History Main / DilatingDoor

* Subverted in [[http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20100116.html this strip]] from ''Webcomic/TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob,'' when Bob is surprised that alien doors have doorknobs.

* ''Videogame/{{Portal 2}}'':
** The hatch between the Central Control Chamber and the Main Breaker Room is composed of six triangular pieces that can either be inserted and removed straight-on, or rotated into position to provide the standard iris effect. Which method is used appears to be up to the {{AI}} or computer that happens to be in control at the time.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

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* From ''Attack of the 50-Ft. Half-Klingon''.
-->The garage door dilated barely in time as Tom's car roared out onto a [[FuturisticSuperhighway twenty-lane superhighway]]...only to be plucked into the air by a giant hand.

* A bizarre aversion in ''Film/TronLegacy''. The interior of [[spoiler:Flynn's]] house in the Grid has obviously visible hinges and door knobs on all of the doors, such that they wouldn't be out of place in a regular modern house. This, of course, is taking place in the entirely virtual world where CoolButInefficient is king. Even stranger when compared with the AsceticAesthetic design of the rest of the house. In particular, the windows stand out, as they are not made of a solid substance, but instead seem to be SomeKindOfForceField, marking a pretty stark contrast with the doors. Presumably this was either a matter of personal preference on the owner's part or because the filmmakers couldn't get a fancier visual effect to look right.

* ''Film/DrWhoAndTheDaleks'' has doors that swing into the sides. However, for some reason, that's just not absurd ''enough'', and one of the doors has to open with a ''pressure sensor''. Said sensor is located ''three metres away'', and elevated by about a foot, meaning that it was ''utterly useless'' to the Dalek inhabitants.
* ''The Atomic Submarine'' (1960). A crewman gets crushed when his arm is caught as he tries to dive through the DilatingDoor as it closes. So in this case it was a Contracting Door.

* Ships in ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' are 'living metal'.
* Creator/SamuelRDelany's ''Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand'' had "the door deliquesced". Parodied in Creator/DavidLangford's [[http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/drabbles.html first drabble]].
* G. Martynov's ''Starfarers'', a fairly average late day InterplanetaryVoyage novel, features [[SufficientlyAdvancedAliens Sufficiently Advanced]] HumanoidAliens from the [[ScienceMarchesOn planet Phaeton]], who used the disintegrating-and-rematerializing doors in their spaceship.

* Likewise in ''Literature/TheWarAgainstTheChtorr''. In "A Season for Slaughter", a robot probe is sent into a Chtorran nest, which turns out to have OrganicTechnology doorways resembling a labia. On seeing this on the camera screen, one soldier quips, "If there are [[VaginaDentata teeth behind that thing]], I'm turning gay."
* This sort of doorway is also explored by Creator/MichaelMoorcock in ''Literature/TheElricSaga''. Elric must enter the perilous '''[[FreudianSlipperySlope Pulsating Cavern]]''', which has a certain ''organic'' quality to it...
* Flint of Outworld, a modern caveman in Piers Anthony's ''Tarot'' series, is unimpressed by the inner world's (that have modern tech) dilating door, comparing it to the anus of a defecating dinosaur.
* ''Literature/ConsiderPhlebas''. When Bora Horza Gobuchul gets ThrownOutTheAirlock on an alien spacecraft, the airlock just turns inside out.

* ''Series/DoctorWho'':
** The series has far, far too many "dilating doors" to list here, but special mention goes to a door in "Day of the Daleks" which curls up toward the ceiling in a slow, sinister fashion.
** "The Ark in Space" also features a sliding door that almost takes the Fourth Doctor's arm off. "I'm rather attached to it," he said.
* In ''Series/{{Firefly}}'', on ''Serenity'', the doors to the crew quarters were these elaborate swinging ladder/door combination things. Quite space-efficient, if a bit easy to lock from the wrong side. (And not wheelchair-accessible, although the guest quarters were.) Still quite modest for this trope, since all the doors on the ship are opened by hand. The guest quarters have perfectly ordinary, manual sliding doors, again a matter of saving space.
* In ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', the main characters are compelled through an elaborate series of variously opening doors and into the screening room. Well, Cambot is. The audience never sees the other characters during the door sequence; they might be going into the theater through a side door. And this might just be a shout-out to the opening and ending sequences of ''Series/GetSmart''.
** The design is also homaged in the Hexfield Viewscreen, the ship-to-ship communications device of the Satellite of Love, which irises open and shut.
* The doors to personal quarters on the eponymous ''Series/BabylonFive'' open by rotating clockwise. They have been known to fall on cast members. Others open like modern automatic doors, sliding to either side. Those doors are actually quite clever, as they're held up by electrical power when open and are closed by the ArtificialGravity produced when the station rotates, with no need for a motor to close them. In the event of a hull breach or life-support failure, the doors would slam shut on their own without any active safety system required.
** The doors leading to the Grey Council chamber inside the Minbari ship Valen'tha open much like the iris from Stargate.
** The doors made for the human Thralls on Z'ha'dum are the sliding door variety, but they sound like heavy rocks being dragged on concrete.
* Shown in the BatmanColdOpen of ''Series/TheMandalorian''. It becomes 'the door dissected' when someone is foolish enough to fire on the title character while lying across the doorway. The Mandalorian proceeds to ShootOutTheLock causing it to [[DestructionEqualsOffSwitch close automatically]]. Cue GoryDiscretionShot as his target becomes HalfTheManHeUsedToBe.
* On ''Series/EarthFinalConflict'', the Taelons utilize organic slurry on their ships. When a wall or door is "closed", flaps of "skin" or slurry appear to grow from the door frame and coalesce at the center like a wound rapidly healing. They also utilize "virtual glass" (basically force fields) on some instances.

* The ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}'' series is an excellent example given that pretty much every door needs to be shot to open. Sometimes they require multiple shots. Sometimes they [[LockedDoor need missiles]].
** This is explained in the ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' games as being a method of bypassing the door's normal opening mechanism; you're basically lowering a weak shield that's there to keep wildlife (or you in the case of stronger ones) out and the doors are opening automatically (presumably there's a more peaceful manner of opening the doors). The ones that need missiles explicitly have a blast shield (which disappears after being removed the first time) on them for extra security. Some areas of ''VideoGame/SuperMetroid'' have doors which lack the shields and just let your straight through when you approach.
** Most other doors and hatches in the ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' are pretty complex as well. Rarely do they simply slide open - there are often many interlocking parts and convoluted mechanisms going on, ''especially'' on the [[EternalEngine Pirate Homeworld]] in ''[[VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption Corruption]]''. Some even require [[WhenThingsSpinScienceHappens spinning the Morph Ball]] to operate.
* Although ''VideoGame/GoldenEye1997'' usually does fine with normal sliding doors, the Cavern level features iris doors. And yes, it ''is'' a pain in the ass when the door takes 5 seconds to open while you're fighting a horde of 20 enemies in your back... on the flip side, they do let you get the drop on some enemies on the other side by abusing the fact that you can get shots off on them faster than their ability to react as you rapidly close/open the door mid opening-animation.

* [[{{Squick}} Sphincter]] and other doors from ''VideoGame/Prey2006''.
* In the future part of ''VideoGame/DayOfTheTentacle'', the doors open vertically with the original ''Series/{{Star Trek|The Original Series}}'' sound.

* ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryIV'' has a cave with doors that look like [[{{Squick}} giant sphincters]]; however, this is Justified since [[spoiler:the "cave" is actually the fossilized corpse of an EldritchAbomination]].
* Spoofed, of course, in Season 3 of ''[[VideoGame/SamAndMaxFreelancePolice Sam and Max]]'', where the doors on Skun'kape's ship dilate, slide in, and even tilt in -- from opposite sides!

* Doors in ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' open upwards, primarily due to limitations of the engine. (When the source code was released, a routine for horizontally sliding doors was found to be DummiedOut with the comment "ABANDONED TO THE MISTS OF TIME!!!") "Polyobjects" from the version of the engine used in ''VideoGame/{{Hexen}}'' and later source ports can be used to make doors that actually imitate real-world door behavior.
* The BUILD engine used by ''VideoGame/DukeNukem3D'' and ''VideoGame/ShadowWarrior1997'' allows for a fair variety of doors, including ''Doom''-style vertical ones (including variants which open down or split in the middle), sliding doors, hinged ones (technically just rotating a sector 90 degrees around a pivot sprite), and a couple of more esoteric ones which involve making wall surfaces shrink away to nothing as the door opens (called "Star Trek doors" in the level editor documentation, and a variant which combines that with the aforementioned split vertical door), used for curtains and in alien levels.

* ''VideoGame/StarshipTitanic'''s arboretum has a door that 'grows' open and closed and is made of metal plants.
* ''VideoGame/DeadSpace3'' has doors that fold up, rotate and vanish in the [[spoiler: alien city]].
* In ''VideoGame/PlanetSide 1'''s [[UndergroundLevel Core Combat caverns]], the [[AdvancedAncientAcropolis Ancient Vanu facilities]] all feature large round doors which vanish when approached, then re-materialize. The doors in human facilities such as the bases and towers feature sliding doors which split along the center. Vehicle bay doors in the Tech Plants slide into the ground when a vehicle leaves the vehicle pad.

* Subverted in [[http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20100116.html this strip]] from ''Webcomic/TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob,'' when Bob is surprised that alien doors have doorknobs.

* ''Film/MaskedAvengers'': The Masked Gang's lair has one of these doors leading to its inner sanctums, opened by pushing a lever.

* The BUILD engine used by ''VideoGame/DukeNukem3D'' and ''VideoGame/ShadowWarrior'' allows for a fair variety of doors, including ''Doom''-style vertical ones (including variants which open down or split in the middle), sliding doors, hinged ones (technically just rotating a sector 90 degrees around a pivot sprite), and a couple of more esoteric ones which involve making wall surfaces shrink away to nothing as the door opens (called "Star Trek doors" in the level editor documentation, and a variant which combines that with the aforementioned split vertical door), used for curtains and in alien levels.

** It's appearance in Fallout 4 is actually a callback to the [[spoiler: previous]] Mechanist's Lair from ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'', which had a very similar seven layer door.

* Although ''VideoGame/GoldenEye1997'' usually does fine with normal sliding doors, the Cavern level features iris doors. And yes, it ''is'' a pain in the ass when the door takes 5 seconds to open while you're fighting a horde of 20 enemies in your back...

** And, of course, out of universe the classic series TARDIS interior doors qualifies -- they were supposed to swing open or closed with the push of a button, but (like many of the show's mechanics) rarely functioned correctly. The new series solved this by doing away with the interior doors entirely.

* Homaged in the ParodyFic ''Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space''.

* In ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', the main characters are compelled through an elaborate series of variously opening doors and into the screening room. Well, Cambot is. The audience never sees the other characters during the door sequence; they might be going into the theater through a side door. And this might just be a shout-out to the opening and ending sequences of ''Series/GetSmart''

** Most other doors and hatches in the ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' are pretty complex as well. Rarely do they simply slide open - there are often many interlocking parts and convoluted mechanisms going on, ''especially'' on the [[EternalEngine Pirate Homeworld]] in ''[[VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption Corruption]]''. Some even require [[EverythingIsBetterWithSpinning spinning the Morph Ball]] to operate.

* Shown in the BatmanColdOpen of ''Series/TheMandalorian''. It becomes 'the door dissected' when someone is foolish enough to fire on the title character while lying across the doorway. The Mandalorian proceeds to ShootOutTheLock causing it to close automatically. Cue GoryDiscretionShot as his target becomes HalfTheManHeUsedToBe.

* ''Film/{{Alien}}'': The sections of the air duct system on the starship ''Nostromo'' are separated by dilating hatches.
** This makes sense assuming that their intended purpose is to regulate air flow through the ship and not to be pressure-tight in case of a hull breech.

** The third dungeon in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime Ocarina of Time]]'' plays this straight with actual iris doors. Justified, as the "dungeon" is the [[WombLevel interior of a whale]].

** The third dungeon in ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime Ocarina of Time]]'' plays this straight with actual iris doors. Justified, as the "dungeon" is the [[WombLevel interior of a giant fish]].

* Despite the HighFantasy-esque setting, doors in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess'' are surprisingly complicated, mechanically speaking. Many dungeon doors are round, and when pushed in, roll out of the way through some mystery of technology.

* In ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', the main characters are compelled through an elaborate series of variously opening doors and into the screening room. Well, Cambot is. The audience never sees the other characters during the door sequence; they might be going into the theater through a side door. And this might just be a shout-out to the opening and ending sequences of ''Get Smart!''

* Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium has a retractable roof that opens and closes by sliding eight triangular pieces on rails back and forth so that the opening made dilates like an iris. The stadium opened in 2017 (though it would be another year before the roof itself was finished). Previous stadiums with retractable roofs usually moved the one or two pieces to the side like a sliding door.