'The Girl in the Box' opens up about harrowing ordeal at the hands of abductor

The story of a hitchhiker who became known as "The Girl in the Box" after years of torture in a small crate will have her story told in a new Lifetime movie.

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The film, Girl in the Box, airs Saturday on the network. In May 1977, Colleen Stan was 20 years old when she was picked up while hitchhiking in California and kidnapped.

See photos from her case

She was imprisoned inside a coffin-like box for about 23 hours a day for seven years and regularly tortured and brainwashed by her abductor, lumber mill worker Cameron Hooker.

"He constructed the coffin-type box, that was a box within a box, it was double walled, had two padlocks on it," she recalled to Inside Edition.

She added: "I [thought] I was going to die, I was so claustrophobic."

Sometimes she had an appalling wooden device locked over her head.

"I just cried. I just cried out to God for his help, I said: 'please!' I was crying all the time," she said.

"Early into my captivity when I was in the basement, Cameron was torturing me. One time he had me hanging up suspended in the basement and he came up next to me and he said: 'Go ahead and scream, I'll cut your vocal chords, I've done it before.'"

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After seven years in captivity, she was able to escape.

Hooker was later found guilty of kidnapping and rape and sentenced to 100 years in prison. His wife was never prosecuted because she helped Stan escape and also agreed to testify against her husband.

Stan says she has now rebuilt her life with the help of counseling.

"Now that so many years have passed it was like a whole other lifetime. This is my new life," she said.

Hooker was up for parole last year, and was rejected.