February 28, 2025  

Unfriendly Confines

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You’re in a box. It’s dark. There’s only one thing to focus on. You really can’t make noise. Are you in a coffin or are you in a movie theater?

Greetings, travelers! And welcome to the first itinerary where we really don’t go anywhere. Or rather, the places we’ll visit just aren’t very spacious. It’ll be hard to move around much at all, so take a load off and try to relax as we explore a segment called Unfriendly Confines.

In 2019 the Göteborg Film Festival offered screenings of the film Aniara to audience members sealed inside individual coffins.

The earliest motion pictures were stage plays performed in front of a camera. How could it have been otherwise? The only directors around then were theatrically trained, so cameras were stationary like the fixed vantage of playhouse audiences. Actors were not yet accustomed to the nuance available when you didn’t have to shout your lines for the cheap seats to hear. The visual language of cinema was still in its infancy. 

But we lost something once cinema figured out rapid cuts, unique angles, and sprawling panoramas. Single location films or ”bottle episodes” in TV, as they are respectively known, automatically heighten drama — or at least provide an opportunity for heightened drama — given their intimacy. It’s the same way you lean in to someone when you want to tell them something important … or give them a smooch. Tight quarters are always more dramatic, sometimes in a positive way and often in a very negative way. We of course will focus here on the negative. But before we get to that let’s also consider just the plain economics of single location filmmaking. It’s so much cheaper. Of course we love sprawling epics on the big screen, but a modestly successful film shot in one location — minus the expense of multiple sets, equipment transportation, location producers, etc — almost certainly means your film will make a lot of money.

Think inside the box.

Most single location movies are thrillers or horror. The reason should be obvious. With very little to look at or to propel the story other than the characters themselves the script (and dialogue) will necessarily be a deep dive into psychological states. Put another way, the space of a single location film is interior rather than exterior. And that can be very very scary, when done well. In the realm specifically of horror, single location films often devolves into claustrophobia. The space itself is a sort of character, providing motivation or challenge or frights simply by being so damn cramped.

Searching for historical beginnings in this micro-sub-genre is complicated by the limited spatial scope of all early silent films. Still The Cat and the Canary from 1927 is generally considered a starting point — and not just of tightly-constrained horror but of the entire “old dark house” setting that characterized so many Universal films through the 1950s. This film — originally a stage play, unsurprisingly — pulls a bunch of family members to a decrepit old house for the reading of a will which leaves all of the decedent’s estate to his most distant relative providing she can be proven sane after spending a night in the mansion. If not, there’s a second will to be opened denoting a different heir. Hijinks ensue (this is, in part, a comedy-horror) and an escaped asylum patient called “The Cat” enters the picture. It’s a fun watch, especially to see what later filmmakers built upon when mining for haunted house tropes and motifs. Note especially the hairy, long-nailed hand reaching through the wall at various points. The Cat and the Canary basically started the we’re-all-stuck-in-a-spooky-house-tonight theme and it’s still going. There’s a straight if dotted line from this film to 2019’s Ready or Not, also about a woman who must survive the night with family in a kooky mansion.

So let’s look at some confined space movies, going from roomiest to most cloying, like a slow-moving trash compactor.

Let’s start in a grocery store. And you know, it sure is foggy outside. That’s right, it’s The Mist from 2007, Frank Darabont’s re-telling of the classic Stephen King novella. Obviously a supermarket is not all that constrained as far as spaces go — and it is certainly well-provisioned. But the interplay of personality types surrounded by an unknown danger outside the all-glass facade of the building makes it seem a heck of a lot smaller. Interpersonal disagreements about what to do escalate quickly as evidence of the mortal peril the shoppers are in becomes unavoidable. So here’s my First Axiom of Single Location Horror: conflict shrinks space. No matter how roomy your confines, when things go south the drama ratchets up. Think about the last time you were on a subway, everyone minding their own business, and then someone does something causing upset (yelling, unwanted solicitation, vomit, whatever). Drama up, you shrink into yourself. The walls close in a bit.

We’ve left the grocery store, safely somehow, but we’re headed to our car, alone, in a parking garage. This movie is P2 also from 2007, a tale featuring only two people in the garage on Christmas Eve. Angela, just trying to go home for the holidays, and Thomas a security guard who also turns out to be a molesting, murderous psychopath. Some spaces — no matter how roomy — seem cloying. I’d put parking garages, especially at night, high on this list. They are never lit well enough, smell of gasoline, and there are no right angles along the x axis, which is disconcerting to the human brain. There’s a safe space, your car, but you have to find it and that in itself can be a source of anxiety. What makes this film work is how inhuman the space is. Parking garages are car storage; they are not for people. Just raw concrete and stains. So the Second Axiom of Single Location Horror: constraint isn’t only about square footage; it’s also a function of habitability.

Let’s go vertical a bit with Robert Eggers 2019 The Lighthouse. Like P2 this one features only two actual people. It’s a great example of psychological horror bleeding into mythological horror. Much has been noted about the standout performances of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in this tale of isolation and creeping lunacy. It’s a fantastic movie. You should watch it. You’ll get the sense of claustrophobia on this rock immediately. The point I want to make is that the job of a lighthouse is to demarcate space, but in an odd way. The light beacon is both saying “your boat shouldn’t be here or it’ll wreck” and “your boat is on the right path, good job, here’s your waypoint, keep going for safe harbor”. Put another way, it’s saying “get close, but not too close”. Uncomfortable quarters indeed.

Of note, Eggers shot this film in the unusual aspect ratio of 1.19:1, which is almost a square. Known as the Movietone ratio this was used mostly between 1926 and 1932 as silent films were transitioning to talkies. So in addition to reminding cinema nerds of this early phase of stage play films, or reminding today’s congenitally online hordes of Snapchat and Instagram videos, it’s an incredibly crammed visual space to work inside. Not unlike, say, a lighthouse. The film is also shot in black and white. There are nostalgic reasons for this, of course, but technically black and white film reduces the visual clutter, highlighting shape and pattern with the removal of color. It doesn’t make a space smaller, necessarily, but it makes what’s in the frame stand out with more contrast. Negative space is easier to highlight and bright light, overblown like a Fresnel lens swinging around in front of you, immediately consumes the whole space. All of which to deliver the Third Axiom of Single Location Horror: technical creativity in film can be just as useful in creating close quarters as the physical aspects of the set. 

Sometimes the confined space is a literal stand-in for us, the viewers, sitting rapt in the theater. All iterations of voyeurism horror owe a debt to the great Rear Window from 1954 by Alfred Hitchcock. Rear Window is emblematic of and a possible decoder for Hitchcock’s obsession with single location (even single take) filmmaking — see Lifeboat, Rope, Dial M for Murder, and of course the shower scene from Psycho. More than anything Hitchcock here seemed interested in using confinement (literal in this case as James Stewart’s character is wheelchair-bound in his apartment for almost the entirety) to make a comment on the act of viewing and our desires as viewers. Those desires include morbid curiosity and male sexual fantasy. And that right there is a good description of the popularity of at least some genres of horror, like 80s slashers. It also is useful biographically when considering Hitchcock’s rampant misogyny. I love this movie for many reasons, but lately it seems even more relevant as hordes of would-be sleuths sit entranced by their computer or phone screens, Rear Window-like, attempting to solve mysteries of what they think is happening in the outside world. Looking at you, conspiracy theorists. But let’s return. The Fourth Axiom of Single Location Horror: often the constraint imposed by the space permits an extended view outward, revealing frights that would otherwise go unnoticed. Peeping Tom, One Hour Photo, and the somewhat recent The Voyeurs are good examples — though there are dozens of others.

Getting cabin fever yet? Climbing the walls? Maybe just seasonal affective disorder? Let’s quickly run through three very different films all of which showcase the diversity of confined spaces. Say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan, but his story for 2010’s Devil is 80 minutes of tight frights. Devil takes place almost entirely in a stuck elevator with five occupants aboard. One of them, it turns out, is Satan himself. Or herself. The lights continually flicker and usually there’s some new mayhem to deal with when the lights return. The five naturally start accusing one another. As ever with M. Night there’s a twist or at least an unforeseen reveal at the end. It certainly got me. 

Then there’s Open Water from 2004 about two scuba divers in the tropics who surface to learn that their dive boat has left without them. That’s pretty much the movie: pure survival horror. The irony here is that the open sea could not be a less constrained space. You can go for miles in any direction (including down). Except of course you can’t because you have to eat, you’ll get cold, and you’ll eventually run out of energy. And oh and let’s not forget stinging jellyfish and hungry sharks. So you’re stranded by biological need rather than anything else. In some ways it’s worse than a broken elevator. 

Changing climates we arrive at Frozen — no not that one — the one from 2010 that follows three snowboarding buddies who are stranded on a chairlift when the ski hill operators forget they’re there and shuts down for the weekend. This is also survival horror of course — where the threat is dehydration and freezing to death — but here there’s one, actually two, obvious ways out of the predicament: up to the transport cable or dooooooown to the snowy slopes below. Both are attempted; neither attempt goes well. Also there are wolves for some reason prowling the east coast The tension in all three of these films comes from the breakdown in personal relationships — five people, two people, or three people. Either trust falters, or individual self-preservation takes over, or latent horrible behavior emerges. This is the horror of movies where people are trapped in close quarters. It’s rarely about the threat posited in the trailer or promotional material. And so to our fifth and Final Axiom of Single Location Horror: Human foibles metastasize, usually catastrophically, in confinement.

But we’re not quite done. We have to get even more constrained, the ultimate and final constraint really. Buried from 2010 stars Ryan Reynolds in a coffin. For the whole movie. There are a few other actors, none shown except on a grainy cell phone screen and mostly providing only voice. This, my weary travelers, is the apotheosis of claustrophobia horror. There is not a single shot from outside the coffin. Indeed, there is not a single shot repeated in this film. I’d love to see how it was made, technically. Reynolds here plays an Iraq-based American civilian truck driver who is buried alive in a plot to extract a ransom from the American occupying forces. He is given a Zippo lighter and a Blackberry. We are Reynolds in this film, slowly suffocating both from the diminishing air and eventually from leaking sand. In fact, the sand sluicing into the coffin is almost a literal hour glass. You know time’s up when the coffin fills up. I think it works and perhaps is proof that good storytelling requires only … a good story. No elaborate sets, no hyper-realistic effects, no lore. And maybe that’s a bonus axiom which applies to all film: despite the affordances of modern cinema, ultimately to be successful a film must tell a good story. It’s just that sometimes you have to trap the story in a box in order to realize that.

What’s that? You’re itching to get out? A little stir crazy? May I recommend the following?

Well that’s it this week. For goodness sake, stretch your legs. Go take a long walk or something. Catch a baseball game. May your confines going forward be nothing but friendly.

A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “Unfriendly Confines”: