Siege Horror

Siege horror traps its characters in a defensible position and then methodically strips away their ability to hold it. The location might be a farmhouse, a police station, a mall, a pub — what matters is that it is surrounded, that escape routes are closing, and that the people inside must cooperate or perish. The siege format is horror as pressure cooker, and the pressure comes from two directions: the threat outside and the disintegration within.

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the foundational siege horror film. The farmhouse becomes both fortress and trap, and the real horror is not just the zombies at the windows but the failure of the people inside to work together. Ben and Harry's power struggle is as lethal as any ghoul. John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) translated the western siege into urban horror. The Mist (2007) trapped its characters in a supermarket surrounded by Lovecraftian creatures, but the genuine threat was the religious zealot inside who turned fear into fanaticism.

Green Room (2015) revitalized the form by pitting a punk band against neo-Nazi skinheads in a locked backstage area, creating a siege that was simultaneously a political horror film. The subgenre works because it combines external threat with internal collapse — the people you are trapped with may be as dangerous as whatever is trying to get in.