9 Movies And TV Shows With Competitions As Twisted As Squid Game

Before dystopian mindfucks like Black Mirror and Squid Game turned survivalism into lethal games, Saw had people desperately ripping keys out of other victims’ stomachs to unlock bear traps poised to rip their own heads off. Created by the twisted minds of James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the franchise mostly centers around sociopath Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), who kidnaps morally flawed people and forces them into deadly games to test their will to live. People have tried to gouge their own eye out to retrieve a lock combination, crawl through a furnace to recover a syringe with a nerve gas antidote, and even fill a bucket with their own blood to survive. Squid Game turned childhood games into nightmares. Saw turned nightmares into living hell.

In Escape Room, six strangers are tricked into a game of survival after being invited to participate in what they believe is a fun, immersive puzzle game for a cash prize. Each room is a deadly trap crafted sadistically around their past traumas. One person survived a plane crash, so one of the rooms heats up like a plane fire. Another person survived a car accident, so the room simulates a smoky, toxic crash environment. All of this is happening while they’re being watched and manipulated by a shadowy organization (sound familiar?). Similar to Squid Game, players have to balance common human decency with staying alive—and that usually leads to people sacrificing someone to save themselves in an icy cabin, or letting someone fall to their death in a zero-gravity room. If you miss the interpersonal turmoil of Squid Game, run to Escape Room.

The first time I watched Funny Games, I was 9. I’m now 37, and I had a nightmare about it last night. Put simply, Funny Games is Squid Game if the torture was more targeted and there was no cash prize to assuage the pain. In the film, a family’s vacation is terrorized by two young men who force them to play sadistic games—like a deadly round of “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe” in which their lives hang in the balance. In Squid Game, the twisted logic that governs who lives and who dies sometimes gives way to no logic at all, as when remaining players are forced to sleep in the same quarters and even the time between “games” becomes a deadly free-for-all. Similarly, in Funny Games, the rules can shift on a whim, with bone-chilling consequences. Make sure you watch the 1997 version of the film after you’re done with the final season of Squid Game to enjoy one of the best psychological thrillers ever.

Not every Black Mirror episode is centered on a deadly test of human morality dressed up like a game. But, when the dark futurism of the Netflix series is conveyed in lethal competitions, it exposes unsettling truths about the humanity we all share. There’s the episode “Shut Up and Dance,” in which blackmailed people have to complete humiliating and illegal tasks like fight another blackmailed victim to the death or unknowingly be the getaway driver for bank robbers. Another episode has people ride stationary bikes to exhaustion in order to earn virtual currency to enter a televised talent competition. Squid Game gamified survivalism, while Black Mirror made it less of a competition and more of a sick test with no winners.

There’s workplace drama in corporate America, and then there’s The Belko Experiment. The Greg McLean-directed psychological thriller pits 80 American office workers against one another as they’re trapped in a corporate building and forced to kill each other—or be killed—before the end of numerous countdowns. All human decency goes out the window when four people’s heads explode after no one is killed before the first countdown is done. By the final countdown, the only person who can live is the one with the highest kill count, essentially transforming office workers into killers by manipulating their primal instincts to live. There’s no Red Light, Green Light kids’ game or sleeping quarters for socializing like in Squid Game. But The Belko Experiment does mirror the Netflix juggernaut in its depiction of the moral degradation that slowly happens as people realize their fellow man’s death directly affects the betterment of their own life.

Squid Game’s perverse competition takes place on a secluded island hidden from the outside world. In Alice in Borderland, Ryohei Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and his friends fight for their survival in a parallel world called Borderland. That similarity alone illustrates how divorced from reality one must be in order to do the inhumane to win a game. In the series, people play deadly competitions to earn “visa days” that help them stay in Borderland. If their visa expires, a laser shoots from the sky and kills them instantly. People will lock others in a room to burn them alive, form alliances even though only one person can win, and voluntarily keep playing after being given a chance to escape—because they feel they have no life in the outside world. As we see in Squid Game, when societal norms are no longer around to keep people in line, their true selves roam free in the deadliest ways.

This Amazon Prime teen thriller series is one of the most underrated shows of the 2020s. Based on the Lauren Oliver novel of the same name, the show follows a group of graduating high school seniors so entitled, they engage in an illegal and, yes, deadly game to give themselves some excitement in their lives before they go off and become boring adults. These kids willingly get buried in a coffin, jump off a cliff into pitch-black water, and enter a cage full of venomous snakes—all for a chance at winning $50,000 in a competition no one knows who runs. And this is a yearly tradition.

As weird as it may sound, The Prisoner is one of my favorite comfort TV watches. Sure, it’s a psychological thriller about a former British Intelligence agent who is psychologically tortured on a creepy island. But Patrick McGoohan’s performance as Number Six has some of the greatest emotional range you’ll ever see on a screen. The Prisoner doesn’t have the deluge of blood and gore that accompanies the morality tests of Squid Game. It does, however, showcase a similar stripping of one’s mental stability as those in control work to expose their subjects’ true, carnal motivations in life. In one of the best episodes of the show, Number Six is placed in an Embryo Room where he’s forced to relive different stages of his life—or possibly die. Unfortunately for Patrick, there is no cash prize at the end of his torture, just an ambiguous future he may never escape from.

Circle features the type of social experiment that would fit perfectly in Squid Game. In the film, 50 strangers are unable to move from their spots in the dark room they mysteriously wake up in, and are forced to collectively vote on who dies every two minutes. If they don’t, a sinister device in the center of the room randomly kills someone. They only have 120 seconds at a time to essentially play God. The most depraved aspect of the show is the logic they develop for determining who deserves to die. Some align on the thinking that children and the elderly should die because they’re weaker. Others choose people based on their race. They even turn on a pregnant woman. These mind games have real consequences—like they do in Squid Game—and it begs the question: Are you really a winner in a game where you lose your humanity?