a life and a health pickup, though.
• In Messiah, a shooter from 2000, there is a moment where you trigger a security system which causes the only available NPC (a worker) to fall and break his legs (meaning he can only crawl slowly), and one of the walls begins to slowly move against you. You're then required to possess the worker and slowly crawl to the switch, deactivating the wall and opening a passage further.
• The Dark Prison in Mortal Kombat: Deception has a stage fatality in which you can knock your enemy into a section of the wall, at which point the two spiked walls begin to close in. They will try to push the walls apart, only to be crushed anyway.
• Nancy Drew: The Silent Spy has Nancy and Zoe Wolfe stuck in a trash compactor. The player has to solve a puzzle to free the lock.
• The very start of Need For Speed: The Run, has the player character trapped inside a car with their hands taped to the wheel. Then, the car is thrown into a trash compactor and one of the walls begin to close in. Fast. Don't worry, all it takes is some button mashing to escape.
• In Nightmare House, at one point, you find yourself trapped in a doorless corridor. Every time you cross the room and turn around, the other wall is closer than it was the last time you looked at it. The only way to get out is to keep doing it until the walls close in completely. Then you wake up somewhere else.
• The NES game Nightshade (1992) uses death traps as "lives". The second one is walls closing in.
• In Portal 2, prior to the Disc-One Final Boss, you have no choice but to jump into an Obvious Trap, leading to this. However, the walls are not intended to crush you but rather to force you into position over a Trap Door as part of a larger trap.
• Prince of Persia 2 has crushing walls in its later levels, some of which are situated in inescapable pits under Fake Platforms.
  • Later Prince of Persia games on some occasions feature the inverse: a tall narrow well that has to be navigated by jumping from one wall to another. And it has to be navigated fast, because on of the walls is moving out, making it too wide to jump across and introducing the Prince to a lethal fall down.
• Happens at the beginning of the last mission in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, but Qwark can brace the walls forever, and all you have to do is just blow up some Mooks in the enclosed space before the trap is released.
• The deathtrap is featured in Rise of Nightmares for the Xbox 360 Kinect. Two people find themselves crushed in it.
• Rise of the Triad: In early versions, even touching an approaching wall causes instant death. While walls usually are independent movers, there are some places where sections of walls move back and forth to crush the player. In one level, it appears the walls are closing in when you hit a touchplate, but they stop at the last second.
• The Demon Wall boss from Secret of Mana. At first it is stationary, but if you destroy its left and right eyes first and leave the center one alive, it will start pushing you towards a spike pit. If you fail to kill it before it pushes you into the spikes, it's Game Over.
• In Sonic Mania, "Flying Battery Act 1", the level's boss (also known as Big Squeeze) is fought in a giant trash compactor, where a giant electromagnet pulls broken Badniks out of the trash and throws them back at the player. The player needs to use said Badniks to destroy the electromagnet before Sonic and Tails are flattened.
• Space Engineers have trash compactors as a popular way to salvage derelict space ships; shove a ship in one, turn on the grinders to break up the ship, and activate the mechanism to push the walls (and the ship) towards the grinders. Eschewing the grinders gives you a much more entertaining way to turn ships into metal pancakes.

• Spider-Man: Edge of Time: Peter/Amazing Spider-Man finds himself in this situation at one point. Miguel/Spider-Man 2099 has to cause a quantum causality to save Peter.
• Squeeze Box for the Atari 2600 has the player shooting at bricks in the wall to stop them from advancing towards him while trying to escape.
• The second planet encountered in Slipsand Galaxy from Super Mario Galaxy 2 has several walls that slide toward and away from each other.
  • The last planet encountered in Bowser's Galaxy Generator before the final battle with Bowser involves Mario and Yoshi eating Dash Peppers to run through a hallway lined with walls of magma before they close in on them.
• This also happens in the fights against Roy Koopa in Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. 2. The most immediate danger is not that the walls will crush you, but that there is less and less room for Mario to evade incoming attacks.
• Thy Dungeonman 3 has walls of spikes that smash the character if they are not stopped with the convenient bone lying around before 12 turns have elapsed.
• Happens throughout the Tomb Raider series.
• Bally/Midway's arcade TRON video game has the player shooting Tron's disc at a wall that descends towards him so he can enter the MCP before he gets derezzed.
• In Warframe, Qorvex can weaponize this: his Containment Wall ability summons two parallel walls in front of him, which then slam together, crushing enemies caught between them (after blasting them with radiation).

Web Comics

• Girl Genius Once castle Heterodyne is repaired and reconnected to Mechanicsburg it takes a pair of buildings with spiked sides and slides them together to crush the invading troops in punching tank that were passing through the alley between them.
  Soldier: Punch-Captain! It's getting— the walls are closing in!
• Appears in the Maze of Many in Goblins. Ends up killing Barbarian Kin and Forgath. Barbarian Minmax died earlier from a Descending Door.
• In Narbonic, when Mell is sent on a mission to kill Helen Narbon (the elder), she falls prey to this after commenting, "Huh, weird floor." Her captor comments that there wasn't time to come up with something original, since Mell made it farther than expected.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time:
  • Happens with the first room Ice King, N.E.P.T.R., Tree Trunks, Shelby and Lemongrab find themselves trapped in in "Mystery Dungeon".
  • Happens again to Finn, Ice King (who is reverted back to Simon as it happens), and Betty during the series Grand Finale.
• Alfred J. Kwak: In the Egyptian pyramid, Alfred and Professor Paljas are walking down a dark corridor when giant blocks begin to move towards them from both the front and back. They manage to climb on top of them, but this is then repeated several times with blocks moving in from several different directions to crush them until they realize that it's all a hypnotic trance.
• Discussed in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: Zurg tells the architect of his base that heroes always have enough time to find a way out of a trash compactor, and to install an incinerator instead.
• Danger Mouse: episode 3 of "The Duel" has DM and Penfold in a room at an amusement park with the spiked walls closing in on them. DM stops them with a giant spanner Penfold had on his person.
• An episode of DuckTales (1987) had Scrooge and his nephews trapped in an Egyptian tomb with a wall with spears closing in on them. They're saved by pressing a hidden (belly) button activating a trapdoor.
• The Fairly OddParents!: When Timmy wishes his life was an action movie, he wakes up and is immediately dropped into a pit with closing walls with Spikes of Doom. And it's also a Snake Pit. And once he gets out, he has to pull an Indy Escape.
• Gravity Falls: A darker version of this trap is shown in "Into The Bunker": Unlike the traditional version, this one has little steel cubes pushing in from every direction, meaning that instead of just squishing you in one painful but (hopefully) short go, it will probably catch and mash up your body parts one by one. And if, by some miracle, you find and hit the four-button OFF sequence? That doesn't stop the mechanism. All it does is open the emergency exit, and reaching that exit is still your problem. Dipper, Mabel, Wendy and Soos barely escape it with their lives.
• The Incredible Hulk (1982): Bruce Banner is stuck between two spiked walls closing in on him in the opening theme.
• Inspector Gadget was caught in a death trap of this type at least twice, one involving Spikes of Doom.
• Josie and the Pussycats: The episode "The Jumpin' Jupiter Affair" has "aliens" using local villagers, and later the Pussycats, as slave labor in a diamond mine. Tired of their escapes and meddling, the aliens capture Josie, Alexandra and Alan, and tie them in place between two walls lined with spikes that slowly move together. Fortunately, Melody finds the "off" button on a console before the "waffle machine" (Alexandra's term) draws blood.
• Spoofed in a Kappa Mikey cutaway. It is a direct parody of the scene in Star Wars, with Guano dressed as a Storm Trooper.
• In an episode of Mister T, a couple of the gymnast kids get stuck in one such deathtrap. They escape by bracing the walls with broken wooden table legs, fashioned as improvised uneven bars, and use them to reach a vent at the top (and very middle) of the room.
• In one episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Daring Do (Rainbow Dash's favorite action hero) is placed a room with this trap... along with spiders, snakes, and quicksand.
• Played straight in one of the rooms in the Phineas and Ferb episode "Escape from Phineas tower", along with many, many other classic escapes.
• In The New Adventures of Superman episode "The Deadly Super-Doll", this is one of the death traps magically summoned by the Sorcerer in an attempt to destroy Superman and Jimmy Olsen.
• All New Popeye Hour: Popeye and his friends are trapped in a pit with the walls closing in. Desperately, Popeye throws his can of spinach to jam in the edge of the walls on top. The walls crush the can, causing the spinach to fall into Popeye's mouth. Now strong to the finish, Popeye easily forces the walls back and the gang escapes.
• Quest: Eventually the poor sandman is crushed into powder by some sort of compactor in the Nightmarish Factory.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • In the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode "A Night of Fright is No Delight", the gang discovers a locked trap door and a nearby organ that appears to control it. Scooby offers to play it to see if they can open the trapdoor, but when that happens, the gang realizes the walls are closing in on them. As the gang tries to hold them back, Scooby desperately plays the instrument more, and then frantically dances on the keys to try to get it to stop the walls, and succeeds by sheer luck.
  • In Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf, Scobby, Shaggy and the others get trapped in chamber with Spikes of Doom when they attempt to flee Dracula's castle.
• In an episode of The Simpsons spoofing the story of Moses, Milhouse and Lisa (as Moses and Aaron) are thrown in a room with spiked walls that close in on them. However, the spikes have all been installed opposite each other, so that the walls stop when the tips touch, leaving plenty of room for them to climb to safety.
  Lisa: Eh, slave labor. You Get What You Pay For.
• Happened in the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "Michelangelo, the Sacred Turtle" when Michelangelo and the servants fell in the trapdoor and the walls are closing in. They're saved by solving the hieroglyphs.
• Blurr falls victim to one of these in the first episode of the third season of Transformers: Animated. Sadly, he is turned into a cube.
• Played for Laughs on T.U.F.F. Puppy Dudley, Kitty and The Chief accidentally activate T.U.F.F's security system against them which causes walls with Spikes of Doom to start pushing in. It's only by saying the password that they stop it.^note Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
• Lampshaded in The Venture Brothers:
  Doctor Orpheus: Spiked walls? How fast?
  Doctor Venture: Uh, slower than "haunted house" spiked walls but not quite as slow as "evil scientist" spiked walls.

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