History Main / BunkerWoman

* The film ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3096_Days 3,096 Days]]'' is based on the true story of Natascha Kampusch, a 10-year-old girl, and her eight-year ordeal being kidnapped by Wolfgang Přiklopil.

* ''Judas Child'' by Carol O'Connell has a little girl being held captive by a serial child murderer, and being helped by another little girl [[spoiler:who is actually the killer's previous victim, and may have been [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane her imaginary friend or an actual ghost]]]].
* ''The Overnight Guest'' by Heather Gudenkauf alternates between different characters at different points in time. One part of the story focuses on a woman (the titular guest) and her daughter kept locked in the basement by the child's abusive father, and it's eventually revealed that he [[spoiler:abducted the woman and forced her to be his ideal 'wife'/sex slave when she was in her early teens]].

* In ''Film/GirlInTheBasement'', a controlling father kidnaps his daughter and keeps her captive for more than a decade in a hidden bomb shelter built underneath their house. Based on the RealLife [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case Josef Fritzl case]].

* ''ComicBook/{{The Outsiders|DCComic}}'': ''ComicBook/Outsiders2008'' The issue that introduces Owlman has him rescuing a little girl from a basement.

* The issue of ''[[ComicBook/BatmanAndTheOutsiders Outsiders]]'' that introduces Owlman has him rescuing a little girl from a basement.
* ComicBook/{{Silk}} was kept in a bunker for about a decade in order to keep her safe from people who wanted her dead.

* From 1984--2008 [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case Elisabeth Fritzl]] endured this at the hands of her own father, being imprisoned in the basement of their home from when she was 18 until she was 42 and forced to bear his 7 children. Not until one of them became gravely I'll was she finally released.

* ''Literature/TheExpanse'': In ''Nemesis Games'', Naomi gets kidnapped by her old [[SpacePeople Belter]] friends to be held captive aboard the ''Pella'', the flagship of the terrorist organisation Free Navy under the command of Marco Inaros -- [[spoiler:Naomi's ex-boyfriend who seemed like a perfect boyfriend material up until he [[AlcoholInducedIdiocy spilled out]] what a manipulative scumbag he was (and still is)]]. They ''don't'' abuse Naomi physically; instead they give her minor maintenance tasks to do while trying to convince her that [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized the atrocities Free Navy commits]] are for the good of her and her fellow Belters, [[spoiler:and that they weren't hurt by her [[RejectionProjection "betrayal"]], not at all]].

A female character is abducted and held against her will underground--usually inside a bunker or TortureCellar. Typically a horror trope, although it is sometimes used in other genres as well. While this trope is fairly specific, it has a large number of variants; for instance, the woman need not necessarily be trapped in a bunker--anything inescapable underground does the trick.

In addition, a man need not necessarily be but is usually the sole trapping force of the Bunker Woman; the trapping man may have a SurvivalistStash or just be CrazyPrepared for TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, he may even lead a DoomsdayCult, either way he likely considers the Bunker Woman an object to be collected for future use, and may lead to RapeAsDrama. Occasionally, the man [[ObliviouslyEvil considers himself the savior]] of the Bunker Woman. Lastly, while this trope is generally tied closely to the major narrative of a work of fiction, it also sometimes appears in passing within TV and film.

* ''Film/TenCloverfieldLane'' - Following a car accident, Michelle wakes up in the fallout shelter of Howard, a CrazyPrepared [[CrazySurvivalist doomsday prepper]], who tells her that there has been some kind of [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt nuclear cataclysm]] or even AlienInvasion on the surface, and that she is lucky to be alive. Initially, she suspects that he may be lying and have a more nefarious purpose for keeping her down there. There's also a third person in the bunker as well, a young man named Emmett who helped build the shelter and corroborates Howard's story. Horror ensues as she plots, persistently and inventively, to figure out what's really going on. [[spoiler:Eventually she realizes that Howard is a genuine threat, and kept a teenage girl in the bunker long before the events of the movie. Michelle manages to escape, but learns that Howard was right about the alien invasion, so even outside the bunker she is not safe - but at least she's free.]]
* Batman fights a human trafficker who has a basement full of terrified women at the beginning of ''Film/BatmanVSupermanDawnOfJustice'' .

* In the Film/HammerHorror ''Film/TheseAreTheDamned'', nine children are being kept in an underground facility by a government scientist.

* ''Film/TheCall'' - A young woman is abducted, and taken to an underground bunker by a serial killer. The lead, played by Creator/HalleBerry, is a 911 dispatcher who received a call from the abducted girl and pursues her to the killer's bunker, where Berry battles him, saving the young woman from certain death underground.

* ''Film/ExMachina'' has an artificially intelligent robot woman trapped in an underground fortress--the threat of her death is imminent and she must connive her own escape. A bit of a twist in this case, as unlike most examples on this page, she was not kidnapped--she was built within the bunker and has never been outside of it. Additionally, there are a few implications that [[spoiler:her escape at the end may not be a good thing; for instance she leaves the man who helped her to escape locked up in her stead]].
* In the reboot of ''Film/FridayThe13th2009'', Jason decides to keep Whitney chained up in an abandoned mine instead of killing her, because she reminds him of his mother.
* ''Film/FriendOfTheWorld'' - Following a mass casualty event, a young filmmaker awakens in the carnage to a CrazyPrepared general who claims they are the last two people alive. [[spoiler:He turns out to be a [[CrazySurvivalist doomsday embracing maniac]] who's responsible for the annihilation.]]

* ''Film/TheLovelyBones'' - A young girl is lured into a bunker and killed, the remainder of the film constitutes her family and friends coming to terms with her horrific death.
* ''Film/MadMaxFuryRoad'' centers around a group of women escaping from The Citadel, a mountain aquifer that has been converted into a post-apocalyptic fortress, where they had been kept as breeding slaves by the BigBad Immortan Joe inside a vault within the mountain. Most of the plot revolves around their escape and Immortan Joe and his army trying to capture them, since he sees them as his property and will stop at nothing to get them back. In one brief scene, we see the place where they were kept before their escape, and while it's a very comfortable space, it's also kept behind what looks like a repurposed bank-vault door - emphasizing that Joe sees them as treasures, not people.
* Played with and gender-flipped in ''Film/ThePeopleUnderTheStairs'': although the landlords' entire ''house'' is a booby-trapped fortress, the only abducted child they were keeping captive there whom they ''didn't'' confine to the basement was Alice, the only girl among them.
* In 2009's ''Film/TheRoad'', women held underground are discovered briefly. The women are members of a group of individuals who are being held in a bunker by cannibals. When the main character discovers these Bunker Women, he is shocked, but ultimately powerless to save them and he quickly leaves them behind.
* ''Film/{{Room}}'' features a woman and her young son's attempt to make a good life for themselves in captivity, and, ultimately, to escape their captor and start their lives anew.
* ''Film/TheSilenceOfTheLambs''; serial killer Buffalo Bill abducts young women and keeps them in a well in the CreepyBasement of his home. The women cannot escape, and are forced to lotion themselves before being brutally murdered and skinned. Clarice Starling, a detective in the film, discovers the bunker of Buffalo Bill at the end of the movie.

* ''Film/VForVendetta'' - Evey is attacked, but rescued by V. She awakes underground in this mysterious man's bunker and informed that she cannot leave. While her rescuer/captor is not explicitly violent towards her and is holding her there to stop her from giving the secret police details about V's hideout, she is trapped underground against her will all the same.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3096_Days 3,096 Days]] : The film is based on the true story of Natascha Kampusch, a 10-year-old girl and her eight-year ordeal being kidnapped by Wolfgang Přiklopil.

* ''Literature/TheCollector'': Miranda is abducted by Frederick and held against her will in a cellar of an isolated countryside house. Her cellar room is furnished luxuriously and she is showered with gifts and other comforts, but she can't leave. Miranda tries to manipulate her captor and she sometimes manages to persuade him to let her outside for brief periods of time, but the novel has a DownerEnding.
* In ''Literature/TheExpanse'' novel ''Nemesis Games'', Naomi gets kidnapped by her old [[SpacePeople Belter]] friends to be held captive aboard the ''Pella'', the flagship of the terrorist organisation Free Navy under the command of Marco Inaros -- [[spoiler:Naomi's ex-boyfriend who seemed like a perfect boyfriend material up until he [[AlcoholInducedIdiocy spilled out]] what a manipulative scumbag he was (and still is)]]. They ''don't'' abuse Naomi physically; instead they give her minor maintenance tasks to do while trying to convince her that [[TheRevolutionWillNotBeCivilized the atrocities Free Navy commits]] are for the good of her and her fellow Belters, [[spoiler:and that they weren't hurt by her [[RejectionProjection "betrayal"]], not at all]].
* Ma in ''Literature/{{Room}}'' has been held captive and not left Room once in seven years. Although the bunker is actually not underground, but in the garden.
* In ''Further Literature/TalesOfTheCity'', Mrs. Madrigal traps one of Mary Ann's coworkers in her basement. In this case, she has a good reason - Mary Ann has discovered that [[spoiler:Jim Jones]] is still alive, but he has taken two children hostage and has threatened to kill them if Mary Ann exposes him, while her coworker has found out about this and is planning to break the story herself.

** "North Mammon" revolves around three high school girls who are kidnapped and locked inside a bunker with no food or water, though very unusual for this trope, the kidnapper never touches them nor even goes into the same room as them after the initial kidnapping. This is because the girls are really just tools for him; it's all part of a RevengeByProxy plot, as the kidnapper wants revenge on their ''parents'' (specifically, their fathers), his former high school friends and football teammates. After getting injured during an important game, the kidnapper lost a college scholarship which went to his friends instead, costing him any real future while they went on to have careers and lives. Decades later, he decides to get revenge for this completely imagined slight by taking their daughters and forcing two of them to kill a third.

** In another episode, the CSI team stumble across a mysterious bunker in the desert while investigating a murder, and are attacked by the man living inside. After he's arrested, the authorities discover a teenaged girl hiding inside the walls of a room containing womens clothing for both adults and children [[spoiler: only for this trope to be subverted. The teenager in question is the man's daughter, and the two had been living off the grid in the bunker ever since the man was falsely accused of killing his wife (the owner of the womens clothing they found). The girl isn't a prisoner, just isolated.]]

** The episode "911" has Benson desperately trying to locate a little girl who is being kept in an unknown basement somewhere in the city by a child pornographer.
** The hundredth episode, "Control", featured a man who for years had been kidnapping various women and imprisoning them in a basement for varying intervals, forcing them to be a SexSlave to him, to the point of making them go through a fake wedding, complete with dress.

* An ''Series/{{NCIS}}'' episode had the team finding the body of a woman imprisoned in a bunker. Even creepier, she was clad in a wedding gown, while the bunker was decked out like a typical 1950s household. The search for the killer was juxtaposed with scenes of another woman being held the same way.
* In ''Series/OneLifeToLive'', Viki (or rather, one of her alternate personalities) imprisoned Dorian in a secret room beneath her mansion.

** In the fifth season finale, Aria, Emily, Hanna, and Spencer are captured and held in a large underground structure, where they find Mona, who had been missing and presumed dead since midseason. At first they're forced to play along in a mock high school prom, but when they use that to try to escape, they're separated and subjected to mind games/mental torture for weeks before they escape/are rescued. During the rescue, it turns out there was yet another girl in the bunker, who had been missing for two and a half years.

* ''Series/StrangerThings'' - A young girl known as Eleven is held in an underground facility; Eleven is first seen after having escaped from her bunker prison. We eventually learn that boys as well as girls were kept in the facility, but Eleven is the main focus of that arc.
* ''Series/UnbreakableKimmySchmidt'' is a comedy series about an [[ThePollyanna extremely upbeat]] young woman who spent years in a bunker with a DoomsdayCult, finally being liberated and being [[FishOutOfTemporalWater naive]] about all the ways the world has passed her by while she was down there.
* ''Series/TheXFiles'', "Oubliette": A paedophile was abducting young girls and held them hostage in a creppy basement. Word "oubliette" from the title refers to a dungeon with an opening only at the top. We see Amy undergo this terrible fate. When she tries to escape, her captor even deprives her of water and she gets terribly thirsty. We find out that Lucy was kidnapped and held for several years, too, and she was living through it again -- she suffers injuries inflicted upon her abductor's new victim.

* ''Film/VForVendetta'' - Evey is attacked, but rescued by a strange man. She awakes underground in this mysterious man's bunker and informed that she cannot leave. While her rescuer/captor is not explicitly violent towards her, she is trapped underground against her will all the same.

* ''Film/ExMachina'' has an artificially intelligent robot woman trapped in an underground fortress--the threat of her death is imminent and she must connive her own escape.
** A bit of a twist in this case, as unlike most examples on this page, she was not kidnapped- she was built within the bunker and has never been outside of it. Additionally, there are a few implications that [[spoiler:her escape at the end may not be a good thing]].

%%* 2016's ''Film/BlairWitch'' features a woman who is pushed into a mine shaft and is forced to crawl through a small tunnel.%%She's not really a prisoner, is she? Just a woman who spends one scene in a cramped environment%%

* The ''Series/CriminalMinds'' episode "The Bunker" presents a psychopathic disaster-prepper and his female accomplice isolating and brainwashing an entire ''colony'' of women and their children into believing that their underground shelter was the only safe place left on a devastated Earth.

** In another episode, the CSI team stumble across a mysterious bunker in the desert while investigating a murder, and are attacked by the man living inside. After he's arrested, the authorities discover a teenaged girl hiding inside the walls of a room containing womens clothing for both adults and children [[spoiler: only for this trope to be averted. The teenager in question is the man's daughter, and the two had been living off the grid in the bunker ever since the man was falsely accused of killing his wife (the owner of the womens clothing they found). The girl isn't a prisoner, just isolated.]]

* An obsessive hoarder on ''Series/{{CSI}}'' was found to be holding her own daughter captive in a sealed-up room inside a house packed with rubbish. [[spoiler:It turns out that the daughter was a serial killer and the woman confined her to prevent her from killing any more of her boyfriends.]]