The Scariest Horror Movies About Isolation

In yesteryear, they would've been referred to as "splatter" flicks. More recently they've been deemed "torture porn." Whatever you call this brutal genre, the Saw series arguably represents its gory peak. For our purposes here we're focusing on the first installment. When Saw hit the big screen back in 2004, it genuinely horrified audiences with its relentlessly cruel, bloody depictions of violence.

The story is deceptively simple. Two men awaken in a disgusting bathroom, each chained at opposing sides of the room, a dead body on the floor between them. A tape recorder informs them that they now must do whatever possible to escape, but that if one of the men doesn't kill the other, his family will be murdered. From there, a struggle to survive and to kill ensues, and through a series of flashbacks, we learn how these men ended up in this mess.

Besides the gruesome violence, part of what makes Saw — and indeed, the whole franchise — so unsettling involves is that the characters caught in the killer's trap find themselves in an isolated location, cut off from any form of outside help. Worse still, the victims who are trapped together are isolated from one another by their individual motivations to survive at all costs. These aren't teammates working together to overcome the odds, but they're instead people reduced to isolated animals who will do anything to save as much of their own skin as possible.