14 Fictional Movie Jails That Take Imprisonment To A Whole New Level

The Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane comes from the lengthy history of various Batman comic books and, originating from that specific medium, this prison takes what we would consider to be a psychiatric hospital and dials it up to 11. Let's be clear: There is nothing real-world about Arkham Asylum. Even the Arkham of the Christopher Nolan films lets Jonathan Crane run around in a burlap mask and use fear gas to mess with his "patients." But it is precisely the fictional nature of Arkham that makes it so scary.

Why would any of the Bat's rogues gallery try to reform if they end up getting sent to this hellhole? Have you seen the Arkham from the Joel Schumaker Batman films? This place isn't exactly the kind of facility you'd expect to get expert care from. Even when caregivers do their best to try and reform the denizens of Arkham (read: Dr. Harleen Quinzel), they end up becoming villains themselves. Arkham Asylum only really exists to give the Dark Knight's villains a place to stay evil, which means it is about as evil a place as there is.

Where do all the baddies from the Harry Potter franchise (that aren't He Who Must Not Be Named) reside? Azkaban, of course. The Azkaban of the films differs from the Azkaban of the books, but the basic idea remains the same: All the evil wizards and witches who reside in the United Kingdom are sent there. Being locked in a triangle-shaped building in the middle of the ocean seems bad enough, but the real fear should lie with the Dementors.

For what is ostensibly a fantasy series for children, the Dementors are about as serious as it gets. These horrifying ghouls serve as the guards of Azkaban, and their presence not only makes inmates incapable of experiencing happiness, but also forces them to relive their worst memories over and over again. Just why the Ministry of Magic felt it was a good idea to use the Dementors in any capacity is beyond us. As far as frightening movie prisons go, Azkaban has to be up there with the best of them. Or is it the worst of them?

Before American Graffiti signaled him as a director on the rise and Star Wars cemented his place in Hollywood history, George Lucas made his feature film debut with 1971's THX 1138. The dystopian sci-fi classic is directly at odds with the crowd-pleasing fare that would make up the rest of Lucas's career, as it focuses on a future where an android police force controls the human population with mandatory drugs. Fundamental facets of humanity like emotion, reproduction, and sex are things of the past, and there isn't much for human beings to do outside of existing and working. 

The White Void that Robert Duvall's THX finds himself in after evading his drug regimen and having sex with Maggie McOmie's LUH proves that prisons don't have to be all that elaborate to be terrifying. Decked out in white prison garb, THX is sequestered alone in a massive white room where the only thing that sticks out is his skin color. Eventually, some of the robotic police show up and torture him a bit, but being forced into a huge room devoid of color is dastardly enough in itself. As you'd imagine, this doesn't do much for THX's mental state.

If Arkham Asylum is DC Comics' reflection of actual human incarceration, then the Phantom Zone serves as DC's take on what a prison would look like if there were no restrictions on technology and/or reality. Viewers may not get much of a look at the actual Phantom Zone in Superman or Superman II, but everything you need to know is in its description. In the 1978 original, the Krypton Elder describes an isolation sentence in the Phantom Zone as "an eternal living death." So... that's not good.

The various versions of the Phantom Zone throughout the decades-long history of DC Comics see the parallel dimension serve as a prison for Superman's most dangerous foes. The cruelest facet of the Phantom Zone has to be that it generally exists outside of the natural space-time continuum. Would you like to be driven insane? Exist outside the traditional laws of space and time for a while. That'll do the trick quite well.

There are plenty of things about the near-future of Minority Report that happen to be more than a bit unsettling: facial recognition technology everywhere you go that tailors advertisements to your interests, predictive police units that can arrest you for crimes you haven't even committed yet, the revolting little spider robots that may or may not haunt the dreams of some viewers. With all that said, the most unsettling aspect of Minority Report has to be the halo "confinement" prison.

Not only do you get arrested for a crime you haven't yet committed (that may or may not have even ended up happening, as is discovered by film's end), but you also spend the rest of your days isolated in a nude, virtual reality prison. Sedated until death, seeing who knows what in your own mind, you are stripped of whatever humanity you have left upon entering confinement. This is some true sci-fi dystopia stuff here.

The Chronicles of Riddick may not be the most elegant sci-fi/action film ever put to celluloid by Hollywood (and it is an odd jump from the low-budget horror of the original Riddick film, Pitch Black), but it does have a lot of fun ideas in it - the most outrageous idea of all being the planet of Crematoria. If the name alone didn't give it away, Crematoria has a bit of a temperature problem.

The planet is used as a maximum-security prison thanks to a deadly twist: The sunlight on the planet will fry you to a crisp immediately. Even if you manage to escape the weird, cave-like structures, you'll have to outrun the sun, which is far easier said than done. One character hits the nail right on the head: "If I owned this place and hell, I'd rent this place out and live in hell." Quite the ringing endorsement.