The horror genre is a versatile category, with everyone finding a favorite by extracting the essence of what scares humans from the audience to the individual level. On this individual level, there exists a kind of horror that is often overlooked.
Horror films often focus on particular elements in their creation. It can be the music that can specifically unsettle or confront senses with unconventionality. It’s gore that has been a part of our culture since Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” to the French Grand Guignol. Though, one of the most interesting and often overlooked aspects of horror is the single-location film.
Single-location film denotes a type of movie filmed in one general location. Films such as “12 Angry Men” and “Rope,” dedicate a single space to all the action. Referred to as a “bottle film these movies are generally contained to a single location, often conniving ways for characters to be in one location like bad weather.
For horror, bottle films have been an inexpensive alternative to classic set pieces as the low costs allow for low-budget horror films to explore their concepts. For example the independent thriller, “Cube.”
“Cube” follows a group of people who wake up inside a cube-shaped maze and attempt to escape while unraveling how they got there and why. The core number often fluctuates from rare discoveries of others within the cube structure and losing members to hidden traps.
The premise of “Cube” should feel prescient since the idea inspired the “Saw” franchise. The first film of the series opened with a similar single-room location.
What makes “Cube” and “Saw” so unique is the rigid nature of their locations. In the case of “Cube,” this comes in the form of no outside interaction. No person, object or element enters the cube that wasn’t put there initially.
The art of a bottled film is its restraint. There isn’t excess in horror kills that become numbing with foreshadowing, instead the elements of the film exist from the outset. Tension is often formed through the escalation of a core element.
This is seen in films like John Carpenter’s “The Thing” where arctic researchers are attacked by a shapeshifting alien they found in the ice. Keeping it extraterrestrial, “Alien,” shows off simple AI ship pathing which puts a crew into contact with a hostile alien life-form.
Films like “Buried” take the single-location to the extreme and remove any hope there is an outside world, instead using the roughly 90-minute run time to explore the folktale of being buried alive.
Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” established the lone cabin horror film, pitting isolated teens against horrific monsters. The secluded cabin plays into the horror of powerlessness and the unknown, a trope that has been recreated and parodied since.
The unique element of a single-location horror film is the variety of stories that can be told. For every “Autopsy of Jane Doe” there is a “Night of the Living Dead.” Horror is not bound to any budget or place, rather it’s a concept that can be extracted and placed into several contexts.
Bottle-Horror is a unique subset of horror films that lean into their budget. They maintain tension by placing the threat in constant contact with the protagonist. It’s an unbreaking dread that makes these single-location features a Halloween mainstay.
Benjamin Ervin is a senior studying English literature and writing at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Benjamin know by emailing him be425014@ohio.edu.
