Dark World - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Man lives, in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But... there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit.....a DARKSIDE."

—Opening Narration, Tales From The Darkside

A relaxing place to visit. Mind the Nightmare Fuel.

Drive down the old highway at midnight, walk through an ancient shrine to the Elder Gods, or "sleep off" a bad trip from a strange drug that's darker than oil... and you'll end up in a parallel world made of your worst Nightmare Dreams. This is the Dark World.

It is a twisted fun-house mirror version of our world, filled with the distorted reflections of normal buildings, decayed into Sinister Subways and Abandoned Hospitals. The changes can even extend to the layout of the city or area, the geography will turn malevolent as it gets huge gaping holes, fences, or other barriers added— or removed. The dimensions don't have to add up the way you learned in geometry class.

Its inhabitants will likely be similarly warped, if not monsters outright or unfathomable spirits. If the real world is also populated with monsters, expect the former to be tougher. Perhaps they feel at home in the dark?

It's not always literally darker, but often is. It might not necessarily be evil, but often is.

The nature of the Dark World might never be revealed, but could very well be entirely "natural", or outright hellish. Entering the Dark World is usually distressingly easy: drive to a little old town, walk into a Haunted Castle, activate a strange device, Swirly Energy Thingy, or go into a Convenient Coma near a psychically charged place. The last one tends to be freakiest. Don't ask us why.

See also Mirror World and Spirit World, which may overlap at times. Frequently used as the horror genre form of Environmental Symbolism, the Dark World shares some qualities with, but is distinct from, Time Travel and Another Dimension. If you travel from your hometown to a Bad Future where it's in ruins, that's Time Travel. If you travel from your hometown to a fantasy forest, that's Another Dimension. But if you travel from your hometown to a dark, twisted parody of your hometown filled with monsters... congratulations, enjoy your stay in the Dark World.

Examples

Anime

Inside the Gate in Darker Than Black.
In the third season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX, the majority of the story takes place in a dimension called Dark World.
- In Yu Gi Oh, for that matter, characters frequently interact wth a dimension called the Shadow Realm.
Closed Space in Suzumiya Haruhi. Gloomy.

Film

Carnival Of Souls may be one of the first films to use this. The protagonist would at times slip out of the perception of those around her, losing all sound as well. Other times, near the titular Carnival, the games and rides would come alive, as would ghoulish dancers who beckoned her...
In Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the seemingly abandoned theme-park/town undergoes a similar transformation at sunset as the streets and buildings come alive with eerie spirits. It isn't actually evil, though; it's merely where kami and ghosts go to relax, and naturally is only active after dark.
Mirror Mask, although there is also a Light World.
In the Super Mario Bros. movie, the parallel dimension city is essentially the Dark World to New York.
Jacob's Ladder seems to revolve around a character's frequent shifts from his ordinary life into a nightmarish dark world filled with demons. It eventually turns out that he's been Dead All Along, and both worlds represented his refusal to let go of his earthly cares and embrace the afterlife.
Many dreamscapes in the A Nightmare On Elm Street films resemble a Dark World version of Springwood.

Literature

Yami-gaia in Sailor Nothing.
Dark Manhattan in the first book of the Young Wizards series.
- In the first book of the "Feline Wizards" Spin Off series, the underground city of the Children of The Serpent is also described as a twisted reflection of Manhattan.
The Dungeon Dimensions from Discworld.
- Also in the Discworld, Death's Country. It isn't that scary (in fact, in the later books he has a nice little farm with apple trees), but everything is in dark-based colors rather than light-based colors.
Coraline.
Alan Dean Foster's Into the Out Of, where the Out Of is the parallel dimension where the demons are coming from. The heroes have to go there to close the gates. This book did quite a good job of giving me heebie-jeebies for some time after reading it.
John Metcalfe's short story "The Bad Lands" helps makes this trope Older Than Television, as a new arrival at a British health clinic soon discovers an abandoned road that gradually leads him into an eerie, twilight version of reality that only one other resident has experienced. That resident has a theory that pockets of "the bad lands", as he calls them, are erupting and invisibly spreading from central points all over the world, but the story leaves open the possibility that both of them are mentally unstable.
Shadow in Tim Waggoner's Like Death.

Live Action TV

Overall it's not completely dark, but Neverwhere does have spots that distinctly qualify such as The Bridge of Night and The Beast's Labyrinth and it does exist parallel to Earth.
Kingdom Hospital characters frequently change perspectives from the hospital at present, the sanatarium from the 1930's, and the mill from the 1870's whose burning to the ground with children still inside causes these perspective changes.
Kamen Rider Decade has the Negative World, where the heroes arrive after helping out in the worlds of their nine predecessors. It looks like Natsumi's homeworld, but is full of human-hunting monsters and evil Kamen Riders like Ryuga, Orga, Dark Kabuto and Dark Kiva.

Tabletop Games

Tabletop RPG example: The fourth edition of Dungeons And Dragons introduced a new campaign setting with two such worlds: The Feywild, a more fey-oriented and wild version of the material plane, and Shadowfell, the bleakly depressing afterlife.
- The third edition already has one, the Plane of Shadows.
- And when we say "introduce a new campaign setting", we mean "force all the old campaign settings to include".
The new version of The World Of Darkness has a few of these: the Shadow Realm (an animistic reflection of Earth occupied by spirits), the Underworld (seldom glimpsed, but not a bright and cheery place), and the Hedge (the midpoint between Earth and Faerie, equally wondrous and dangerous).
- The original World Of Darkness had the Penumbra and Dark Umbra.
The KULT roleplaying game: The endless city of Metropolis and the nightmareish realms connected to it, filled with twisted mockeries of life and sanity. The True Reality, as opposed to the illusion of the "real world" that mankind lives in.
In the JAGS Wonderland RPG, Chessboard Two is like this, being a broken and deserted reflection of "Chessboard Zero" (the real world, or at least the world we live in) populated by ... things.

Video Games

The Trope Namer is the Dark World from The Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which is technically called "The Golden Realm" but was corrupted by Ganon centuries earlier.
- Another Legend Of Zelda example, of course, would be the encroachment of the Twilight into Hyrule in Twilight Princess. Any area under the sway of the Twilight looks essentially identical to its normal state, except that the colors are washed out and little bits of darkness constantly peel off of everything and float up toward the sky. Sapient beings are turned into spirits that look like little wisps of light, and non-sapient beings are turned into black, tentacly versions of themselves.
Metroid Prime 2 has Dark Aether, which was created when a Phazon-infused meteor struck the surface of Aether and split the planet into two parallel dimensions. In addition to being populated by tougher monsters, Dark Aether constantly drains your health (ridiculouly quickly at first, then more slowly once you get certain upgrades) if you're not standing in a safe zone generated by certain crystals.
This is one of the tropes upon which Silent Hill was built.
The Shadow Plane in Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer.
The alternate dark hotel from Trilby's Notes of Chzo Mythos.
Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver had a "spirit realm" you had to enter to solve certain puzzles. The geography would often twist and warp, creating paths that weren't in the physical realm. Not to mention the tortured spirits that would hunt you down.
Amaterasu Server in Digimon World 3 is something like a Dark World version of the regular game world. Not really evil, just shrouded in eternal darkness. Comparitively, the Asuka Server where you start out in is always sunny 24/7. Travel between the two "servers" is done using a combination of 2 different secret (and dangerous) routes.
In the Dark Seed games, the Dark World is a twisted, desolate alternate version of Earth. It doesn't help that H.R. Giger designed it.
Moonside from Earth Bound, though it's just a hallucination caused by the Mani Mani statue.
In the Constantine tie-in video game you keep alternating between the real world and Hell to solve puzzles, leading to some ridiculous situations. As one review stated, "what kind of game has you going through Hell to open a door?.
- There better have been something awesome on the other side of that door.
The Red Night in 11eyes, a world categorized by its overlarge black moon and red sky. Electricity doesn't work in this world, all people except for the chosen six disappear, and horrific monsters roam the streets. Scary place.
The White Chamber two main "dark world" sequences, complete with more Nightmare Fuel than usual, Room Full Of Crazy, and really, really weird reality warping. However, the "regular" station you go through most of the game in is also a dark world of sorts, you see what the station really is supposed to look like at the end.
Persona 4 places all of its dungeons in a world accessed by sticking your head through a turned-off TV. Each new dungeon reflects how the victim of the month sees the world around him.
- Persona3 has a "Dark Hour" between midnight and 12:01am when the Shadows come out to play: the sky turns a sickly green, the city's splattered in blood, and most humans are turned into indestructible coffins. They're the lucky ones.
  - And let's not forget Tartarus, a twisted tower that grows out of the ground each Dark Hour.
The freeware game Eversion starts out in a typically cheerful retro platformer world, but in order to progress you must "everse" yourself into ever darker Dark Worlds- a "descent into Platform Hell" if you will.
Dynamis. A dream world originally created by the avatar Diabolos to escape the Emptiness, other beings began to be pulled in, and turned it into a Beastmen-dominated version of Vana'diel. The area itself is warped enough that aside from temporary visits by players(Even then, they need spiritual assistance to get in), if you get stuck in there, it's for good.
The fractured nature of reality in Planescape Torment lends to many dark worlds and subworlds. The beginning Morgue appears to be one, but it's just the creepier side of a Crapsack World; there are still the Lady's pocket dimension mazes and the Negative Material Plane.
Doom 3 has moments throughout the game where the hero seems to see reality change from the already wrecked, lifeless base into a blood-streaked, skeleton-littered nightmare world, only for everything to snap back to normal a second later.
There's a Dark Realm in the Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha games, although it's not quite as creepy and twisted as most of these. It's mostly just, well... dark, and full of demons.

Webcomics

Zimmy from Gunnerkrigg Court occasionally gets pulled into a twisted city, with subtle Alien Geometries, defaced mannequins in boarded-up buildings, bizarre silhouettes of people and centipedes in the windows, and a native population that consists entirely of creepy people with no faces and even creepier doppelgangers of people Zimmy knows. It's unclear if this place is real, or just a dark corner of Zimmy's mind.
- Tom Siddell loosely modeled this place after his hometown, Birmingham. Given the way he describes the city, he seems to consider Birmingham a Real Life example of this setting as well.

Western Animation

The Halloween episode of Invader Zim has, appropriately enough, a Nightmare Fuel Unleaded dark world born out of (or, at least, somehow connected to) the hero Dib's mind. Eventually the eldritch abominations lurking within it manage to capture and use Dib as a gateway into the real world... and the sight of the series' own Crapsack World sends them fleeing right back into the dark world.
- To be fair, the first thing the spider demon of Mrs. Bitters saw was a bloated, super fat Gir in his green dog "diguise", surrounded by the moaning "corpses" of children in Halloween costumes he stole candy from. Though honestly, the nightmare dimension she came from probably was better (or at least had little chance to be worse) than the real world. At least it beats the dimension of eternal itching and restlessness. Or the room with a moose. *Shudder*

Real Life

Many places in real life are spooky and decayed enough that they could very well be Dark World settings:
- Centralia, Pennsylvania the town on which the Silent Hill movie was based on. A coal mine fire's been raging in the town for 45+ years, and it is but an abandoned ghost town.
  - Not even, now. These days it's little more than two or three (inhabited) homes, some sidewalks to nowhere, and a cracked highway separated from the main roads by a dirt barrier.
- The Carpathian Mountains, from where the fictional Dracula hails, is a spooky, fog-covered range of craggy, unforgiving peaks.
- Auschwitz. I don't really have to say more, do I?