Eldritch Location / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

• The room in 1408. As Samuel L. Jackson's character insists, there are no ghosts, it's just "an evil fucking room". Yes, the Eldritch Location is itself the Eldritch Abomination: it's effectively the Overlook Hotel compressed into a single room. And only that room, which if anything makes it even less comprehensible a phenomenon.
• The dark skies in Altitude. After hours of flying around and descending with no ground or any other landmark features in sight and no radio contact with anyone, it becomes clear that the characters have entered some alternate dimension filled with endless sky and housing giant alien terrors flying around looking for prey.
• "Saturn" in Beetlejuice, which looks like Tim Burton's take on Arrakis with a little bit of Wackyland mixed in.
• From The Blair Witch Project, the woods where the eponymous witch dwells. It's very subtle in the first film, with the only confirmation that the protagonists aren't just hopelessly lost coming when an attempt to follow the creek leads them in circles. In Blair Witch, the woods suddenly extend endlessly (as seen from a bird's-eye view using a drone), there's endless night, and a strange sort of time distortion causing time to pass differently for characters split off from the group.
• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, normal laws of physics don't quite seem to apply in Castle Dracula, most notably seen when Harker opens a perfume bottle that starts dripping upwards into the ceiling. For extra creep factor, the castle itself vaguely resembles a ghoulish figure crouched on a cracked throne.
• The Hypercube in Cube 2: Hypercube is the theoretical construct of a tesseract made reality by constructing some sort of pocket dimension. The laws of physics are bent around in the place, making the entire thing an inescapable death trap.
• Dave Made a Maze: At some point, the titular maze that Dave made literally came to life and started building new sections entirely on its own. It even starts to extend outside the entrance and converts Dave and Annie's apartment to cardboard.
• Don't Blink: The resort where the story takes place. It is a visually normal place, but the weather behaves oddly, being both warmer and colder than what it should be and it could snow in a second. There's a bizarre phenomenon where, if no one is looking at you, you might disappear.
• In Event Horizon, the dimension that the gravity drive took the titular ship into is summed up as "Hell", but from what's hinted, Hell is very warm and fuzzy compared to what actually lies beyond the portal; it's actively described as a dimension of "pure chaos, pure evil", and it spills out into the titular starship until it's alive, malevolent, and actively refusing to let anyone leave. There's enough similarities to Warhammer's Warp that some tend to treat the movie as an unintentional prequel.
• The apartment building in Ghostbusters certainly applies, given what it was designed for. The dimension one of the refrigerators opens onto counts as well.
• Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum: Late in the movie, Je-Yoon, Ah-Yeong, and Sung-Hoon find themselves in an unusual room. What makes it unusual is that it's full of ankle-deep water, there's no doorway in or out of the room, and there appears to be the surface of water in a huge hole in the ceiling. It's in this room that they all end up possessed by ghosts.
• The hospital in Grave Encounters. The trapped ghost-hunting team manages to bust open the front door, only to reveal another hallway. Same for an emergency exit. Later, a staircase promising rooftop access instead leads to a blank wall, and underground tunnels that should have had turn-offs for traversing between buildings instead turns into a single, Endless Corridor. Until the end, anyway.
• In Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel, the hotel has become one in the years since the accident in the first film with lights mysteriously powering themselves, doors refusing to open, time passing faster than it should and a portal to Hell in the basement. This isn't helped by that all of the decorations from the haunted house attraction set up during Hell House LLC are still in the hotel.
• Similarly, in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the Imaginarium functions as a Journey to the Center of the Mind, based around Parnassus's own imagination but also combining with visitors' imaginations. It's been even more eldritch ever since Mister Nick set up shop there.
• Inception has the various dream lands that the characters visit when dream walking.
• The field in In the Tall Grass. Composed almost entirely of just-above-head-height grass, those who enter it quickly learn that it doesn't follow the laws of physics (both in regards to space and time) and actively prevents anyone from leaving. Plus, there's a big, black rock in the centre with strange markings on it that acts as The Corrupter to those who touch it.
• Kong: Skull Island: Skull Island is a very unusual place to say the least; for starters, it's an Isle of Giant Horrors surrounded by a massive Perpetual Storm that opens up into the Hollow Earth. Somehow, it also has auroras, suggesting a magnetic anomaly in the region (similar to the 2005 film), and it's mentioned that some of the natives of the island don't seem to age. It's also inhabited by all sorts of weird creatures; there are hybrid animals, plant-creatures, predators that eat each other, predators that eat themselves, gigantic arthropods, giant ants that chirp like birds, and of course a certain one-hundred-foot-tall gorilla which not even the natives are sure where he came from.
• In Labyrinth, Sarah's final showdown with Jareth occurs in a place that was designed by M.C. Escher.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • The sub-atomic realm in Ant-Man. It's our normal everyday world, but from the point of view of somebody continuously shrinking for all eternity.
  • Doctor Strange (2016):
    • The Mirror Dimension is a parallel dimension that allows the user to practice their magical abilities and fight their enemies without the public's knowledge. The dimension is layered over the Earthly Plane, people and their actions in the Mirror Dimension are unable to affect the real world, but sorcerers (even more so those empowered by the Dark Dimension) are able to bend matter and gravity to their will akin to the dream-realm in Inception.
    • The Dark Dimension is a hostile universe under the complete control of its ruler Dormammu, assimilating other realities into it in an endless hunger. Sorcerers are able to draw power from it, gaining abilities regular sorcerers do not possess, including immortality and the power to bend matter in the Earth Dimension.
• The Mayflower department store in Mirrors has become this thanks to Demonic Possession and being an otherworldly prison for the ghosts of those who have died there. While the store itself doesn't have any strange geometry (though being burned out it is quite creepy), The Maze of tunnels beneath it is rather unsettling and the Demonic Possession allows for many strange visions, images, and effects throughout it, including some very disturbing All Just a Dream/That Was Not a Dream sequences.
• Nightbooks: The apartment, which can travel, has doors that disappear when Natacha wants them to, has a massive library stretching up to an incredible height, and initially has a fake window showing the New York City skyline that fools Alex. The back door that Alex and Yazmin "escape" through leads into a fake forest constructed within the apartment, leading to the original witch's Gingerbread House.
• invoked Pacific Rim: The home dimension of the Precursors, where the Kaiju are sent from. It's spiral-y, mostly organic, with weird lights everywhere and gravity working weirdly, and it has a sun that looks like an eyeball (it's actually a sun being devoured by a black hole, according to Word of God).
• Within the house that Relic takes place in is a wardrobe that seems normal at first, but pushing some of the various stored objects out of the way reveals that connects to other places seemingly deeper within the house that make no sense in relation to its regular architecture, some of which narrow in strange ways and have bizarre fluctuations in terms of the direction that gravity pulls.
• Tiny in comparison to most examples, but the titular sauna in AJ Annila's Surreal Horror indie Sauna is a piece of Sinister Geometry that defies all definition, and has a habit of swallowing people whole, or sending them out...different. A common theory makes it the gate to Hell.
• The Overlook Hotel in The Shining is... bizarre to say the least. Even if all the weird shit that can be observed is all just hallucinations, it'd still have a knack for driving normal people completely insane and into a bloodthirsty rampage. And the ending only makes things more confusing, adding an element of irregular timeflow into the fray.
• In Star Wars, it's never made entirely clear what exactly the dark side caves (specifically the ones found on Dagobah and Ahch-to) are. What we do know is that they call to Force-users, they are dangerous, they can induce hyper-realistic and trippy visions, they respond to the fears and doubts of those who enter them, and the consequences of screwing up while inside can be catastrophic. Supplemental materials make it clear that an essential part of training for young Jedi is to enter a dark side cave and face their darkest fear. Some masters have died waiting for their Padawans to get out of these caves.
  • In the larger Star Wars franchise, we have wounds in the force, the most well-known being Alderaan after it was destroyed by the Death Star. Since the force exists in all living things, when enough life forms die in a short time, it leaves a "wound in the force" which is akin to a human losing a limb. The screams and feelings of those who died there can be felt by force sensitives, and prolonged exposure to a wound in the force is enough to drive all but the most disciplined Jedi to the Dark Side. In one novel set years after Return of the Jedi, Luke feels a new wound in the force being created and notes "Anyone who would describe what I felt a 'disturbance' would probably think of Hutts as cuddly" (Obi-wan called Alderaan being destroyed a "disturbance in the force"). If a wound in the force is particularly nasty, such as Malachor V in the Knights of the Old Republic games, it can even warp life on a Galactic Scale.
• Under the Bed: Under Neal's bed is a portal that leads to the realm of the monster that's been tormenting Neal for years. The monster's realm seems to resemble some sort of bog cloaked in perpetual dawn.
• Yonder in Vivarium. It's a seemingly-endless suburb with no readily apparent means of entrance or exit once inside. At one point, the protagonist walk in a straight line, following the sun and cutting through other yards and still end up back at Number Nine. There's no wind, the clouds all look artificial, the sun is a slightly off shade, the soil looks fake, there are no birds or animals of any kind, planes never fly over it and the food has no taste. There are no deliveries or trash collectors; groceries just appear in a cardboard box on the sidewalk whenever they're not looking directly at it and the trash leaves the same way. There's also a labyrinth of identical houses connected to it that can only be accessed by lifting up the sidewalk, despite a hole being dug straight down almost right next to it that doesn't intersect with it somehow.
• The Void:
  • The Void itself. It's simply a featureless dimension covered with alien architecture and strange creatures floating among the stars.
  • Apparently there is a whole sub-basement in the hospital, which doesn't really exist and is some sort of pocket dimension instead. It's also impossible to navigate inside of it and it almost looks like generating next rooms only when anyone enters it, leading where it wants to lead. Yes, a conscious place - it's that sort of story.
    Vincent: It's a rat maze.
• Toon Town in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, being an ethnic enclave of Toons, naturally operates on Toon Physics. For example, the building you're in becomes higher than all the surrounding ones if you're in danger of falling from it and look down, simply because it's a trick used by animators to make it look more like the perspective is from really high up.

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