Oubliettes and other Sealed Rooms in the Middle of Nowhere in Live-Action Films.
- In 1408 the protagonist becomes trapped in a posh hotel room and completely isolated from the outside world. There is even some fire evacuation literature which transforms from a normal floor layout to a display of just his room, with no entrances or exits.
- Fiorina "Fury" 161 in Alien³ is basically this. The prisoners spend their lives in a prison facility in the middle of nowhere, on a planet in the middle of nowhere in the universe. As the warden puts it: The prisoners are free to leave anytime they want, only the rest of the planet is a much bigger shithole than the facility itself.
- The Call ends with the villain locked up and left alone in his own well-hidden Torture Cellar.
- In the 1944 film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost the Ghost is the spirit of Sir Simon de Canterville, who ran away from a Trial by Combat and hid in his room; his father refused to believe he had run away and to prove it had his room bricked shut, deaf to his son's pleas.
- The glass-enclosed cell in The Cell is located in an underground chamber in the middle of nowhere.
- In the short horror film, daughter
, the main character, a mother, finds herself trapped in a dreamlike version of her own house where darkly surreal things happen. It turns out this place is an Ironic Hell where the mother is trapped for all eternity as punishment for taking her own—and her daughter's—life. Also, it's implied that all of Hell is composed of Sealed Rooms in the Middle of Nowhere, where each condemned person receives a punishment exclusively tailored to them. - The Cube movies featured mazes made of giant shifting cubes full of deathtraps in the middle of nowhere, although admittedly Cube 2: Hypercube does reveal that the second maze is indeed formed with non-Euclidean geometry and thus the endless cubes were all inside a single lab room all along.
- The Dark Knight Rises has "the pit," a prison carved out of the ground hundreds of feet deep with no ceiling and walls nearly impossible to climb.
- In Ex Machina, this is Caleb's ultimate fate, locked in Nathan's room, in Nathan's locked-down house with no power, hundreds of miles from any sort of help. There is a fridge full of water, but there's little chance of him getting out or of anyone coming to look for him before he dies of starvation.
- The Expendables 2 featured most of the crew being trapped, at least for a little while, inside a collapsed mining tunnel.
- The central concept in Fermat's Room, combined with math riddles that activated deathtraps when not solved.
- Most of the cast of The Hole, since they don't know that one of their supposed fellow captives, Liz, is actually the one keeping them locked up.
- The 2009 film Hunger 2009 (not to be confused with the 2008 Hunger) features four characters being sealed in a bunker deep underground with plenty of water, but very little light and no food as a twisted doctor starves them as a science experiment. Several weeks later, on the verge of starving to death, they're provided with knives by their captor and reminded that humans contain meat...
- Just for a definition of oubliette, try Labyrinth, where the heroine falls through a Trap Door and gets stuck there (for a short time).
- In the opening of The Matrix Revolutions, Neo is trapped in Mobil Avenue (Mobil being an anagram for Limbo), a shiny, empty underground train station literally in the middle of nowhere. Trying to escape by following the tracks just leads you back to where you came from.
- In the 2003 Korean film Oldboy, Oh Dae-su is confined to a hotel-like room for fifteen years, fed only fried dumplings and with a television as his only form of information on the outside world. In the end, it turns out that the room isn't exactly "in the middle of nowhere" — Oh Dae-su later uses the taste of the dumplings to work out the location of room, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of his captors.
- In La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) the doctor's mansion, Vera's room in it and Vicente's dungeon beneath it.
- In the Pirates of the Caribbean series, when (Captain) Jack Sparrow gets trapped in Davy Jones' Locker.
- Also, the time he'd been marooned by the Black Pearl's mutinous crew.
- The 1961 film The Pit and the Pendulum ends with a couple of memorable examples: Elizabeth accidentally gets sealed away in an iron maiden, forgotten in an abandoned torture room and is therefore locked up forever. Also, Medinas' mother Isabella was sealed up in a tomb alive.
- In Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indy and Marian are sealed in the Ark's chamber.
- Saw:
- The main plot arc of the original Saw, with a twist: the hostages are free to leave at any time, but they must saw off their feet to do so. Adam winds up getting sealed in the room at the end anyway.
- At the end of Saw 3D, Hoffman is chained in the room from the first movie, by none other than Dr. Gordon.
- As the page quote shows, this was Khan's intention towards Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. However, he misses a few things; namely, that the "barren rock" is actually the site of a thriving "Genesis cave" that contains everything they need to survive, and that the Enterprise is still nearby.
- Khan wants to do this to Kirk specifically because he feels that Kirk did this to him. Kirk sort of did, but it was an accident — Kirk's intention was to leave Khan and his crew on an uninhabited but habitable planet so that they would be unable to hurt anyone but would have the ability to make a relatively decent life for themselves, only for the planet to be turned into a barren wasteland by a natural disaster six months later. When the planet was relatively hospitable, Khan himself understood this decision as a mercy and was pleased with the opportunity, but after the natural disaster, he began to blame Kirk for leaving them there and never checking up on them.
