Brow Beat

Love (and Sex and Violence) in an Elevator: A Brief Cinematic History 

Elevators are the opposite of what people tend to mean when they use the word cinematic. They’re cramped and often drab spaces that don’t allow characters to move much and usually offer no vistas beyond their own tight corners.

And yet there’s drama in that very confinement, and many directors have found elevators to be the perfect setting for everything from suspense to violent confrontations to love (and sex, of course). When you watch movies for their elevator scenes, you also start to notice certain tropes and patterns emerging. Going up?