An escape room seems like a natural fit for a horror movie because for some people, the idea is awful, claustrophic-making, and not much fun. But even those who think that this will be fun, exciting activity with friends or family members can still see how this would work as a setting in a scary film.
Escape Room was released in 2019 and the sequel Escape Room: Tournament of Champions came out in 2021, telling a story about characters who are asked to compete in some escape rooms so they can win some money. But the promising idea of watching people try to get out of these rooms alive falls apart pretty fast, and audiences might be disappointed with both the original film and its sequel.
There is one major element missing from both Escape Room movies: the scares. In the first film, six people are told that if they can make it through these games, they can be given $10,000. The movies just don't do much to terrifying audiences. The main issue seems to be the way that the sets look. There is a cabin in the wintertime, a billiards bar, and a hospital room in the first film, but the sets look kind of fake and don't inspire much fear or terror.
When horror fans think about horror movies that could be franchises, 2011's The Cabin in the Woods comes up, and when comparing the sets in Escape Room, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, and The Cabin in the Woods, the latter film has much scarier and more impressive settings. As those main characters realize that the cabin in a simulation, it's incredible to watch, and the building with a different monster on each level is also visually stunning. The sets in Escape Room aren't much to look at.
A horror movie's setting can be incredible, but it just falls flat here, particularly because Escape Room keeps the characters in the same area for a long time. By the time that audiences watch the sequel, there's one scene when the characters are on a New York City street near a store and a cab, and there is weird, creepy rain falling. The characters are given a few tries, but they keep being put back in this room, and it just isn't that much fun to keep watching it.
While Escape Room: Tournament of Champions does add something new to the story and gives fans a deeper background, as audiences learn that Amanda Harper (Deborah Ann Woll) is the designer behind the escape rooms, it's still not a very scary backstory. Perhaps if audiences learned this information earlier on, such as perhaps in the first movie, it would feel like it matters more. But when these details come out near the end of the sequel, it feels like too late to really get invested in this new information.
It's also hard to be scared when it doesn't feel like audiences can really get to know the characters and it also doesn't feel like they have what it takes to win. Two of the characters from the first movie survive: Ben Miller (Logan Miller) and Zoey Davis (Taylor Russell) team up to stop The Gamemaster (Yorick van Wageningen) in the sequel. They make this decision at the end of the original movie and while it's promising that they are determined to win, it feels like they don't have much hope at all.
Both Escape Room movies do a good job of showing how impossible it is to beat The Gamemaster without giving its characters the necessary strength, desire, and determination to be able to survive. It feels like it's inevitable that most of the characters will die and that's a shame as it takes the fun out of watching a scary movie with final girls or people who won't rest until they defeat the killer. The six main characters in the first movie all survived a horrible accident, but that feels a bit trite and not that impactful.
The ending of Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions might remind horror fans of another familiar franchise. Final Destination 3 is a great movie with a solid ending: the main character finds herself having a vision of death and danger while riding a subway train. Just as she realizes that this evil is happening all over again, Zoey realizes that she's not on a plane but in another escape room. Since it feels like this has been done before, this ending feels really lackluster and it's hard to feel excited about it.
The problem with both Escape Room and its sequel? The movies are too one-note and don't inspire any fear or worry in audiences, who aren't given enough character development to be invested enough in the characters to be scared that they're facing death in every escape room that they need to get out of.