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.
- The underwater base works much like the above. The film 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 loose remake The Thing.
- The mansion isolated by adverse weather: Extremely common in murder mysteries.
Dungeons and Dragons come to mind. The third edition justifies this trope, pointing out that dungeons are actually a convenient way to place characters. Furthermore, a dungeon can be imagined as a diagram of a scene-based adventure, with rooms as key encounters and corridors as travels between scenes. Therefore most
RP Gamers refer to any setting as
dungeon.
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.
Examples:
- 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.
- The movie Cube.
- The Chzo Mythos makes use of this trope in two of its four component games. In one, you're stuck in a mansion. In the other, you're stuck on a spaceship.
- The Michael Crichton novel (and movie of the novel or maybe the other way round I forget which) Sphere featured the underwater base version.
- I Have No Mouth, And Yet I Must Scream does this in an underground complex (inescapable because it's the only habitable place on Earth).
- 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.
- 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.
- Arguably, much of ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'' takes place in an enclosed space, with that tent which the Power Trio occupies, and which they magically fortify and isolate every time they set up camp, not to mention the fact that for 90% of the book, if Harry is seen by the outside world, their mission is caput.
