Black Bug Room

Where's the Raid when you need it?

"It doesn't kill you. What it does is make you feel like you're in a noisy little dark room...naked and ashamed...and there are things in the dark that need to hurt you because you're bad...little pinching things that go in your ears and crawl on the inside of your skull. And you know that if the noise and the crawling would stop...that you could remember how to get out...but you never will."

— Glory describing the effects of her brain suck to Tara, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Evil Counterpart to the Happy Place and the darkest corner of the Mental World, the Black Bug Room is the place inside a person's head where all of their negative feelings dwell and fester. A person's consciousness may get sent there when their mind breaks under the strain, or other characters may end up there by taking a wrong turn during a Journey to the Center of the Mind, and permanent confinement there is to be avoided at all costs.

In movies, entering the Room is often shown with a Madness Montage. Compare Room 101 and Psychological Torment Zone for the non-metaphysical versions with all the same effects. Not to be confused with a Debug Room, or the Black Room of Death in Super Mario 64.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Elfen Lied: Most of Lucy's interior monologue and reasoning takes place in an incredibly large black void. Her reasoning is mostly governed by her murderous instincts and tortured past, so she sees the room as a space where humans remind her that she is pathetic and doesn't belong in their world, with her diclonius instinct sweetly promising that everything will be better if she just kills every last motherfucker in sight.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion: The center of the Witch's mind turns out to be one, as the magical girl ends up mentally reliving the moment of utter despair for them over and over, with no chance to escape. In the movie, the worst memory is Homura having to Mercy Kill Madoka in one of the previous timelines. Sayaka implies that this horror is the norm for every magical girl turned Witch in the series. Tormented by their worst memories that caused them to fall into despair far enough to turn into a Witch.
• Soul Eater: A Black Blood Room appears in Soul Eater's mind. Manifesting when he got infected with the Black Blood, the Black Blood Imp lives there. Whenever Soul tries to channel the Black Blood's Madness properties, he ends up there. It's a fancy room with a piano (which is how he can use his Soul Resonance in an advanced state) and whoever ends up there ends up dressed to the nines, reflecting Soul's sophisticated tastes (he ends up there in a nice suit with the Imp already having one and Maka, the only person entering there, ends up in a lovely black dress with heels).

Comic Books

• Scott Pilgrim:
  • "The Glow" is Gideon Graves' form of supernatural psychological warfare that he heavily implies he made millions with the military. Anyone inflicted has their memories tainted and distorted while their vices are amplified to self-destructive tendencies; their heads begin glowing (hence the name) whenever they are in distress, likely signifying that they are trapped in this. For example, when Ramona's head glows, it's a sign of her currently troubled state. Scott later ends up infected with it. Worth noting that Gideon himself is seemingly immune to the Glow. He explains he's been trapped inside his own head since he was a kid and, as far as the man's concerned, has no personal issues to deal with.
  • Scott's mindscape represents a desert and appears to symbolize his feelings of despair and loneliness as seen in the beginning (he is still recovering from a bad breakup and showing he's in an emotionally unstable state.) It was likely this emotional instability along with the Glow that led to the rise of Nega-Scott (given how he first appears when Scott is first seen glowing.)

Fan Works

• Invader Zim fan works:
  • In Darth's Vengeance, Darth (an Irken with Psychic Powers) torments Zim by sticking him in the worst part of his own mind, which is referred to as the Black Bug Room. It takes the form of a mixture of the Skool and the restaurant on Foodcourtia that Zim was banished to, where an in-universe Composite Character of Miss Bitters and Sizz-Lorr harasses him. And when Dib and Gaz interfere with Darth's attack, he sticks them in their Bug Rooms too — Dib's is the Nightmare Realm from the canonical Halloween Episode, while Gaz's is an eldritch void. And then it turns out that Gaz is so twisted that her Bug Room is her Happy Place, and she has total control of it; to counter this, Darth sticks her in her actual Happy Place, a Sugar Bowl that disgusts and terrifies her.
  • In Gaz and the Sinister Social Club, Gaz ends up retreating into the deepest part of her mind, described as her Black Bug Room, in response to the attempt to brainwash her into preppiness. It's described as a black void full of countless copies of her own eyes staring back at her, while she's left with the feeling of things crawling all over her, as countless voices whisper at her. Getting in touch with her innermost self like this gives her the strength to resist the brainwashing.

Films — Animation

• Inside Out: The Subconscious is a prison set in the cliff around the Memory Dump, home to all the things that Riley is afraid of. Of course, since she's 11, it's mostly stuff like broccoli, basement stairs, and a clown who was at one of her birthday parties. Joy and Sadness have to go down there to retrieve Bing-Bong after he's caught being troublesome by mind workers.

Films — Live-Action

• Osmosis Jones: The evil virus Thrax at one point stumbles into Frank's brain and takes a peek at his nightmare section, which greatly disturbs Thrax and he quickly and frantically scrambles out of the room.
  Thrax: Whew! This cat was sick before I even got here!
• In What Dreams May Come, those who commit suicide end up in a Self-Inflicted Hell of their own making, since they are still wracked by the depression and guilt they suffered while they lived. Since Your Mind Makes It Real, they suffer from their worst fears. In the case of Anne, the main character's wife, she suffers from the guilt of not only outliving her two children, who died in a car accident, but also her husband, who died later on from another car accident.

Literature

• In Hannibal by Thomas Harris, Hannibal Lecter has an 'oubliette' in his Memory Palace that contains some troubling memories.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager novel Mosaic, Janeway keeps dreaming that she's stuck in a small room with a locked door (mirroring the current crisis, where the Voyager is pinned down by the Kazon while part of their crew is stuck on a nearby planet.) Behind the locked door is the memory of the accident that killed both her father and her fiancée.
• Uprooted: Those who fall to The Corruption of the Wood have their bodies used as Meat Puppets while their minds are trapped in an endless nightmare of being lost in the trees. Their minds can be located with magic and even rescued, but most are Mind Raped into Empty Shells after a week or so of captivity.

Live-Action TV

• Farscape:
  • The episode "Won't Get Fooled Again" involves Crichton becoming trapped in a Mental World in which plenty of repressed fears and insecurities rise to the surface in humanoid form. Ironically, for someone so traumatized, Crichton does a pretty good job staying out of his Black Bug Room during the rest of the series.

Music

• In Poets of the Fall's "Nothing Stays the Same", the singer says he's "walked through [the] unlit corridors" that are inhabited by his black and white thoughts.

Tabletop Games

• The World of Darkness:
  • In Mage: The Awakening, Insanity Realms are said to by far be the most dangerous and disturbing parts of the Oneiros. They're literally the metaphysical landscapes embodying a person's derangements, and anyone who visits them temporarily suffers the derangement they embody...and they don't let go of visitors very easily.
  • In Wraith: The Oblivion, the Harrowing occurs when a wraith has just lost or is about to lose some key part of their existence (their passions, their fetters, their physical coherence, etc.). It's as much a struggle against one's own personal nightmares as a fight against some of the more insidious influences of Oblivion.

Theater

• In Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, Marley's personal hell is a room where everyone laughs and screams at him. He cracks in minutes.

Video Games

• Condemned 2: Bloodshot: The main character's hallucinations mysteriously go to a place filled with oily black monsters, getting progressively worse as black oil starts covering everything in that place, and then never show up again.
• Disco Elysium: Thanks to a combination of long-standing depression and a recent mental breakdown, the protagonist is tormented by the voices of his Ancient Reptilian Brain and Limbic System every time he goes to bed, telling him how much of an unlovable fuck-up he is and trying to convince him to take the big black door marked "EXIT ONLY". It's specifically noted that this makes his sleep an absolute horror, turning it into something "dry [and] un-nourishing".
• D'LIRIUM: The Personal Hell is where you awaken if you die of too much shock, if the name is of any indication. You awaken as an undead ghoul in a dark cavern and must retrieve personality fragments to return to the Heart in order to escape before giant black tendrils engulf the whole map.
• Drakengard 2: Near the end of the game, Nowe travels into Manah's mind to save her from a Heroic BSoD. It's freaky enough to begin with, what with the series of empty doorframes, and having to chase around the constantly teleporting Creepy Child. And then you have to fight an army of red-eyed black-and-red-silhouette things. And they keep coming. And then during the second stage, the background becomes row upon row of these things, just watching you.
• EarthBound (1994): the Sea of Eden in Magicant is located deep within Ness' own subconscious, and the only enemies encountered in the Sea of Eden are three Krakens and Ness's Nightmare, which appears as the Evil Mani Mani statue and represents all of Ness's evil, fears, and doubts. Destroying it will allow Ness to gain the true power of the "Your Sanctuary" locations.
• Final Fantasy VII: the central hub of Cloud's Psyche, populated by the ghostly images of Cloud's subpersonalities, all in the state of anguish and suffering. Tifa arrives here when their minds meld as they submerge into the Lifestream, and has to use this uncanny place as a hub to explore other parts of Cloud's mind to find out his history and the reason for his madness and catatonia.
• The elevator in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is where Ellen is confronted by a biography of her traumatic life — and a reconstruction of the man who raped her. Whether this place is a physical reconstruction or the literal place within Ellen's mind is up for debate.
• Life Is Strange: In the final episode, Max seriously overstrains her time travel powers and passes out. She spends an extended period of time wandering through a nightmare world, bombarded by all her worst fears and insecurities: that she's using her rewind to make people like her and doesn't actually care, that the tornado might be her fault, that she's too dull for Chloe, that basically all the guys she knows are possible threats...
• The Park: Atlantic Island Park's House of Horrors is deliberately modeled on Lorraine's house, specifically during the time when she was left alone to raise Callum; for good measure, the place is littered with evidence of her hardships, from disconnection letters from the power company to rejection letters from her own mother. Attempting to leave results in Lorraine looping back through the house, finding it more and more distorted with each iteration: blood drips from the walls, corpses dangle from the ceiling, dolls are melted in ovens, books rewrite themselves into disturbing new narratives, and notes sudden transform into taunting messages addressed to Lorraine herself. This is actually an illusion created by the Bogeyman/Nathaniel Winter, all with the explicit goal of driving Lorraine into insanity. Worse still, it's hinted that the events of the game are actually Lorraine's memories of what happened to her that day, continuously re-experienced as nightmares: as a result, Lorraine will keep being dragged through her Black Bug Room all the way up to the events of The Secret World.
• Persona: Some of the dungeons are at least partially formed from the minds of the people who are trapped in them, so they're bound to include these.
  • Persona 4: Arena has Labrys' once their Shadow reveals itself. The environment switches from a mostly normal school to a hellish security room with a giant incinerator in the background, dismantled and broken mannequins hanging off meat hooks, and blood running down the windows repeatedly.
  • Persona 5 goes the furthest with this with the Palaces of the installment's resident Mental World—the Metaverse. Here, distorted views of reality are made physical, and the Shadows of their source act as Ruler.
  • Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth has Hikari's labyrinth, a representation of all the trauma heaped on her throughout her life every time she went against the crowd, which by the time of the game has left her a horribly depressed and catatonic girl. The majority of the labyrinth has a bright and cheerful aesthetic atypical of a Black Bug Room, but it's filled with cartoon animals and flowers singing about abandoning your individuality and becoming one with the crowd, and every few floors depicts an event in Hikari's past that led her to become the broken person she is now.
  • Persona 5 Strikers, the sequel to 5, in the Metaverse, the Jail Monarchs' Shadows are locked in cages that constantly remind them of their past traumas and mistakes, making them continue their Pay Evil unto Evil mindset that they all share.
  • ''Persona 5 Tactica: The game's Kingdoms turn out to be this for Toshiro Kasukabe, especially the Third Kingdom, as they were designed to deliberately use his worst memories and experiences in order to break his spirit so that he couldn't influence society to rebel if he became Prime Minister.
• Psychonauts
  • A secret room in "Milla's Dance Party" is a cage made of fire with ghostly monsters behind it, whispering menacing things about a tragedy from Milla's past. Keep in mind the rest of the level has a bright, disco/party theme, and this single room is the disturbing exception. They're a representation of a person's nightmares, caged up there because Milla has iron control over them, which, considering what they actually are, is pretty impressive given how relevant they are to her current job. Milla is constantly running this noisy party in her mind to drown out the nightmare-inducing memories of the cries of her foster children as they died in a fire.
  • The game's final level combines traumatic childhood memories of Raz and the Big Bad, forcing Raz to sort out both of their issues with some help from his dad.
• Sanitarium: The premise (quickly explained in the third chapter) is that the protagonist is a mental asylum patient who experienced a car accident. As a result, he has frequent hallucinations set in surreal worlds. As the game goes on, he starts experiencing hallucinations even when he's in the asylum in the "real world". Except that, near the end of the game, it's revealed that the asylum is also a hallucination; the protagonist was in a coma the entire time.
• Silent Hill: The entire town seems to serve as the keeping place of all its visitors' psychological torments, waiting to be confronted. The topologies and layouts have less to do with being actual places and more with emphasizing what the characters feel and think, and upon entering the Otherworld, the symbology takes center stage under the spotlight, to horrifying or depressing effect.

Webcomics

• Blip: Mary, Hester, and Liz take a trip into Bishop's subconscious. In there, they find a room with infinitely tall walls, and every secret in Bishop's life is scrawled on those walls. In the center of the room, there's a small table with a laptop on it, which has a video that shows the trio that certain recent events were not all that they seemed.
• Daughter of the Lilies: When a person is possessed by a drath, their mind is trapped with the drath's spirit in a black void where it delivers an unending Hannibal Lecture of their deepest insecurities. A wizard can break in and rescue them, but only if the victim can shake off the drath's lies enough to accept the help.

Web Original

• In Animerica, Big Bad Kiyone is revealed to have an Enemy Within that was subsequently created from his hidden negative feelings on his brother Kasuse but we don't actually get a glimpse of his mind until next season when he is confronted by his evil side once Ron gives him a moving speech. From the looks of it, it consists of him being tied up in spiked vines to a black pillar in a purple-black hued room with his inner demon smirking at him in a sinister chair across the room. Here, it attempts to give him another Breaking Lecture but then...

Western Animation

• Duckman: Duckman has a Journey to the Center of the Mind episode wherein he is hypnotized and encounters his Confidence (an emaciated, chained-up version of himself) and his Guilt (a massive dragon). All seems lost, but then a memory of Duckman's late wife, Beatrice, appears and reminds him of how and why she loved him. Hearing this causes his Confidence to become healthy and muscular, and it slays the dragon.

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