The Claustrophobic Horror Setting Meme

1. Snowed In
Cabin fever, getting "toasty," going stir crazy - call it what you will, there's a special kind of madness associated with the winter months when the outside world is extra inhospitable, and, depending on the snowfall levels, sometimes inaccessible. Even being in a larger indoor space, like a military barracks or a scientific research base, does little to stave off the inevitable breakdown, and sometimes, it just makes it easier for people to become separated, and to mistrust each other if something terrible happens...

2. Space Ship
There's a cosmos of infinite promise out there, but getting there is mostly a trek through infinite darkness. Infinite darkness, however, is not empty: it's full of radiation, micrometeorites, rogue planets, rogue black holes, and a hard vacuum from which you are only separated by a few meters of steel and instrumentation at best. It's the ultimate hostile environment under the best of circumstances, and that's just assuming that you and your crew are still alone in your ship. Who knows what else has evolved means of traversing the vastness of space - perhaps even ones that don't play by the known rules of our reality, ones that might make them inimical to human sanity or existence.

3. Deep Sea Exploration
We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the deepest parts of our own oceans. For whatever reasons, you've decided it's time to do your part to fix that; and while the alienness of the seafloor is not without its own appeal, it also poses hazards beyond just the crushing pressure and immense distance to the surface. There are an endless variety of unknown things living down there, ones that might be impossibly vast enough to crack your vessel in half, or ones that might be tiny enough to make their way into its water or air filtration systems and inflict ailments whose exact parallels have never been seen on the surface. Then, there are all the remnants of the Cold War and the two World Wars before it - all those ghost submarines still "on patrol," all the remains of nuclear, biologic, radiologic, and temporal weapons projects buried at sea to protect the world and their results from each other. There's no telling what you might encounter in the depths.

4. Oil Rig
Just because you're on the surface, that doesn't necessarily mean you're any less isolated. The kinds of high seas and storms that a large platform is built to weather can make immediate rescue impossible, if the sheer logistics of getting a vessel out to your position don't do that on their own. Whatever the black depths can throw up, you might just have to handle on your own.

5. Cold War Bunker
Those who say that it's impossible to fight and win on a nuclear battlefield are dead wrong - but, fortunately, that's something your country never had to prove. Now that the plans stemming from that concept are a mild national embarrassment rather than a necessity, you've become part of the drawdown team decommissioning those bunkers - or perhaps you've stumbled across one entirely by chance. Either way, the security measures on this place are just as strict as you'd expect from something designed for all-out MAD scenarios, and either you or one of your team has triggered a lockdown. It's only then that you discover, perhaps you're not alone, or perhaps there were experiments carried out in this bunker that are still hazardous...

6. Trapped Underground
There's a certain lure to going caving: the thrill of exploring spaces where few or no people have ever been before, observing unique geologic formations, or maybe even stumbling upon the remains of human proto-civilization - or maybe something not so human, and not as extinct as you thought. Or maybe you're exploring an abandoned mine, in search of thrills or abandoned equipment or the remains of whatever veins or deposits were extracted here that you might be able to sell for a little extra cash, unaware that the things that are in the earth beneath have been here for eons longer than mankind, and always resented being disturbed - and without the numerical superiority of the old days, you have nothing to protect you from their anger.

7. Topopathy
A topopathy is a malevolent, sentient spatial anomaly - like room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel, or the town of Silent Hill. There's no way out, the local geography makes no sense, the few doors that open lead to places you've already been or endless mazes of corridors... and this place is out for your blood. Whether you're sharing the space with impossible phantasms, or whether it's whispering terrible things into your head to try to make you turn your hand against yourself or your companions, your odds of escaping sane and whole are slim.

8. Universe 25
Everything is perfect here - it's 72 degrees F all the time, there's an unlimited supply of clean water and nutritionally complete food, and you get to see all your friends every day - all the time, in fact, because even the artificial sunlight can't disguise the fact that there's no way out, but the population density is still rising. And the worse the overcrowding gets, the more people are inclined to do crazy things...

9. Prison
You're trapped, in a space that might defy or coincide with one of the other categories, guarded by entities whose interests most strongly coincide with you never making it out alive. Whether it's a modern supermax, a World War II-era concentration camp, or a serial killer's elaborate murder maze, escape definitely isn't going to be easy, or perhaps even possible. All you can do is your time, and try to keep the time from doing you (in).

10. Time Loop
Why be claustrophobic in only three dimensions, when you can be stuck in a day, or a few hours, ahead of some horrific cataclysm that keeps repeating on loop? No matter how far you try to run, or how well you try to hide, there's no escaping the inevitable - as you've already found out, or perhaps you soon will. Maybe there's a way to fight your way out, to find whatever or whoever is responsible for this and put a stop to it, but how do you go up against something that can bend time itself? And what might happen if the outcome isn't as you anticipated?

11. Possession
There's something inside your head that isn't you, and whatever it is, it's in charge, it's strong, and it doesn't want to let go. However bitterly you fight, the ruination of your life is just a hairsbreadth away - and you're starting to suspect it isn't even your own will tempering that outcome, but rather, the temporary entertainment of whatever is in there with you...

12. Choose Your Own Claustrophobia

The Claustrophobic Horror Setting Meme

The Claustrophobic Horror Setting Meme

Michael Corvin | Underworld | OTA