Alone with the Psycho

The young police officer goes to visit the house of one of the suspects in a Serial Killer case. Meanwhile, back at the police station, the detectives put together the clues to see who the killer is.

Simultaneously, the two parties figure out the truth -- the detectives through the DNA test, the officer through finding the Torture Cellar. The suspect is the Serial Killer. The detectives try to contact them, but their mobile isn't working properly.

They're alone in the house with a serial killer. Will they survive? The answer to that is generally "yes".

The house-visitor is most often female and attractive, although there have been male examples.

Anime and Manga

 * Happens in Suzumiya Haruhi, when Kyon is alone in a room with Asakura Ryoko who reveals to be a Stepford Smiler Knife Nut. She also uses her data manipulation skills to make the room inescapable. Luckily,  noticed it from outside and busted in for a rescue. This is par for the course as he also knows a girl who may destroy the universe whenever she gets PMS and another who kidnaps the entire world just to be alone with him.
 * Inverted in Black Lagoon, when Balalaika finds herself alone with Psycho for Hire Hansel. The inversion is that.
 * Conan's friend Mitsuhiko finds himself in this situation in Detective Conan, when.
 * Also happens to Conan himself, Ran, Sonoko and Officer Takagi.
 * From Death Note this happens to Naomi Misora on two separate occasions, once in a prequel and once in the main story.
 * Subverted by Misa, L, and the whole Kira Investigation Task Force. Not that he wouldn't want to do something about all of them... Though, um, Misa is psycho too...
 * Anyone who has an encounter with Johan in Monster
 * Perhaps the most notable example of this trope in Monster has to be the scene in which
 * A variant is done in Anatolia Story. Just as Prince Kail and his men catch a servant who spills the beans on who The Mole is in their group,
 * Happens to  in Fruits Basket. In that case, the psycho is

Comics

 * Uncanny X-Men 143 “Demon” in which newest X-Man/girl Kitty Pryde Are You Alone In The House is left alone to deal with an Alien-style demon.

Film

 * Really, most of Wait Until Dark, but especially the climax.
 * The climax of The Silence of the Lambs.
 * As well as Graham's confrontation with Lecter at the beginning of Red Dragon.
 * The ending of No Country for Old Men has the protagonist's wife encountering Psycho for Hire Anton Chigurh in her house even after
 * This happens to Detective David Mill's wife in the film Se7en. Unfortunately,.
 * Various scenes of Primal Fear.
 * Jane in And Soon the Darkness runs to the cop that unbeknownst to her . Subverted because Paul.
 * Marvin Nash is tortured and almost killed by sadistic sociopath Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs because of this trope.
 * Fargo seems to be heading for this kind of climax when pregnant Marge Gunderson, the Brainerd, Minnesota sheriff,.
 * In Patch Adams  Quite a shocking development in an otherwise upbeat movie. Truth in Television in that Patch Adams'.
 * Occurs (of course) in the climax of Hitchcock's Psycho.
 * Pretty much the entire latter half of Paperhouse.
 * Occurs at the end of Zodiac. Subverted in that.
 * Happens in The Element of Crime, but gets subverted and perhaps even deconstructed in the most possible twisted way:
 * An inversion happens in Kiss the Girls: the officer is visiting one of the victims and reveals himself to be the serial rapist/killer just as another detective is putting the pieces together back at the station. The killer manages to cut the victim's phone line just before the other detective tries to call.
 * Sin City has a scene where Marv visits an old farm to search for clues and doesn't realize it is the home of the Serial Killer. He survives but the killer does defeat and imprison him for a time.
 * The climax of Julias Eyes.
 * When somebody puts on the Ring in The Lord of the Rings, they do this with Sauron being the psycho, so it's sort of on a cosmic scale.
 * From Russia With Love has James Bond cornered by the psycho SPECTRE assassin, Red Grant, who was planning a sadistic fate for Bond after he got the Lector. Fortunately, he was enough of a sucker to be tricked into setting off Bond's tear gas booby trap in his attache case, allowing Bond to tackle him.
 * There is a scene in The Avengers where Tony entered his house by himself without his suit, knowing perfectly well that Loki was there waiting for him.
 * There is a scene in The Avengers where Tony entered his house by himself without his suit, knowing perfectly well that Loki was there waiting for him.

Literature

 * Near the end of Great Expectations, Pip is captured and imprisoned by violently insane . Which makes this Older Than Radio.
 * In one of the Zack Files books, Zack and a friend were stuck in a house alone with an actor who turned out to be a vampire.
 * In Z for Zachariah, the main protagonist discovers the man she's nursed back from radiation sickness, possibly the only other living human being on the planet, turns out to be a controlling, borderline-sociopath who shoots her in an attempt to make sure she can't run away.
 * In Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov locks Dunya in a room with him and a gun... because he loves her. Alone With the Psycho indeed.
 * Seen in Men Who Hate Women (English language title: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), with the satisfying twist that
 * Considering that the psycho in this case was
 * In the novel Falling by Christopher Pike, FBI agent Kelly Feinman thinks she has tracked down the Acid Man serial killer,
 * Mary Higgins Clark's  uses this trope in the climax.
 * A variant is used near the climax of Otherland. Australian cop Calliope Skouros goes to an apartment on the trail of a Serial Killer after backtracking a suspicious Internet search. Knocking on the door, she encounters not Dread himself, but his unwitting conspirator, Dulcie Anwin, who has coincidentally just discovered Dread's secret and is in the throes of a Heroic BSOD over it. Skouros doesn't realize Dread is there until he stabs her in the back and subsequently shoots Anwin.
 * This trope basically describes Misery.
 * In The Cabinet of Curiosities, Smithback breaks into Dr. Leng's mansion expecting to rifle through an abandoned old house looking for clues to the murders 130 years ago. He finds he's stumbled onto the lair of the current killer and is quickly taken captive.
 * And in Still Life With Crows, (also by Preston and Child) Corrie runs off to investigate the cave without calling Pendergast because she doesn't want to look foolish if she's wrong. She ends up running into the killer and taken prisoner.

Live Action TV

 * The Avengers, episode "The Joker" has Emma Peel trapped in a house with a psychopath . The script was recycled from a previous Avengers story, "Don't Look Behind You", which starred Emma Peel's predecessor, Cathy Gale.
 * The climax to the first season of Dexter has.
 * And the ending of the second season has
 * In season 2 of Carnivale, Sophie becomes the house maid of
 * Played for laughs in Only Fools and Horses.
 * Criminal Minds: When Reid and J.J. try to interview a witness at his house but get turned away, they realize moments later that their witness is in fact the UnSub (serial killer they're trying to catch). Rather than wait for reinforcements and let him get away, they brilliantly decide to split up at which point
 * This seems to happen to Reid a lot, though usually he's not on his own:
 * In Damaged, he and Hotch are interviewing a death row convict when it turns out.
 * Somebody's Watching has him alone in Lila Archer's house with Lila and her stalker.
 * He and Prentiss are held hostage by a Christian cult in Minimal Loss.
 * He also tries to do this at the end of The Fisher King.
 * Prentiss uses her similarity to the unsub's victims to get into his house at the end of In Name and Blood, and is nearly killed when he stuns her with a plank of wood.
 * Also occurs with Hotchner at the end of season 4 and beginning of Season 5. However,
 * It was a seriously bad idea to let Elle go home at the end of Season 1...
 * The end of Our Darkest Hour sees.
 * In The Performer, JJ visits the house of the victim's friend. In accordance with the trope, the team discovers that she's with the unsub while she's there, alone.
 * Millennium: this trope is used several times, most notably in the episodes "The Mikado" and "In Arcadia Ego". In both, Frank Black figures out where the killer is before the police do, and has a confrontation with the killer.
 * Monk loves this trope more than his deceased wife. Usually it's Monk himself who has to be rescued, sometimes it's Natalie or his other sidekicks.
 * Happens to Annie in Episode 5 (Season 2) of Life On Mars.
 * Heroes: Sylar gets this twice with the Bennets. But the dog loves him... And back in the first season, Mohinder visits a powered human, unaware that the "Zane" he's speaking to is actually Sylar.
 * Any scene with Sylar and another character, really.
 * In the season 2 finale of Veronica Mars Mac finds herself alone with  who Veronica finds out is responsible for the bus crash which killed their classmates and   This particular alone with the killer scenario seems to reference Psycho, with
 * In the first season finale of True Blood, Sam recognizes the Serial Killer's scent from  Meanwhile, Sookie telepathically.
 * Happens quite often on NCIS, and almost always ends in a What Kept You?. Gibbs, Tony, Ziva, even Abby (who is a noncombatant Lab Rat) have all taken their turn here at least once.
 * Neatly subverted in the season five episode "Recoil." Gibbs, Tony, McGee, and Abby check Michael Locke's fingerprints against those of a murderer, while at the same time Ziva takes Locke with her to walk herself back through a previous incident in which she was almost killed. The scene cuts back and forth between the lab and the site of the incident and seems to be building to an Alone With the Psycho realization - especially when Ziva turns around and finds Locke standing behind her in place of her earlier attacker - but when the fingerprint results come back, it's not a match, and Locke is proved innocent.
 * Also subverted in a third season episode where Ziva is in a log cabin and finds a missing woman who was to be the next victim. The Serial Killer is with Gibbs and the others.
 * Used in an episode of New Tricks, with the slight modification that the mild-mannered murderer was not even a suspect in the case at the time.
 * In almost every episode of Pushing Daisies, someone from the investigation team is directly endangered by the criminal.
 * In the Seinfeld episode, The Opera, Elane creeps into the apartment of "Crazy" Joe Davola. a potentially murderous psycho who she's been dating and is, unbeknownst to her, stalking Jerry. She sees photos of her on the wall taken with a telephoto lens, and Davola invites her into his dark room. It is a surprisingly tense scene.
 * In an episode of The Closer, Chief Johnson goes to the docks to notify the ex-husband of a serial killer's victim that his ex-wife has died and ask him a few questions. Right in the middle of the notification, she gets a call from her team; . She quickly realizes that she's alone in the shop of the new most likely suspect, and tries to get out and call for backup without raising his suspicions.
 * Shameless: This is how
 * Jekyll a variation of this occurs when Tom Jackman's assistant, Katherine, ends up trapped alone in their apartment after he transforms into Hyde. Worse still, Katherine has switched the power off as part of a very risky gambit to get past Tom's security, meaning that the security cameras that normally keep Hyde in line are also off; fortunately, after toying with her for a while, Hyde lets her live- so long as she explains why she drugged Tom and switched off the power in the first place.
 * CSI: NY has done it twice, once with Stella in "All Access" and more recently with Jo in "Means to an End." Both cases resulted in the would-be killer being shot in self defense.
 * CSI also did it with Catherine in season 3's "A Little Murder", when a uniform cop failed to clear the scene completely and Catherine got jumped.
 * Supernatural had Dean assume the sad eyed little girl he comes across is another victim of the MOTW, turns out she and her family are the MOTW in "The Benders".
 * Wire in The Blood has this right out of the gate in the first episode, "The Mermaids Are Singing", all of the victims willingly let their killer into their house: they thought the killer needed help, including Tony for whom the killer had began to fixate on. This happens to Tony a lot throughout the series as he displays extreme empathy towards the killers, using his ability to see their POV to catch them but it also makes them fixate on him in return.

Video Games

 * This trope is applied in Baldur's Gate II during the 'skinner murders' sidequest. If, after finding the necessary clues, you decide to present the implications of them to the watch inspector on the case first instead of confronting the suspect directly, you'll find the inspector's corpse stuffed in an oven in the killer's house when you finally do it yourself.
 * The demo for the game Heavy Rain focused on a journalist entering a suspected serial killer's house and finding all the proof she needs, just in time for him to come home. Depending on the way the player, um, plays, the main options are for the journalist to hide and sneak out, just plain sneak out, get found but escape, and die.
 * Happens more than once in the game proper. Including the DLC. Which probably IS the demo.
 * Condemned has this in its second to last level, with a bit of a twist in that the psycho doesn't even get to the house until the end of the level, and the main character tricks him into thinking he is dead so he can take him by surprise.
 * Clocktower First Fear lives and breathes this trope only with, not one, but two active psychos and a third one waiting in the wings in the sequel. Sure, it may not be played straight at first, what with Jennifer (the player) also having three friends with her, one of which, Lotte, is fighting competent, but when the numbers could slowly dwindle down to just Jennifer,, and the only ones left eventually are either the scissor-wielding-manically-laughing-deformed Bobby , this trope is played more straight.
 * Action Doom Two Urban Brawl has a level where, at the behest of an old woman, you seek her lost son in a forest and come across a lonely farm. Exploring, you find a Room Full of Crazy with lots and lots of newspaper clippings about kid disappearances, an imprisoned and beaten cop in the basement, and eventually confront the Serial Killer himself in a barn full of butchered child corpses.

Web Comics

 * Penny and Aggie has an unusual variant presented in its "Missing Person" arc. Cyndi is trapped with, who has kidnapped her and is threatening her. However, despite being taped to a chair, Cyndi herself is very dangerous.
 * Chopping Block likes to use its protagonist as the "psycho" in this situation. Naturally, the girl is much less likely to survive here.

Western Animation

 * In the episode of Futurama where Fry was put into a Robot Insane Asylum, he was roommates with the psychotic Roberto. Note: the room was 10 cubic feet and Roberto liked to practice his stabbing.