And I Must Scream / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

And I Must Scream in Live-Action Films.

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• Alien: Covenant ends with Daniels and Tennessee being put into sleep stasis by who they believe to be their ship's android and friend Walter, but is in fact David. Daniels realizes this seconds before she enters stasis, but is powerless to fight back, and the film ends with David now having total control over an entire colony ship full of unsuspecting test subjects, including Daniels and Tennessee. The short film Advent sees David outlining his future plans, including using Daniels to create the first Alien Queen. If Daniels ever wakes up, fortune won't be smiling on her.
• Part of the Downer Ending in The Alphabet Killer. Detective Megan Paige, who can see the spirits of the eponymous killer's victims, also has a history of mental illness. In the end the stress of the case and her confrontation with the killer leads to a psychotic break. This results in her being hospitalized and sedated to the point where she can't move or speak, and thus is helpless to stop the murderer (whose identity remains a mystery to the rest of the police force.) The final scenes chillingly show the detective in a near catatonic where it is implied she will remain for years, her bed slowly being surrounded by the ghosts of more and more of the killer's victims.
• The title character of American Mary gets revenge on her rapist by kidnapping him and using him as an involuntary guinea pig for her body modification career. He ends up a limbless torso hanging from the ceiling by chains hooked into his skin and his mouth sewn shut.
• Anaconda:
  • In Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, one of the characters gets bitten by a spider whose venom will paralyze him completely for two days, outside of breathing and retaining consciousness. He gets discovered but is obviously unable to communicate his situation and then gets swallowed alive by one of the snakes. The other characters then burn down the hut that the snake is in, presumably roasting it, and him, alive.
  • The main villain of Anacondas: Trail of Blood, right after giving himself immortality, gets eaten by an immortal snake and never gets out.
• In Anatomy, a female medical student who enters a prestigious Heidelberg medical school uncovers a conspiracy by an Antihippocratic secret society operating within the university grounds who are masters of plastination of corpses but due to a lack of fresh, perfect, undamaged corpses have decided to obtain their own "study material". Certain selected victims (people that no-one will miss but also a co-student who discovered what was going on) are injected with a drug that completely paralyzes the victim within a few minutes and suppresses all life signs so that the victims appear dead on first glance, while still semi-conscious. The drug then transforms the blood, slowly plastinating the victim from within, while the members of the conspiracy pose the body and start to dissect and flay away skin and muscles from the organs and bones. One such victim wakes up, unable to move more than his eyes, and sees his hand has been artfully dissected down to the bones, and he himself is posed naked as a plastinated "scientific showpiece".
• Another Me: Fay's fate. Her soul is trapped inside a mirror while her dead twin takes over her body.
• The climax of Audition sees the protagonist injected with a drug that paralyzes his muscles but heightens his pain sensation while his girlfriend starts torturing him with piano wire and acupuncture needles. He is trying very very hard to scream, you better believe it.
  • Though he was released from that before too long. This trope applies better to the guy stuffed in the burlap sack in her apartment.
• Awake (2007) is about a man who undergoes surgery, during which the anesthetic had worn off but the neuromuscular blocking agents holding him still had not. Sadly, there's a handful of surgeries in Real Life where this had happened.
• Awakenings, based on Real Life Dr. Oliver Sachs' experiences with catatonic patients. There is one exchange that expounds the true Fridge Horror of the situation.
  Dr. Ingham: Most died during the acute stage of the illness, during a sleep so deep they couldn't be roused. A sleep that in most cases lasted several months. Those who survived, who awoke, seemed fine, as though nothing had happened. Years went by — five, ten, fifteen — before anyone suspected they were not well... they were not. I began to see them in the early 1930's — old people brought in by their children, young people brought in by their parents — all of them complaining they weren't themselves anymore. They'd grown distant, aloof, anti-social, they daydreamed at the dinner table. I referred them to psychiatrists. Before long they were being referred back to me. They could no longer dress themselves or feed themselves. They could no longer speak in most cases. Families went mad. People who were normal, were now elsewhere.
  Dr. Sayer: What must it be like to be them? What are they thinking?
  Dr. Ingham: They're not. The virus didn't spare the higher faculties.
  Dr. Sayer: We know that for a fact?
  Dr. Ingham: Yes.
  Dr. Sayer: Because?
  Dr. Ingham: Because the alternative would be unthinkable.
  • Leonard Lowe actually manages to convey his being trapped by directing Dr. Sayer to the poem The Panther:
    His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
    has grown so weary that it cannot hold
    anything else. It seems to him there are
    a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
    As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
    the movement of his powerful soft strides
    is like a ritual dance around a center
    in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
    Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
    lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
    rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
    plunges into the heart and is gone.
• In Beauty and the Beast (2017), the Enchantress's curse works this way. The servants are still transformed into household items that can walk and talk, but there's a new codicil to the spell: if the Beast can't learn to love and be loved in turn, they'll be transformed into completely inanimate objects forever. Lumiere notes that as each day passes, they lose more and more of their humanity — they can feel it happening, but are unable to do anything to stop it. And the ending shows this happening to the servants — we watch their bodies lock up in a state of utter panic and despair as their faces fade away. Maestro Cadenza has to watch his wife Garderobe freeze first; their beloved dog Frou-Frou, who's been turned into a small table, desperately tries to wake them up before he too keels over; Mrs. Potts, who can feel the transformation happening, screams for her son, while Chip himself cries for her, only to change before they can reunite; and Cogsworth actually chokes out how the final transformation feels: "Lumiere, I...I can't...speak..." Thank GOD the Enchantress decided to undo the curse despite the Beast technically dying.
• In Being John Malkovich
  • John Cusack's character attempts to travel through the portal at a particularly inappropriate time, leaving his consciousness stranded in the body of a young girl that he cannot control.
  • Mr. Malkovich himself — being helplessly forced to watch somebody else control his body for the rest of his life? Eesh.
• In the film The Black Hole, the finale includes a sequence showing the primary and secondary antagonists Maximilian and Dr Hans Reinhardt being fused together into one hellish hybrid, paralyzed, doomed to forever watch over a dimension of fire and brimstone.
• After Corey kills Vascan in Blood Machines, he is later resurrected as a tiny component of the biomass that makes up the literal heart of a Giant Woman.
• The revenge method of the main villain of Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh involves using a ritual to trap a victim's soul in their decaying body forever.
• In Bone Tomahawk, the female Troglodytes have their limbs amputated and bone spikes shoved through their eyes to blind and immobilize them. They exist only to be breeding machines for the Troglodytes, spending their entire lives being raped, giving birth, and then being raped again by their own sons in a horrific, endless cycle of incest.
• In The Burrowers, the monsters' venom causes near-total paralysis, save breathing and slight movement of the toes or fingers. Once their victims are paralyzed, the creatures bury their prey with nothing but the nose exposed, ensuring the captive won't suffocate and will provide fresh meat when the time comes. Unfortunately, once the monsters have been killed, the surviving humans don't realize they need to look for a still-living victim, who is left buried up to his nose without hope of rescue. This leads to some Fridge Logic when you realize the missing family may have been buried near the house.
• Casper Meets Wendy: Although the effect is mostly killed by the movie's cheese factor, the film features evil warlock Desmond Spellman who summons a vortex called the Mystic Abyss, which is magically opened and used to throw victims into which drags them away. After it's closed, very few people can open it again, so a later rescue is out of the question. It's particularly horrific for the ghosts, since a human might be lucky and get bashed in the head but someone already dead wouldn't have that option.
• In Cult of Chucky Andy has imprisoned Chucky's still conscious, decapitated head which he routinely tortures.
• In Day Shift, Audrey eliminates a rival vampire by burying him in concrete. Since vampires can only be killed by decapitation, immolation or having their hearts destroyed, said vampire is likely doomed to spend decades or centuries suspended there, fully conscious.
• In Death Becomes Her, both of the immortal women have this. Their souls are bonded to their bodies, but their bodies do NOT repair themselves. At the end, they fall down a set of stairs and their bodies shatter. Their heads are intact, but they cannot move. So now they can do nothing but bicker with each other for all eternity, or at least until their heads are damaged.
• In Demolition Man, criminals aren't supposed to be aware of the time spent as a Human Popsicle. But John spent the time dreaming of the innocents that he didn't save, and seeing his wife pounding on the ice cube he was in. The police are appropriately horrified to learn this. When pressed, Cocteau uncomfortably states that "The side effects of the freezing process are unavoidable".
• In Demon Knight, the reason the "shoot-for-the-eyes" tactic works is that it frees the tortured souls within the demons.
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly centres around a man having to cope with falling victim to this fate, as a stroke leaves him paralyzed everywhere except his eyes (and one of them is sewn up early on due to infection, so he can only use one eye). It's suggested that it is temporary (the doctors keep talking about how they hope to help him eventually regain the ability to move, though the epilogue reveals that he died of a heart attack before this could happen, but he still ends up like this long enough to write a book about his feelings. And it bears mentioning that this was based on a true story.
• In Clive Barker's Dread, a woman is locked into a room with the dead body of her boyfriend, the implication being that she'll be forced to eat it.
• Dreamkeeper shows this in the Show Within a Show. Along with Who Wants to Live Forever?, the protagonist is granted clairvoyance. And can see the 20th century.
• The Empty Mirror: Implied to be Hitler's fate. After spending the whole film trying to justify his legacy and the atrocities committed in his name, a white-haired Hitler is eventually left alone with his thoughts, then the walls burst open and submerge him in a river of blood and human bones. By the end he realizes he's trapped, all alone, and can't escape his past as darkness moves in over him.
• Played for laughs in The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec: Adèle undresses for a bath in front of a mummy, which, unknown to her, is being revived and can see, but not move or speak. After the mummy regains speech and movement, he thanks her for the show.
• The Exorcist III: Father Kerras is trapped inside his own body, which is under the control of the spirit of a Serial Killer, forced to watch the killer target the people he knew in life with absolutely no ability to stop or control it, as punishment from Pazuzu for exorcising him from Regan.
• In The Final, one of the outcasts' victims is drugged so that he can't move but can feel everything. Then, Emily sticks him in the throat with needle after needle, all while she remains completely silent and his friends beg for her to stop.
• The fate of the villain in The Fly II, when fly Marty replaces his mutated genes with the villain ones, thus trapping the villain in a tumorous, deformed mutated body that can barely crawl.
• In found., this is Marty's ultimate fate. He's left bound and gagged on his bed surrounded by the dismembered corpses of his parents and doesn't know when someone will eventually investigate.
• This happens to Jason Voorhees at the end of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, as he gets his neck snapped after he is chained to a rock that sinks to the bottom of Crystal Lake. The final scene of the film shows him moving his eye as he floats down there helplessly. Of course, this being a slasher series, Jason is freed from the rock to continue his killing spree in the next movie.
• From a Whisper to a Scream: After being made immortal, Jesse has his arm and leg cut off with an axe and is set on fire, leaving him permanently immobile, mute, and in constant pain.
• Get Out (2017) involves black people having a white person's brain implanted in their head, with only a tiny bit of the black person's consciousness still in the body. This means the victims can see and hear anything that is happening but are unable to do anything about it unless they see the flash of a camera, which causes their original consciousness to activate.
• The fate of any ghost captured by the Ghostbusters.
• Cobra Commander and Destro start G.I. Joe: Retaliation immobilized in tanks and pumped full of drugs that leave them incapable of moving anything but their eyes.
• If Slappy's words are any indication, the monsters in Goosebumps were conscious inside their imprisonment in the manuscripts. Slappy even freed The Blob That Ate Everyone just to show his creator R.L. Stine what that's like.
  Slappy: How does it feel, papa? Knowing the entire world is outside your grasp, but you can't move. You're trapped. That's what it feels like to be locked inside your books!
• Phil Conners in Groundhog Day becomes trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop where he is forced to relive the same day over and over again, and be the only person aware of what is happening. He tries to kill himself multiple times, but always wakes upon the next day in perfect condition. At the end of the film he manages to escape the loop, but only after spending possibly thousands of years in it.^note Word of God says that Phil probably lived the same day for about ten years
• In Hansel and Gretel (2007), a woman is turned into a tree.
• In Hellboy (2019), after Nimue's first defeat in the 5th century, her body was chopped up into half a dozen pieces, sealed in iron chests and hidden throughout the world. Unfortunately for her, her head remained conscious the whole time it was locked in this dark and quiet box for well over 1,500 years. She's remarkably sane when pieced together after this ordeal. Sure, she wants to wipe out mankind, but that's no different from her plans before she was put away.
• The Human Centipede: This is Lindsay's ultimate fate, with Heiter and the other two members of the "centipede" dead, leaving her stuck between two dead bodies with nobody to help her.
• John Blaylock, as well as Miriam Blaylock's other past lovers in The Hunger, deserve a mention. In short, not only do they age rapidly, they can't physically die, meaning someone else has to kill them. Instead, they are encased alive in coffins kept by Miriam.
• In Inception, it's alluded that this occurs when someone dies in a dream sedated enough that they can't simply wake up from it. Supposedly they go to a "limbo" where they can trapped for what seems like years or even decades. Cobb and Mal (before she died) have been there and by the end, so has Saito.
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: The Black Sleep of the Kali Ma, a cursed trance that a person falls under when forced to drink the Blood of Kali. One victim describes the experience as a nightmare from which you can't wake up, and openly prefers death to being forced under it.
• In Infernal Affairs III, Ming is left in a paralyzed and catatonic state after a botched suicide attempt. However, he is still semi-conscious and essentially trapped in an eternal nightmare where he is forced to deal with the guilt of his past crimes. In the very last scene, he is seen tapping his fingers, which is Morse code for "HELL".
• Interview with the Vampire:
  • Louis is sealed into a coffin and set into a solid cement wall. Naturally, being a vampire and thus immortal, he does not need the oxygen, food or water that this denies him — and in context, lack of blood does not kill a vampire, it simply torments him and drives him slowly insane. Or it would, if he wasn't rescued shortly after to avoid this fate.
  • This may have happened to another vampire during the time that Louis and Claudia were traveling the world in search of their kin. So for several decades, Lestat was left barely alive in the old manor, seemingly killed for a SECOND time. Instead of dying, he survives as a charcoal covered corpse that feeds on rats, all alone and afraid of the changing outside world.
• The film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun. See the entry under Literature.
• The Japanese horror films Ju-on screams this. As each film's opening spiel explains, when a person dies in the grip of a powerful rage they may be consumed by a Hate Plague which begins in the place that their death took place, then spreads and consumes everyone that enters said location, and then may infect other people that come into contact with the infected. The Saekis become rage-filled ghosts after Kayako's infidelity leads to the deaths of her whole family, often reacting their murders. Anyone who enters their house are doomed, sooner or later Kayako, her dead son or dead husband will come for them and there is nothing they can do but be killed and consumed by the curse. Most victims disappear body and all.
  • To make matters worse, a lot of the victims can materialize as ghosts themselves, tormenting those who failed to save them. A poor school girl suffers this in the fourth film when three friends are consumed by the curse and their ghosts haunt her, watching her through holes in her papered up windows. That is until the ghosts get in and slowly stalk her through the house, then Kayako herself appears and drags the girl to her doom, with the ghost girls still trying to get her.
  • It is implied that the protagonist of the third film was haunted by Kayako and Toshio for a good few years, since the aforementioned school girl was young when introduced.
  • The spin-off films, White Ghost / Black Ghost, it is implied that another curse was responsible for the creation of another. In Black Ghost, a Fetus Terrible who absorbed by her twin sister possesses her body during an exorcism and murders her aunt's family. The house they die in is the same in White Ghost, where a man is possessed is implied to be possessed by the same ghost and murders his family before hanging himself. Several of his relatives return as ghosts, including his young niece who haunts her childhood friend for not saving her when he sexually abused her.
• In Livid, Anna is trapped for years as part of a twisted "music box" with her eyes stapled shut.
• The fate of Seth Richards in Looper. After he ends up letting his future self escape, Abe is not pleased. He knows he can't just kill Seth (he needs to survive long enough to be sent back in time and complete the loop), so Seth is instead condemned to spend 30 years without his limbs, tongue, ears, or nose. We don't see any of it directly. Instead, as a result of Temporal Mutability, we watch Future Seth's body parts disappear one by one as he tries to get to his past self until he's left a barely intelligible torso and head, then put out of his mercy by a bullet to the cranium.
• Lorenzo's Oil: Lorenzo himself is one of the more famous Real Life examples due to him having the nerve disease Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). (The real Lorenzo communicated by moving his fingers and blinking his eyes.)
• Martyrs: In the end, this is Anna's fate. She is imprisoned, isolated, and systematically tortured for an unknown but extended period of time. The prolonged and helpless suffering is actually the point, as the cult she's a victim of believes that bringing a person to the absolute height of human suffering grants them the ability to see what lies beyond the physical world and they wish to prove the existence of the afterlife. The very slow and methodical escalation of the torture is a means to effectively uncouple the person from an attachment to their physical existence (for all practical purposes driving them to insanity). This all culminates in Anna being bound in place and flayed when she is deemed "ready". It is left ambiguous as to what Anna experiences at this point, only that her resultant revelation leads to the cult leader immediately killing herself, with no indication of how long Anna will be forced to continue living in this state. If her discovery of a previous, now feral "martyr" part way through the film is any indication, her odds of being put out of her misery anytime soon are not good.
• The Matrix.
  • Given a twist. Since the machines are interested in the energy created by human bodies they need to keep them in a good state, which turns out to be much easier to do if their minds believe they are leading normal lives.
  • Early in the first The Matrix, Neo gets a brief, literal, experience of this type when Agent Smith erases his mouth and implants a tracking bug in him.
  Agent Smith: So tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?
• In Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends, after trying to steal the Plasma Spark, Ultraman King punishes Belial by imprisoning him inside the moon for all eternity. However, he is freed by Alien Zarab.... 457,542 years later.
• Those murdered by the killer in Midnight Movie become trapped in the film world he originates from, unable to die and held in a Torture Cellar. Escape is possible, but highly unlikely.
• The "precogs" of Minority Report. Daily life for them involves being forced to watch — and in some cases, relive — future murders in a drugged stupor, incapable of waking up or drifting off into too deep a sleep. Those convicted by their predictions are kept in stasis, while their minds remain active — though there's some debate as to what they experience, mentally speaking.
• Victims of the mirror in Mirrors have their souls imprisoned inside of it, a world where everything is mute and backwards. This becomes our protagonist from the first film's fate.
• End fate of the slasher in Monster Man, where the survivors manage to steal his monster truck and proceed to avert Once is Not Enough with it. They plough into him, run him over, reverse over him, and then run him over, again and again for hours. As he's been rendered essentially unkillable thanks to his sister's Black Magic, he's still alive and aware even after they finally get sick of it and drive away, leaving behind a great greasy smear of meat-pulp screaming that they haven't killed him yet.
• Imohtep in both versions of The Mummy (the 1932 original and 1999 remake). The novelization of the 1999 film explains that Imhotep's soul is locked in his body, even after it dies, and in the meantime, he's buried alive with flesh eating scarabs devouring him, and his tongue cut out so he can't scream, at least not effectively.
• Because Robert's fate is left ambiguous, this could be the case in Mystery Team.
• In the first Night at the Museum movie, the pharaoh Akhmenrah was locked in a vault from 1952 to the mid-2000s, when the films take place. The tablet that makes the museum come alive at night is his tablet, and the previous night guards and the other exhibits assumed he'd be evil if they let him out. So they left him to come alive and scream every night in the vault for five decades. When he's finally let out, he turns out to be a Nice Guy who did not Go Mad from the Isolation.
• Nightbooks: The fate of children who are disobedient to Natacha — transformed into a still figurine. As Yasmin keeps emphasizing to Alex, he'd only wish Natacha would kill him if he invokes her wrath. At the end of the film, one starts to move.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors reveals that Freddy actually devours the souls of his victims, keeping them contained in his body while leeching power from them. Some of their screaming, writhing faces periodically appear on his torso. They actually rip him apart in the fourth film, though by the sixth, he presumably trapped more.
  • Freddy's plan for Nancy in the 2010 remake was to trap her in this type of situation.
• The Old Guard: As revealed in flashbacks, Andy's original partner Quynh, upon being accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, was locked inside an iron maiden and dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. Due to how immortality works in this film, that means that she's spent centuries drowning, coming back to life, and drowning again; the other immortals, who can see her in their Shared Dreams of each other, can feel how the pain and desperation has driven her insane. Then the last scene shows that she's somehow escaped.
• The title character in Patrick is left in a vegetative state after murdering his mother and her lover. His only means of communication is via a typewriter, which he is able to control using his powers, or through occasional facial tics.
• Patrick Still Lives: In this unauthorized In Name Only sequel to Patrick, the title character is left comatose at the beginning of the film as a result of being hit in the face by a bottle thrown from a passing van.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean, Bootstrap Bill was tied to a cannon and sent to the bottom of the ocean by Captain Barbossa prior to the events of the first film. However, because of the curse of the Aztec gold, which rendered him immortal, he was fated to spend an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and unable to free himself, until the Big Bad of the second film came along.
• In Pitch Black, a bound, gagged, and sedated Riddick tells (in voiceover) how the animal part of the brain never goes to sleep — which is why he is still fully aware of what's going on during the space voyage. Downplayed because Riddick, while certainly not the most well-adjusted individual, doesn't seem to be bothered that much by the sensation.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu: Mewtwo after Howard hijacks his body. Also anyone who gets merged with their Pokemon. For both the human and the Pokemon.
• Happens to Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream. And to an extent, the other three protagonists during the final sequence as well.
• The victims of the killer in the Rest Stop duology become unhinged ghosts, trapped haunting the lonely stretch of highway the killer prowls.
• Return of the Living Dead has this as the downside of being a zombie. Sure, you're a lot more ambulatory than usual for this trope, but you spend that time moving around in unimaginable, agonizing pain - because you're still rotting, and now you have a functional brain that feels every moment of decomposition. The whole reason for eating brains is that the endorphins consumed that way make the pain stop for a while.
• RoboCop
  • RoboCop (1987) has the scenes of RoboCop's creation from his point of view. The moment that is closest to this trope is surely when Bob Morton and Donald Johnson are commenting in front of him that his memory is going to be wiped, as well as ordering his left arm to be removed and replaced by a cybernetic one.
  • RoboCop 2 gives, too, an example with Cain: his brain and eyeball are surgically removed from his skull, leaving him to stare out at his own autopsy without even eyelids to close.
  • RoboCop (2014) Murphy nearly dies from a Car Bomb explosion, and all that remains of him is a hand, his head, throat and lungs, which are freakishly throbbing in a translucent torso while dipped in blood. In one scene he's disassembled to show him how little of his organic body remains, which horrifies Murphy quite a bit. To make it worse, while in this remake Murphy is much more agile and powerful as RoboCop, it comes with the cost of needing daily maintenance to get nutrients and have his blood cleaned, not to mention the fact that the shady corp he depends on can easily shut him down remotely.
• Savaged: Hoo boy. Zoe is dead, and her soul is trapped inside her decaying corpse with the angry ghost of an Apache war chief.
• The victim of the "Sloth" punishment in Se7en is kept strapped to his bed for over a year, completely immobilized and fed only the bare minimum of food and water to keep him alive, supplemented with antibiotics to keep his bedsores from killing him. By the time he is found, he is severely underweight and malnourished, every muscle in his body is totally atrophied, and his brain is described as "jelly" from lack of stimulation. Just moving him to the hospital induces shock, ultimately killing him.
• A new monster of the Silent Hill universe is introduced in Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. It is a multi-handed mannequin that assimilates people by transforming them into mannequins and putting them on its body. As we watch it assimilate a woman, we see the mannequin's head scream.
• Victims of Cecile and Justify in The Skeleton Key tend to wind up in elderly, stroke ridden bodies, unable to take care of themselves, let alone tell anyone what had happened.
• Claudia attempted to do this to Lilli with the apple in Snow White: A Tale of Terror. The apple would completely paralyze her, but give her full awareness in the "prison of her mind" as she was buried alive.
• Two examples in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
  • First, the Grimhold kept Morgana and Veronica trapped for a millennium. Morgana and Veronica were trapped in the Grimhold for over a millennium, though, unlike the urn, it isn't expressly stated that the Grimhold prisoners are conscious.
  • A second, shorter version happens when Balthazar and Horvath are trapped inside an urn for ten years. They do have things to read Horvath has Dave's essay on Napoleon (and probably a few of his other papers) and Blake was hinted to have the Encantus.
• SpaceGodzilla falls under this at the end of his only film appearance (Godzilla Vs Spacegodzilla). Being one of the few truly immortal Kaiju, he's trapped in the form of tiny particles floating through space for all of eternity.
• In Star Trek: First Contact, during a montage of Enterprise officers struggling to hold back the Borg, we see some crewmembers being sent to assimilation, all with stunned expressions knowing what's going to happen to them and powerless to stop it.
• Star Wars:
  • Return of the Jedi: In the belly of the Sarlacc, victims find a new definition of suffering as they are "slowly digested over a thousand years".
  • The Star Wars Legends story "A Barve Like That", describing Boba Fett's escape from the Sarlacc is a freaking study in this trope... there's something in the Sarlacc's digestive fluids that keeps people alive and conscious, though immobile and in pain, since the thing rarely feeds. Not only that, it's telepathic, can force people to relive their, its, and each other's memories, and apparently becomes sentient through its victims — even after death, they become part of its psyche. When Fett does eventually escape, the Sarlacc appears to express some satisfaction that Fett will "release it from the long cycle". He does not, implying that its own existence is an example of this trope.
  • It's noticeable that a Heroic, Republic-side mission for Star Wars: The Old Republic involves charging a Sarlacc pit with a load of explosives — not to destroy the Sarlacc (you'd probably have to nuke it from orbit), but to Mercy Kill the poor Republic grunts a Gammorean gang tossed inside. Even the darkest Jedi, mercenary Smuggler, or sociopath Trooper isn't going to go against the plan.
  • See the Literature section for what carbonite prisons do...
  • Vader's existence in a cybernetic iron lung is not pleasant. The novelization of Revenge of the Sith and The Rise of Darth Vader, by Matthew Stover and James Luceno respectively, make this clear. Supplementary materials imply that the cybernetics that Palpatine out-of-date and he did so both as a means to punish him for his failure and to keep him in line.
  • In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin's vocal cords are burned, and thus he now relies on a voice synthesizer in the mask that reads his brain waves to best determine a word to express that thought. In the iconic scene where he learned of the death of Padmé, it is implied that what he did was simply scream in agony, but the translator can only interpret such thoughts to be a long and equally agonizing "NO", making him a literal incarnation of this trope. The look on his face as the mask is lowered onto him is one of pure despair.
  • After the droid L3-37 is killed in Solo, her brain is uploaded into the computer of the Millennium Falcon. She is able to assist with navigation, but is forever bound to the ship. This is particularly ironic given her outspoken stance on "droid rights."
• Stitches (2001): Mrs. Albright stores her victims' souls in paper dolls, which she keeps in a scrapbook. Opening the pages makes their screams audible.
• Talk to Me: Mia, after realizing she died trying to save Riley, is now trapped on the other side of the embalmed hand while others play with it at conjuring spirits.
• Tales of Terror: In "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'', Valdemar's soul is trapped at the very instant of his death. This leaves his soul trapped within his dead body (which is slowly putrefying), wracked in constant, and only able to communicate through the auspices of the man who trapped him in the first place.
• The Theatre Bizarre:
  • At the end of "Wet Dreams", Dr. Maurey and Enola amputate Donnie's arms and legs (and castrate him) and keep him a prisoner in the attic. When Enola removes his gag to feed him, Donnie snarls that this is a dream and he will close his eyes and that when he opens them, he will be awake and kill her. She responds by cutting off his eyelids.
  • The "Theatre Guignol" framing sequence ends with Peg Poett transforming Enola into a puppet, which he then puts into a trunk. As he closes the lid, her eyelid snaps open showing her still human eye.
• Three Thousand Years of Longing: When the Djinn was first trapped inside his bottle it was immediately thrown into the ocean where it remained for a thousand years. On hearing this Alithea assumes he just had a really long nap, but the Djinn explains that his kind don't sleep. He was awake for every second of those thousand years, and he implies that the experience was deeply unpleasant.
• In Warlock: The Armageddon, the Warlock gets an art collector to hand over one of the gems that he is seeking by offering him "the greatest piece your gallery has ever seen". He didn't tell him that the collector himself would become that piece. Fully conscious and aware.
• We Are Still Here: The souls of sacrifices to the Darkness are said to be "burning till the stars go dark."
• Wishmaster:
  • The souls the Djinn captures are placed in Hellraiser-like dimension, presumably for eternal torture.
  • In the first film, a woman gets turned into a sentient but inanimate mannequin when she wishes to be beautiful forever, and Alexandra's sister gets frozen inside a painting.
• The Wizard of Oz averted for The Tin Man, whom if Dorothy didn't come along he would have been in a sentient statue position forever.
• Zardoz: One subset of the immortal Eternals are the Apathetics, who are so bored by immortality that they literally cannot do anything anymore.

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