The Descent
The Descent is one of the best horror movies from the last decade or so. Relentlessly scary and brutally claustrophobic, it puts you in the company of six women spelunking and checking out an underground cave system that has never been explored before. That, alone, would have worked great as a movie in itself. But once they get deep enough underground, they encounter a race of what can best be described as bat-men. Don’t let the name fool you, though. These things don’t fight crime and wear capes. They eat people.
But the element that made the horror of the The Descent work so well was the fact that you felt like you were in that cave system with those women, squeezing yourself through cracks in the rocks that seem to be shifting and changing around you. Add to that the growing tension that they are being hunted and cannot make a sound (as these creatures see with their ears using echo location), and you have a movie that will make people with claustrophobia truly suffer.
And even if you don’t have claustrophobia, The Descent is still pretty damn terrifying.