You Wake Up in a Room - Television Tropes & Idioms

"This is weird... No doors, no windows..."

"You wake up locked in a deserted jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in your cell, useful or otherwise."

—Jailbreak

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."

—"Knock" (1948), Fredric Brown

A specific type of Ontological Mystery (which covers this trope in passing).

A character wakes up in a setting that's unfamiliar to them. They don't know how they got there, who brought them, or for what reason. Frequently, getting out is not so simple as simply walking out the door.

Sometimes the character, or characters, will have no memory of prior events whatsoever, although this is not a necessary component. In more extreme examples, the character may not exactly know even who they are.

If the piece begins In Medias Res and the character wakes up in a room, and the audience has no idea where they are or what has gone before (or the character has only limited knowledge, possibly having been drunk the night before, or something bad happened to him, or he's in an alternate reality that only the audience seems to pick up on) that may be sufficient to meet this trope. Compare Good Morning, Crono.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Gantz. Upon their deaths, the main characters are sent to a mysterious room; the room is obviously located in Tokyo, but cannot be accessed unless you are called there by Gantz.
Happens at least twice to Rosa in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. The first time is in the second arc's tea party. The second time occurs in the fourth arc, in what is implied-ish? to be a Dream Sequence Maria had.
- Happens to somebody (actually Battler) early on in the sixth arc.
Kirika in Noir woke up one day with no memory of who she was in an empty house that despite having photographs of parents, had no actual parents in sight. She found with her a pocketwatch, school ID with her name on it and a gun and killed a bunch of Mooks who showed up to harass her. The rest of the series deals with her trying to discover her identity.
Dangaioh: The four ESP'ers are all suddenly find themselves in service to Dr. Tarsan without knowing who they are/were, or how they got there.
In aptly named Locked Room arc of Psychic Detective Yakumo, when Takaoka-sensei (in the original novels & Ritsu version) / Yuuichi (in the Suzuka version) thinks he killed Yuri after hitting her a little too hard, he hides her body in the basement. Turns out she wasn't dead after all. Until she died trying to get out of the room.

Fan Fiction

Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons: Chapter 11: Blackjack after being hauled out of a slaver camp half dead and emotionality worn out from making a Sadistic Choice passes out in a mine-cart... Only to wake up in a room next to a strange stallion named Prist who then explains that she was found unconscious and alone in the rain, a week prior, she has no idea how she got miles away from the slaver camp or what happened to her friends along the way.
The first chapter of Composure starts out like this when Princess Celestia wakes up in a hospital bed injured, unable to perform magic, and amnesic. Her last memory is of Princess Luna in her room...

Film - Live-Action

Dark City
Memento
A Scanner Darkly (film)
This is the modus operandi for the "Jigsaw Killer" in Saw: nearly every victim wakes up in a room, and the punishemnt for failure (when it's not immediate and messy death, is usually turning it into a Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere.
Pandorum... in a hypersleep capsule.
In Cube, its sequel, and its prequel, all the victims of the cube wake up in a cube-shaped room with no memory of how they got there.
The teleplay The Cube (unrelated to the above series) where a man awakes in a solid white room with people coming in and out doing various wacky things, but he cannot get anyone to tell him where he is or why he's there, he's only told that somewhere on the wall is a hidden door made just for him.
In the 2006 film Unknown, the entire cast wakes up with amnesia and locked in a warehouse.
Occurs in both The Hangover and its sequel.
In 28 Days Later, Jim wakes up from a coma

Literature

Fredric Brown's "Knock" begins:
There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door..."
Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes In Amber (which spawned two entire five-novel series) begins this way. The first-person narrator doesn't even know his own name when he wakes up in, well, a hospital room.
In A Snowball In Hell by Christopher Brookmyre, Darren "The Daddy" McDade wakes up in a hotel room he doesn't recognize. Things... don't end well for him.
The Tightrope Men was written by Spy Fiction writer Desmond Bagley as a deliberate evocation of this trope — a man wakes up in a hotel room in Norway with a confused memory and a completely different face. Bagley decided to take the most terrifying situation he could think of, and then write a book explaining it. The protagonist has been abducted, brainwashed and altered through plastic surgery, then put in the place of a kidnapped scientist in order to create a few days confusion so the kidnappers can get away with their prize.
Eri of After Dark wakes up in a bed on the TV side. She has no idea how she got there, and neither does the viewer.
Animorphs In 'The Familiar', Jake wakes up in a room, his bedroom, only it's a futuristic bedroom, and he's ten years older, with no idea what happened in between.
The young adult series that begins with The Maze Runner begins essentially this way.
James P. Hogan's "The Multiplex Man" starts with the protagonist waking up in a hotel room with ID that doesn't match his identity, a suitcase full of guns, and the weird conviction that the familiar face in the mirror SHOULDN'T be familiar.
"Time & Time Again" by H. Beam Piper - Allan Hartley wakes up in his childhood bedroom from thirty years before... wearing his childhood body. He takes it rather well.

Live-Action TV

The captives in Persons Unknown wake up in hotel rooms with little clue how they got there or why.
The Twilight Zone Classic episodes ''Stopover in a Quiet Town" and "Five Characters In Search Of An Exit".
The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries has "Sole Survivor", where Joe Hardy wakes up in a hospital room with no clue where he is or how he got there, only to find out that he's not only been in a coma for a year, but that his father and brother are dead. Of course, Frank and Fenton are very much alive, and the whole thing is a Mind Screw to get Joe to reveal information on a defection attempt.
In season 4 of Castle, the episode "Cuffed" opened with Beckett and the titular writer handcuffed together in a sealed room, with no memory of how they got there.
"Legacy", the penultimate episode of the second season of Criminal Minds, features an UnSub that kidnaps transients, knocks them out and throws them into an abandoned factory, where they wake up and are forced to find their own way out of the factory.
the surreal 1960's drama series The Prisoner begins with this trope: spy Patrick Mc Goohan wakes up in The Village with a headache not knowing why he has been transported there from London, nor why he is now only Number Six, and realises how difficult it is to escape.

Music

Lindsey Stirling's "Song of the Caged Bird" video features this — in the beginning, Lindsey gets up off the floor of a small, dirty room with no apparrant knowledge of where she is or how to get out.

New Media

Happens to Shelton and Eddie in Darwin's Soldiers story Nietzsche's Soldiers.

Tabletop Games

A fairly common way to begin a theatre-style Live Action Role Playing Game.
Magic: The Gathering: Tezzeret gets this treatment at the beginning of Test Of Metal when he finds himself Naked on Arrival in an empty cave with his etherium arm ripped off.

Video Games

The Seventh Guest, where the "room" is a big, spooky mansion.
Ego: How did I get here? I remember...nothing.
Both Portal games begin this way, although in completely different rooms.
- You actually transverse through old chambers in the beginning of Portal 2, so pretty much you end up in the same room in both games.
Silent Hill 4: The Room
Cave Story
The Neverhood. Very literally applied, as Klayman was created only a few minutes prior to the game's beginning and still asleep when the player takes control.
1213.
Zork is "you are in front of a small white house." with no reason as to how you got there. The explanation for the starting locations for later Infocom games makes a lot more sense. Except perhaps for Beyond Zork.
the white chamber has the main character wake up inside of a coffin on a spacestation with no memory of why she's there or why the space station is completely empty and covered in blood, rust, and limbs.
Obsidian/Black Isle loves this trope:
- Planescape: Torment, which begins in a morgue no less.
- The second Knights of the Old Republic. As a Shout Out to Planescape: Torment, one of the first rooms you visit after waking up is a morgue.
- Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer
- Alpha Protocol
Shadowrun, also in a morgue in the SNES version.
Galerians opens with the main character Strapped to an Operating Table.
Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors starts with your character waking up in the cabin of a large passenger ship. Of the nine characters involved, however, only one has amnesia and it isn't you. In fact, Junpei only needs a few minutes to get his bearings before the player sees exactly how he was abducted from his apartment.
- The sequel, Virtue's Last Reward, starts out similarly, with the protagonist waking up in what appears to be an elevator with no idea how he got there - and with a total stranger who happens to know his name before he can tell her.
Every goddamn Room Escape Game ever made.

Web Comics

In an example without the room, Wil low of Earthsong wakes up under a purple willow/wiple tree with no idea whatsoever of what's going on.^* This is echoed in a later wake-up, though she quickly remembers and the audience knows.
Furrocious starts with the main character waking up in a a gray room with a large door.
MS Paint Adventures likes this trope. Jailbreak fits the definition perfectly, and Homestuck begins in a similar manner (three times).

Web Original

Ruby Quest
Basically the ENTIRE "you wake up in a room and have to get out" flash-based adventure game subgenre is nothing but this trope.
- Crimson Room
- Viridian Room
- White Chamber
- Mystery Of Time And Space
- Any game with the "escape" tag at Jay Is Games.
- Shmorky from The Flash Tub made a parody called "The Stupid Room" where even the voice actress in it kept snickering at how ridiculous the premise is.
  - Tub Adventure also began this way.
- Eli Piilonen's You Find Yourself In A Room
- The first Submachine, and to an extent the second one (even if it begins "I didn't wake up. And I do remember").
The basic premise of The Fear Mythos story Ontological.
The Dark Room, an interactive YouTube adventure with an abusive narrator.