10 Most Claustrophobic Movies Of All Time
The most enjoyable panic attacks you'll ever have.
Filmmakers have been taking great pleasure in filling us with dread since the inception of the medium, though over the years traditional horror movies have tended to deal in rational fears rather than genuine phobias. We're all a little freaked out by the dark, and not many of us can claim that deranged serial killers and demonic entities don't bring on the heebie-jeebies, though for a phobic movie-goer, terror is always lurking.
Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been a family-friendly affair, but it gave ophidiophobics (fear of snakes) nightmares for weeks, and those who suffer from glossophobia (fear of public speaking) were no doubt squirming every time Bertie sat down in front of a mic in The King's Speech.
While some films unexpectedly provoke our anxieties, others hone in on them ruthlessly, and one filmmaker that understood how to harness the suffocating feeling of a phobia better than anyone was Alfred Hitchcock.
Lifeboat (1944) was the great director's ode to claustrophobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that affects up to 7% of the world's population in which the sufferer has an irrational fear of having no escape or being closed-in.
The black and white thriller follows the survivors of a German submarine attack as they struggle to find land in a crowded boat, and it captures the asphyxiating nature of claustrophobia brilliantly, a feat that not many films have been able to achieve in the many years since - the few that did comprise this list.
10. Panic Room (2002)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 76%
Many critics compared the high-tension narrative of David Fincher's Panic Room to the work of Hitchcock, with the majority of them meaning it as a compliment. While some complained that Panic Room was too commercial for their liking on the back of Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Fight Club, most reviews applauded the director for a film that achieved so much despite the constricting dimensions of the premise.
The film stars a typically spunky Jodie Foster as a thirty-something divorcee who purchases a brownstone in New York City. When intruders break into her home soon after, Foster and her daughter (a pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart) are forced to take advantage of the special feature that came with the property - a hidden panic room. Trapped in the cold, claustrophobic space and unable to reach outside help, the mother-daughter combo enter into an ever-evolving game of cat and mouse with the home invaders.
A movie that could have ended up a formulaic popcorn thriller managed to avoid the many genre trappings by employing a director on top of his game. Fincher utilizes atmosphere as a function of architecture here, with the usual functions a filmmaker relies on either purposefully overshadowed or stripped away entirely. The film is a tale of psychological gamesmanship made all the more tense for the viewer by never straying too far from the plausible and believable performances all round.