Locked in a Freezer: Difference between revisions

If the characters are locked in, but not in peril, they are simply [[Locked in a Room]].

Unrelated to [[Stuffed Into the Fridge]]. Similar in ease-of-escape terms but opposite in temperature terms to [[Sauna of Death]].

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== Advertising ==

* A Jack in the Box commercial featuring Jack finding himself locked in a freezer with a male, middle aged, overweight employee. A young, female employee comes in to look for something just as the two are trying the body-heat huddle.

* Used with some regularity in the ''[[Macross]]'' series. In the original, Hikaru/Rick and Minmei are trapped in actually a very LARGE area of the SDF-1, but as the ship is massive and not fully understood even by the crew, they have no way out and run the risk of starvation before being rescued. In ''[[Macross Frontier]]'', Alto, Sheryl and Ranka are trapped in a small, hardened combat shelter (to shield them from the local area being reduced to vacuum) and the air recycling gives out.

* An episode in the third generation of ''[[Robotech]]'', the heroes are trapped in a collapsed subway. Drama ensues.

* Toyed with in [[Hana no Ko Lunlun]]. A little girl is trapped in an unused freezer in Sicily and the man who opens said freezer and saves her is actually a [[Punch Clock Villain]] who's on the run and has great lockpicking skills. {{spoiler|Later, Lunlun tries to stop a robbery and gets locked in a tightair vault; the [[Punch Clock Villain]] hesitates at first since he might get caught right before the state of limitations kicks in, but ultimately saves her... and when he's done, the state has already passed, thus the police lets him go as a free man.}}

* Played straight in the limited series/graphic novel ''[[Arkham Asylum: Living Hell]]''. Main character Warren White, "the Great White Shark", sent to the eponymous madhouse to escape jail time, finds himself spending several months severely abused by the inmates and asylum employees, culminating to one night where truly psychotic inmate, Jane Doe, kidnaps White during a asylum-wide communications blackout and takes him to the freezer usually used for storing Mr. Freeze. White is then tortured by Doe, discovers that she is going to replace him using a mansuit, made with real skin, and locked in said freezer with the temperature lowered down to an extreme subzero state. The result is White losing several of his fingers, hair, ears and nose and upper lip to frostbite (making for some [[Nightmare Fuel]]). He is eventually saved by, of all people, the ghost of the man who White had pushed to suicide, who wished to haunt White, but ultimately ended up being unable to do so. This all leads up to White's descent into madness that turns him into a "super" villain.

* [[The Flash]] villain known as Heatwave was trapped in one as a child, leading to his crippling fear of coldness and his fire gimmick.

* In ''[[Horndog]]'', Leonard gets locked in a storeroom in a parody of ''[[The Shining]]''.

* 1950s cult classic ''[[The Blob]]'' does unusual things with this one. The eponymous blob is running around a small town one night, eating people. We are now aware of the dangers. The [[Dawson Casting|main character and TheChick]] run into a grocery store meat locker to hide. They learn two things: 1) Amorphous blobs have no difficulty fitting through cracks beneath meat locker doors and 2) the Blob [[Chekhov's Gun|doesn't like cold]].

* ''[[Short Circuit]] 2'' had Ben Jarvhi and his con man associate Fred locked in a Chinese restaurant freezer by the bad guys, and manage to type out a series of musical clues to Ben's girlfriend Sandy for her to follow and rescue them, but not before the requisite talk and coming to terms with one another.

* ''[[Under The Rainbow]]'' has a scene where Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher's characters get trapped in this manner. For Fisher, it's made worse by the fact that she's clad only [[Fan Service|in bra and panties]] (leading to a [[You Must Be Cold]] moment).

* Disney's ''[[Tangled]]'' has this with Rapunzel and Flynn in a blocked tunnel filling with water. They have their deep and meaningful and share their deepest secrets; {{spoiler|Rapunzel's, incidentally, gets them out}}.

== Literature ==

* The [[Warhammer 40,000]] novel, '' Atlas Infernal '' by Rob Sanders has the protagonists attempting to escape an enemy fleet intent on capturing them by purposely flying into a "cold star" (called a Kryonova, it saps all heat from the area around it, should not be possible, but being deep in the [[Negative Space Wedgie]] that is the Eye of Terror, you are ''lucky'' if it is ''only'' the laws of physics working backwards) to inflict Locked in a Freezer on their pursuers as well as themselves. {{spoiler|To keep from freezing all the way to death and their ship becoming brittle and shattering under its own physics like their pursuers, they set their ship's fusion core to critical meltdown in an attempt to counteract the heat-sapping effects of getting near the Kryonova. Naturally this ruins their ship, but a last minute intervention by the [[Magnificent Bastard]] [[Monster Clown]] Harliquins sees them safely out of the Eye and into the much safer Webway. Of course, the purpose of their intervention isn't quite as nice as it seems...}}

* ''[[I Love Lucy]]'', "The Freezer". They actually did this twice; there is another episode during the story arc where they go to Europe, and they get caught in a cabin in Switzerland that's buried under ''tons'' of snow.

** But in the freezer episode only ''Lucy'' is trapped.

* In ''[[Escape from Horrorland]]'', after Lizzie suddenly goes missing soon after the two of you land in Werewolf Village, you find her in the butcher shop, locked inside the freezer, covered in frost and too numb with cold and fear to panic.

* Not as cramped as a walk-in fridge, but in one of the ''[[Nancy Drew (video game)|Nancy Drew]]'' games, she's locked inside a ski-resort outbuilding by the culprit and must get out before she freezes to death.

== Web Comics ==

* In ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]],'' when a very hungry Molly and Golly discover a walk-in freezer full of food, Molly makes reference to the relevent ''[[Brady Bunch]]'' episode. Golly, unsurprisingly, doesn't get the reference.

* In ''[[Off White]]'', a snow leopard caused an avalanche or something that trapped a group of sledders.

== Web Original ==

* An excellent parody by ''[[The Onion]]'', involving this trope [https://web.archive.org/web/20100218232451/http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29099 furthering the Middle East peace process.]

* In V3 of ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'', Alex Steele gets locked in the freezer by Guy Rapide. He tries to escape by [[Shoot Out the Lock|shooting the lock out]], but instead has a bullet ricochet into his chest.

== Western Animation ==

* Rigby from ''[[Regular Show]]'' tried to prevent this with [[Genre Savvy]] common sense to prop the door open before leaving the lockable door. It failed still because he tried to prop the door open with a couple of bags of ice.

* The plot of the ''[[King of the Hill]]'' episode ''Nancy's Boys'' is launched when, during a "random service check," Hank winds up rescuing a restaurant owner from this fate, earning him a reward of free dinner for four.

== Real Life ==

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[[Category:Narrative Devices]]

[[Category:These Tropes Were Frozen Today]]