Closed Circle / Live-Action Films

• 8 Women: The story takes place entirely inside a mansion where the characters gradually become trapped and isolated due to the snow, Cut Phone Lines, a damaged car and locked gates. Under those conditions they have to figure out who from among them committed a murder.
• 12 Angry Men: The jury members are deliberating in the jury room and aren't allowed to leave until they come to a decision.
• Abigail (2024): The six kidnappers surrender their phones beforehand to ensure they aren't tracked. Then the entire mansion is locked down with shutters on the doors and iron gates blocking every window
• Alien: The characters are trapped in a spaceship with the alien. That said, there's still the escape pod.
• Beetlejuice: When the Maitlands try to leave, they wind up in a strange limbo-like location called Saturn, a type of limbo inhabited by sandworms.
• In The Blair Witch Project, the main characters become lost in the woods while filming a documentary about the Blair Witch. Efforts to reorient themselves fail, even things like following a river or walking in one direction until they're out.
• The main action of Blood Red Sky takes place on a hijacked airliner in mid-Atlantic. The terrorists were planning to parachute out and be picked up from the ocean, but the passengers regain control of the cockpit and change course, thus missing the pickup point.
• Bodies Bodies Bodies is set at a mansion during a hurricane. The power, Wi-Fi, and cell service has been knocked out due to the storm, the mansion's remote location means the characters can't go to another house, and the group doesn't have a car since they were driven by another one of their friends, Max, who left the day prior. Sophie and Bee, the two members of the group who came separately from the others, do have a car, but when they try to use it, the battery's been drained since Bee accidentally left the light on. This leaves everyone no choice but to stay, which does not help the group's increasing amount of paranoia and distrust of each other as the night goes on.
• The entire point of The Breakfast Club is that none of the characters would even speak to each other if they hadn't been forced to stay alone with each other for the day.
• In Camp Slaughter, the protagonists are stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop in an Unnaturally Looping Location of a summer camp that has been trapped in one August day in 1981 for 24 years. Cell phones don't exist, computers are the province of governments, and their attempt to reach the tow company before they realize the location loops gets them platitudes for why the tow truck isn't available.
• In Cemetery Man, the man in charge of a town's cemetery (and putting zombies back in their graves) finally has enough and tries to drive away. Inexplicably the highway seems to have been destroyed and there is no way out.
• Compulsion (2016): Sadie's attempt to escape the villa the first time fails as the local people are in the cult's thrall. One cab driver refuses to let her in, another does but then drugs her, depositing Sadie back there. She only manages to escape later, after they already murdered Thierry.
• Circle takes this trope literally, as the people are trapped in a circle that will kill them if they try to leave. Surrounding them is nothing but a featureless black void that the bodies of the dead periodically disappear into.
• In Clue, the butler locks all the characters up in a remote house in order to confront a blackmailer. Once the blackmailer is killed, it's still pouring rain, there are angry guard dogs roaming the perimeter, and they're in the middle of nowhere, keeping everyone motivated to stay. Even if someone did want to run, it would make them look like the killer.
• In Coherence, a group of eight is bound to stay at a house because due to a time/space anomaly any attempt to leave the place will just cause the characters to reemerge at the same house in an alternate reality.
• In Color Out of Space (2020), as the titular Eldritch Abomination's power grows as it feeds on its surroundings, it uses its influence to conspire to keep the unfortunate Gardner family trapped on their rural property by disrupting their phone service and rendering their vehicles inoperable, making escape from the area impossible. In desperation, Lavinia and Benny eventually attempt to escape on horseback. But then it possesses the horse.
• The eponymous contraptions of the Cube movies are these. The protagonists are doomed to roam around a maze of cuboid rooms until they can figure out its particular structure and escape. Or not.
• Dog Soldiers: The house is surrounded by werewolves and their vehicle is damaged.
• In D-Tox, the rehab centre gets Snowed-In; trapping the patients and staff inside as one them starts to play Ten Little Murder Victims.
• The Elf: A massive snowstorm is keeping anyone from leaving by road, trapping them all in the house with the killer doll.
• In The Evil Dead (1981) they can't leave the cabin because the bridge is out and the trees are all rapey. Also, a curse is turning them into Deadites.
• Exam: The room itself, in a way. There's nothing stopping them from leaving, other than the knowledge that doing so will disqualify them.
• In Ex Machina, Caleb is dropped off by helicopter into a compound in the middle of a vast wilderness, with no other means of leaving available to him. His communication with the outside world is cut off because his cell phone has no signal and he can't use the keycard-locked house phones. This is entirely intentional on Nathan's part, as his goal was to create a secret and undisturbed place for his experiments.
• The 2007 Spanish film Fermat's Room has the main characters trapped in a locked room by the villain, with Advancing Walls Of Doom to make things more interesting.
• Flightplan (2005): Set aboard a plane, so there's only so many places a missing daughter could be hidden.
• Though nods to this are seen throughout the anthology, about 75 percent of the run-time of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is set on a cruise ship that is out to sea, making it the straightest example of this trope in the series.
• Glorious: Once Wes enters the bathroom, he isn't able to leave - the door is sealed, the windows are barred, and even trying to escape via the vents only brings him back into the bathroom. He eventually manages to draw the attention of Gary, the property supervisor. Ghat allows him to enter, then keeps him trapped as well. Wes finally gets out at the very end, and then dies.
• Phil Connors, Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day, not only experiences a "Groundhog Day" Loop but is perpetually stuck in Punxsutawney due to a blizzard blocking the roads.
• The Haunting of Whaley House: The ghosts lock all of the doors, making the doorknobs hot to the touch, and drain the cell phones. And an attempt to break the windows leads to the character attempting getting impaled with his own chair.
• Part of the initiation ritual in Hell Night entails being locked up inside an abandoned manor. Unfortunately, there's also a killer loose.
• In the Hercule Poirot film series by Kenneth Branagh:
  • In Murder on the Orient Express (2017), the train becomes derailed and trapped in a snowdrift, leaving Poirot and all the suspects stuck in the Alps until help arrives.
  • In A Haunting in Venice, a storm rolls in at the same time as the séance, leaving the police unable to reach them after Joyce Reynolds was killed. Poirot further enforces this by locking all the doors so that the murderer would not be able to leave even if they were willing to risk the storm.
• In the British chiller The Hole they can't leave the titular bunker because the leading lady has the key and won't open that door until the guy she is infatuated with will start to like her. The twist? The other three people with her don't know it.
• Protagonists of House of the Dead can't leave the island because zombies are swimming in the surrounding waters. Same thing happens later when they barricade themselves into the titular shack.
• In House on Haunted Hill (1959), Vincent Price's character locks several characters in his mansion with the promise of a large cash reward for staying the night. It was all a convoluted plot to expose his wife's affair and to kill her and her lover.
• House on Haunted Hill (1999) has this among its many Double Subversions. This time the Price character is a mogul famous for parlaying his animatronic genius into into a thrill-ride empire, so everyone expects elaborately staged technological wizardry from him, and though everyone suspects he's behind locking them all in, they can't pass up the million he offers to remain there — at least until it's too late to say Screw This, I'm Outta Here.
• Horror movie Identity traps a handful of protagonists in a motel by way of a major storm, and includes broken bridges and vehicles as well. But it turns out that regardless of all that, moving in any direction away from the motel will STILL bring you back to the motel...because it's all happening in one person's head.
• In Jumanji anyone who rolls the dice of the titular board game becomes a player. Once four players are chosen those specific people must finish the game in order for all the horror it unleashes to be undone.
• The Killing Room (2009): Four subjects are locked in a room for a psychological experiment. They're then told only one can get out alive. The film also covers the man running the experiment and a new recruit for the program. They never leave the premises, and it's implied that if the new recruit does try to walk out before the experiment runs its course, she'll be killed.
• The 1930 Laurel and Hardy short "The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case" ended up having all the relatives of a recently deceased millionaire — including our two heroes — forcibly detained by a police detective in a mansion. Said detective believes one of them is the murderer and keeps them there until he finds the guilty party. One frantic character even attempts to escape out a window, but is stopped as everyone else is warned that cops are surrounding the mansion to prevent escape.
• In The Legacy (1979), protagonists Maggie and Pete try to leave the Ravenhurst mansion after the other guests start dying, only to find that all the roads lead back to the mansion.
• In Lizzie Borden's Revenge, the sisters are locked in the sorority house for the weekend as punishment, while the rest of the sorority heads off on Spring Break.
• Manos: The Hands of Fate: Once the family arrive at the hotel, Torgo tells them, "There is no way out of here. It will be dark soon. There is no way out of here." Michael decides it would be a good idea to stay the night. This is the least of his problems. Or the audience's for that matter.
• In The Mansion, the eponymous mansion is isolated, their phones don't get any bars, their van disappears, and the forests surrounding the mansion are believed to contain wild boars.
• The murders in Murder on Flight 502 occur on a jumbo jet flying above the Atlantic, meaning that no one can enter or leave the crime scene.
• In Murder on the Orient Express (1974), the characters are all on a train stopped by snow.
• Non-Stop: Also set on a plane, as an air marshal searches for a killer among the passengers.
• In Panic Room, the thieves and the residents of the house are all basically stuck around the titular panic room, as the bearer bonds the thieves are after are kept in the room and the family are obviously reluctant to 'trust' the thieves that they only want something kept in the room.
• In The Phantom of Crestwood, a landslide takes out the only road to the ranch, meaning no one can enter or leave.
• In Phone Booth, a sniper and Bully Hunter blackmails the protagonist into staying in the only phone booth left in Manhattan, calling him all the while.
• Pitch Black just loved this trope. First, their starship crashes on a mysterious planet. They go to retrieve power cells so they can leave in a smaller, functional ship. The car they're using is solar powered, and seemed ideal on a planet with three suns, but as luck would have it, they have a solar eclipse, which releases the monsters that are harmed by light. As monsters pick off each of the characters, and they continuously lose light sources, the remaining characters are trapped in a cave, with Riddick holding the only working flashlight.
• Pleasantville is physically isolated—it's surrounded by mountains on all sides, and all of the roads circle back in towards the city. No one is ever seen entering or leaving the town either. This all changes by the end, though, when the teenagers who got sucked into the TV reality open up the worldview of Pleasantville's inhabitants, and there is now at least one road leading out of the town.
• Poor Pretty Eddie has a woman's car breaking down near an isolated lodge run by a White-Dwarf Starlet and her titular rapist kept man. Eddie refuses to fix Liz's car so it'll actually run, and because everyone in the area is on his side, all her escape attempts end with her getting returned to the lodge.
• In Prison, nobody gets out because, it's prison. Additionally, there's a supernatural force that won't let them.
• Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies uses the setting of the penitentiary where they were performing the event to justify the wrestlers having difficulty escaping. Their cell phones were confiscated before entering under the auspices of security.
• The eponymous villain in Psycho Cop Returns locks the protagonists up with him inside the office building they are partying in.
• Quarantine (2008) is set in a quarantined apartment building. One character attempts to escape and is promptly killed by a sniper.
• Ravers takes place in an abandoned factory. The lack of cell reception is noted early on, the people who set up the eponymous rave only bothered to unlock one of the doors to get in, and that door gets blocked early on by a survivor trying to block off the ravers.
• Revenge (2017): Richard's holiday home is in the middle of the desert. Richard and Jen arrive there by helicopter, which leaves and won't be returning for 48 hours. The house has a satellite phone and a radio, but by the time Jen is in trouble, she cannot access them, and the only all-terrain vehicles are controlled by the men hunting her.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show. With only a few very minor variations, it precisely fits the classic version of car breaks down in the rain, protagonists are stuck in a spooky castle. Though this is only natural considering that it's a parody of (among many other things) exactly those kinds of stories.
• Most of the "games" in the Saw movies are held in closed locations that are unknown to the public.
• In the Sharon Stone thriller Scissors, her character (Angie) spends most of the movie trapped in a show home.
• In Rear Window, L.B. Jeffries is confined to his apartment with a multiple leg fracture.
• Scream Park has the protagonists trapped inside the locked fences of the park. Even if they got over the fence, their car keys were confiscated by the manager before the party.
• Slaughter High: After the characters enter the school, the killer seals and booby-traps all the exits: trapping them inside.
• In the Slasher Movie Terror Train, a murderer is onboard the titular vehicle and due to the winter, nobody can get off. They just have sit in and wait for the next station.
• The Thing (1982) takes place at an Antarctic research base which lacks the resources for anyone to get off the continent without outside help. Blair destroys their communications equipment to keep the Thing from escaping alive, leaving everyone stranded for the next couple months until someone comes for routine resupplying, trapped with the monster than can assume the form of anyone its killed. Then The Thing uses this to his advantage, destroying the base so everyone else will freeze to death while it hibernates until the resuppliers come and give it a way to the rest of the world.
• This short was remade 15 years later as The Three Stooges short "If A Body Meets A Body". It follows the plot for the most part. In fact, the police detective is even played by the same actor, Fred Kelsey.
• Played out on a large scale in Tremors. Yes, the monster's stomping ground is a great big valley, but it's a great big valley that no one can leave because the monsters can outrun them, and the only normal road out was blocked off by a landslide inadvertently caused by the monsters.
  Burt: We are completely cut off! We've got the cliffs to the north, mountains to the east and west. That's why me and Heather settled here in the first place: geographical isolation.
• Triangle has it in the form of the abandoned cruise ship, the Aeolus. All the life raft are gone, and the protagonists can't find anyone else aboard. Then it turns out they're in a Time Loop, further isolating them. Even leaving the ship and exiting the loop is no guarantee of escape, since it returns the person to a few hours before entering, and the sole survivor chooses to go back to the Aeolus for personal reasons.
• The Truman Show is a massive set for a reality show with only one real person, Truman Burbank, with the creators deliberately Railroading ways so Truman could spend his entire life in the fictitious Seahaven set. Or that was the idea at least...
• The protagonists of Unknown (2006) are properly trapped in an Abandoned Warehouse in the middle of nowhere, doors are shut tight, windows are made of bullet-proof glass, cell phones are destroyed and the landline connection is cut. Lampshaded by one of the trapped characters: "Somebody's obviously gone to a lot of expense to secure this."
• Warlock III: The End of Innocence: Initially, a searing storm forces the main characters to remain holed up in the Old, Dark House. Later on, after Kris realizes what's really going on and tries to flee, the Warlock traps her in a repeating loop until she's right back where she started.
• Winterskin: The bulk of the movie is set in Agnes' cabin. Billy can't leave so long as his leg is injured, and even then, Anges says there's skinless monsters in the woods outside. That second thing is a lie, though.
• The bulk of The Zombie Apocalypse in Apartment 14F takes place in Bradly's apartment.

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