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When a door in media holds back something so vile, so unbelievably evil that it could alter or end the world, it makes you wonder – why not just make it a wall?
In this post, I share some examples of a media trope I am fascinated with, which I am calling doors to darkness.
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland: The Nightmare King Door
Starting with my first exposure to this concept, the 1989 animated film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland produced by Tokyo Company Shinsa features a magical world of children’s pleasant dreams.
Well, mostly pleasant dreams.
At one point early in the film, we get our first hint that there is suppressed darkness in this utopia. The protagonist enters a hidden door to a room that is completely upside-down – chandeliers pointing upwards from a vaulted ceiling that is now a deeply curved floor. It is the sort of space that could only exist in a dream that borders on a nightmare, stressful and uncanny.
Later, the protagonist is urged by his bad-influence friend to hide in another secret tunnel, leading to a massive hidden cavern beneath the kind dream-king’s palace. At the bottom of this cavern is a huge, imposing door. It is visibly ancient, with chunky wooden framing surrounded by medieval clockwork gears. Notably, it also has a metal sculpture of a shrieking demon face at the top, and a symbol of a dragon painted or burned into the wood. The door is distinctly much too large for the average human, to which the bad influence character remarks, “A door this big has gotta have something really big, big, big behind it.”
The location and locking mechanisms convey a sort of deliberate abandonment that I really enjoy – there is a dark secret here that is meant to be forgotten about.
Unlocking the door sets ancient gears and rope pulleys into motion. Cobwebs stretch and tear as cross-bars retract from rusted metal brackets.
Taking “just a peek” through the open gap reveals an ocean of darkness, with two red orbs – eyes – hovering above the horizon of black sea. We can only tell there is a surface to the blackness by the light reflecting from these eyes. Black Ghibli-esque ooze bubbles and churns, occasionally spurting red flecks that could be more eyes. We only get the briefest glimpse, but the space behind the door feels impossibly large, perhaps an entire infinite reality of oily black goop-ocean.
This entity ultimately escapes and resolves into the much less exciting Nightmare King, who just kinda looks like a generic devil/demon guy with grey skin, pointy ears, and bat wings. Meh. Infinite eldritch shadow-ocean was WAY scarier!
MediEvil: Haunted Ruins Flood Gate
My next exposure to this concept terrified me to the point of needing to ask someone else to beat a video game level for me.
In the 1998 PlayStation game ‘MediEvil’, which is set in a delightfully bizarre Halloweentown-like magical sword-and-sorcery medieval world inhabited by talking gargoyles, pirate ghosts, and predatory pumpkins, there is a castle built on a volcano. Not too unusual in magical fantasy settings. But unlike most fantasy volcano-lairs, the possibility of an eruption was an actual threat.
The level starts off on a stressful note – there are NPC villagers who you can rescue from demon torturers, the only time the game expects you to protect someone else, and it’s completely unexpected and sets an anxious tone for the whole level.
A trapdoor facing the king’s throne (sounds like a great ruler who never had an issue with dissenters!) drops you into a dark area. You run along a thin path in the dark and come across a wall of rock – with an enormous, skinned human face mounted upon it, with a lovely dried crackly texture and a gash-like frown straight out of the Necronomicon! Next to this charming welcome sign is a small opening; entering this leads to a rough, cavern with plumes of flame constantly spurting from the walls and floors. At the far end of this cave, there is a metal door shaped like a grinning demonic maw, teeth and all. The game describes this as a “floodgate” holding the lava back.
Eventually you are forced to open this floodgate to destroy the monsters now inhabiting the castle, lest they escape and destroy the entire countryside.
I was unbelievably scared of this door and the timed escape sequence that begins once you open the door. You get a brief camera shot of the door opening – all you actually see are more plumes of fire from the open door – but to my child-brain, the castle was rapidly flooding with lava, the door-maw gushing pure engulfing death.
During the entire escape sequence from the castle, the music changes – from a somber piano tune to fast-paced, anxious strings interspersed with the sound of a clunky ticking clock. The screen shakes, fire erupts from random parts of the floor, and a timer flashes red in the corner to warn you that you’re about to die.
Kingdom Hearts: The Door to Darkness
The ending of the first Kingdom Hearts game would name this trope for me with the Door to Darkness. Because Kingdom Hearts lore is… um… let’s say, complicated… I’m not actually sure if this is also the door to the titular Kingdom Hearts. At least, some characters seem to think it is.
To arrive here, you have traversed a liminal space, a realm between worlds, lifeless and barren. The only solid ground is covered in ice or snow, or perhaps cave calcite. There are strange structures that resemble conifer trees draped in snow, but they could also be strange rock formations.
After his defeat, the final boss reveals a huge, white marble door that looks like it belongs in some kind of church. Again, it is far too large for the average person, and it has complex stained glass windows and golden handles. I always got the distinct sense that this door was not for humans, but instead some kind of maintenance hatch in reality for higher beings to use. It also seems to float in midair – there is no attached wall or structure.
Peering inside reveals similar sight to that in Little Nemo from the beginning of this article – a strange, surreal space of living black gunk that bubbles and twitches, periodically releasing Heartless, the shadow-creatures you’ve been fighting for the course of the entire game. There are vague structures in the background that resemble castle buttresses, or, horrifyingly, they might look more like the bones and organ structures of a giant creature.
We never go inside, but we do see the hilarious sight of Hot Topic Mickey Mouse within, hacking away at shadow-monsters with his giant key-sword.
Elden Ring: The Three Fingers
My most recent experience with this trope, and the inspiration for this article. In the massive world of Elden Ring, you might stumble down a non-critical path in the horrid sewers beneath the golden capitol of Leyndell.
So here you are, deep underground, far beyond the sewers and into an even older era of architectural strata, and you come across a secret entrance to a strange room. This room is like a well, with gravestones jutting into the interior serving as stepping stones. You’re now faced with a grueling platforming challenge: figure out how to carefully descend to the bottom of this well.
And when you do, you’re probably going to be confused and underwhelmed.
At the bottom of this well, so impossibly deep beneath the golden capitol and the mighty world tree that anchors this world, is a door.
And this door is distinctly hellish. Black and red, organically warped, ridged and ribbed like something from an H.R. Gieger drawing.
You’re not allowed to enter it unless you remove all of your armor and attire, stripped down to nothing but your medieval linen undergarments. Pushing the door open, you find an unexpectedly small room – entirely dominated by a huge, three-fingered hand emerging from the ground at the wrist. The hand is black and cracked, with a violent orange light glowing through the grooves of the fingertips. It wraps around your character, burning them, and locking you in to a special ending in which you melt the entire world with supernatural madness-inducing flame.
Why was it locked down here? How was it locked down here? And why, if it was never meant to be found, is it accessible by simply opening a door?
You may have noticed an interesting running theme with the locations of these doors: they’re typically tucked away in a forgotten, forbidden, or otherwise extremely difficult to find areas. They’re not meant to be opened, and for the curious fool who does open them, there are typically grave repercussions.
These “doors to darkness” evoke older stories – Pandora’s Box (well, jar, actually), the temptation of Eve – stories in which someone is tempted out of sheer curiosity to disobey a command, and suffers for it. Ultimately, I think a lot of these older stories are social control tactics, and unfairly target women as “excessively disobedient” or “too curious for their own good”.
The “door to darkness” trope I’ve described here is an interesting parallel to ancient obedience stories, because the narrative always expects the big scary door to be re-opened. It’s an inevitable outcome that reveals the fallacies of the previous generation who failed to properly secure something deadly.
Why the heck was it a door that could be re-opened if it was so dangerous?!
On that note, a fun and intriguing read is the Wikipedia article on long-term nuclear waste warning messages, in which scientists have tried to devise ways to warn future people (human or otherwise) to prevent them from digging up deadly radioactive materials. A forest of concrete spikes is a way more effective deterrent than a ding-dang DOOR!
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There’s an extremely prominent (though possibly not literally physical) door of darkness in YuGiOh Zexal as well!