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To celebrate the UK premiere of the terrifying web-series Buried Alive we've put together our top five buried alive moments from the movies that will ensure you carry a fold-up spade, a fully charged mobile and a torch with you at all times.

Watch Buried Alive by clicking below or read on for the top five. 

5. Army of Darkness
Now, let’s not mince words here, being buried alive is a horrible thing, so it’s good to kick the list off with a lighter example before we plummet into the abyss. Halfway through Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness Ash sprouts a doppelganger from his shoulder – let’s face it, one Ash wasn’t enough – who quickly titles himself Bad Ash in order to distinguish him from Good Ash. After a helping of slapstick, Good Ash finally dispatches Bad Ash with a shotgun blast to the face and proceeds to dismember his body with a chainsaw (well, when in mediaeval England). He then buries the parts, but, being a demon and all, Bad Ash isn’t dead. The decapitated head taunts Ash from the grave, resulting in one of the film’s best one liners – ‘Hey, what’s that you got on your face?’ quips Ash as he drops a shovel of earth on his doppelganger’s bonce. 

4. Casino
And it’s straight into the rough stuff. The thing is, as horrible as Nicky Santoro’s (Joe Pesci) death is in Casino it’s really hard to feel sorry for him. Nicky spends most of the film stabbing people in the neck with fountain pens, putting heads in vices and cavorting with his buddy Ace Rothstein’s missus in the front seat of his car. Not a very nice chap. So when Ace’s boys drive Nicky out to some wasteland, under the pretence of viewing a plot for a restaurant, and show him the shiny side of their metal baseball bats before dropping him into a ditch it’s karma being dealt out in the cruellest possible way.  But I do feel sorry for his battered brother, lying next to Nicky in the ditch. All he wanted to do was open a restaurant.

3. The Mummy
Okay, it’s The Mummy, right? How nasty can it be? Well, sure, the buried alive scene at the beginning of Stephen Somers inaugural Mummy movie doesn’t have the gritty realism of Casino, but what it lacks in grit it makes up for in cringe factor. The high Priest Imhotep has been a naughty boy. When he gets caught showing the Pharaoh’s wife a good time (are you noticing a pattern here) he decides the only way to make amends is to execute the Pharaoh – I’m not sure he thought this one through. For his sins, Imhotep is wrapped in bandages and thrown in a sarcophagus with two thousand flesh eating beetles to keep him company on those chilly nights. Just a thought Imhotep, maybe you should’ve scarpered out the bedroom window like any self respecting Lothario. 

2. Kill Bill Volume 2
If there’s one thing worse than being buried alive it’s being buried alive by Michael Madsen. He hasn’t earned the right to bury me alive. Anyway, I recently asked people on Twitter if they were going to be buried alive what single object they would take into the coffin with them. Quite understandably most people suggested a spade or a mobile phone. But this film shows that in fact you don’t need any object at all in order to help you escape a wooden coffin; all you need are years of high end martial arts training and a tolerance for pain. After being buried by a surprisingly resourceful Madsen, The Bride (aka Uma Thurman) pummels her way out of the coffin with a mean six inch punch in a scene reminiscent of the classic tree kicking scene from Kickboxer (what do you mean you’ve never seen Kickboxer?)

1 The Vanishing
The undisputed daddy of buried alive moments. First off, let’s clarify that we’re not talking about the Kiefer Sutherland remake with its compromised ending, we’re talking about French director George Sluizer’s first crack at the whip, the 1988 Dutch version. The whole film is centred on Rex’s search for his missing girlfriend, Saskia, which eventually leads him to Raymond Lemorne, a man who confesses to the abduction, but who won’t tell Rex what happened to Saskia. Lemorne offers Rex a deal – drink a spiked cup of coffee and you can experience Saskia’s fate first hand. Rex, being all emotionally torn up and everything, drinks the mickey finn. What was he expecting he’d wake up to? Saskia waiting for him with a pair of pina colada’s at the end of a jetty in the Caribbean? Evidently he wasn’t expecting to wake up in a wooden coffin, six feet under in the middle of a forest... but that’s what he got.

Buried Alive is Syfy.co.uk horror web-series about five teenagers who are kidnapped and buried alive in individual coffins. See Buried Alive here.