1. The Being John Malkovich Door
The tiny door resides on an already half-sized floor of an office building. Hidden behind a filing cabinet and a boarded-up and painted-over hole in the wall, the door opens to a passageway that is not only filled with unidentified muck, but shoots you to the end once you’ve crawled about halfway in. On top of that, the passage happens to lead to inside the head of John Malkovich, providing you with a view through his eyes.
Compounded with the fact that the Malkovich bloodline allows a certain cult to live forever by way of living inside people of said bloodline, this door couldn’t be any creepier. Except that after a certain amount of time, it drops you off on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Out of thin air.
2. Coraline’s Door
Kids across the world have always been confused and fascinated by the little doors and passageways that can be found in old houses. Without exception, these are always boring in nature: Crawlspaces, coal scuttles, ice delivery hatches, etc. But in the film Coraline, it is the gateway to another place that is both wonderful and horrifying.
The important thing about the door in Coraline is that it looks exactly like a million weird, tiny doors in a million old houses. Nothing, save for its appearance in modern eyes, is unusual. But for children that grew up at the dawning of the digital age, there is an almost universal curiosity and fear of these antiquated portals. This is what the Coraline door preys on.
3. Every Resident Evil 2 Door
Horror games (even the good ones) fall into the trap of being a world full of closed doors that the player must try to open to progress. It’s both a boon and a curse. In a well-made horror game, the closed door provides a sense of ambivalence — you want the door to open so you can progress, but you’re terrified of what may be behind it.
Though the Resident Evil series is generally decried by horror fans as not scary, the technical limitations of early Resident Evils actually made the doors kind of scary. Because the consoles weren’t powerful enough to have the characters fluidly open a door and have the room loaded, most openable doors had their own quick scene of a dirty, creaky door, slowly opening into the darkness, keeping what terrors that lie in wait a secret.
4. Silent Hill 4’s Apartment Door
Imagine you wake up one morning in your nice apartment, groggily walk to the kitchen to get some cereal, then realize your front door is chained up from the inside, full of locks, bolts, and wayward chains. Also imagine that on the door, a message waits for you that reads, “Don’t go out!!” and is signed by some guy you don’t know.
So, you’re trapped in your apartment for a while, when you notice a big hole has opened up in your bathroom wall that you can crawl through, and sick of being stuck inside because of creepy door chains, you decide to crawl through the bathroom hole. You end up at a subway, somehow, and monsters and ghosts and general ick are decorating the environment. Then you remember the warning on your somehow chained-up-from-the-inside front door.
5. The Hatch From Lost
You and a large group of other passengers survive a terrible plane crash in which the plane breaks in half. Trapped on what seems like a deserted island, you realize someone on your plane was being escorted to jail on murder charges, and another passenger happened to be a torturer for the Republican Guard. One night while everyone is gathered at the beach, very loud mechanical sounds emanate from the island’s forest, and large trees can be seen being knocked down from a distance.
Eventually, your island posse finds a metal hatch buried in the ground of a supposedly deserted island. It’s locked, which is even creepier. Something’s in there, but nothing you do gets the thing open. Right when you give up, however, a light shines up through the darkness, shooting out of the glass window on the metal door. It’s pretty much time to run away.
6. The Door in Doctor Who’s “The Lodger”
Stranded on a planet and separated from your loving friends, the only logical thing for a space and time traveler to do is rent a room in some guy’s house. Unfortunately for the time traveler, the upstairs apartment is somehow luring people off the street and making them disappear.
So, you play some soccer and find out you’re quite good at it, and also attempt to figure out a way to stop being so stranded. That scary upstairs apartment, though? The one with the broken hallway lighting? Well, it turns out that building doesn’t actually have a second story. It’s an alien ship that crash landed some time ago, and is using advanced technology to camouflage itself as the second floor of a building. During this time, it was luring bystanders in from the street because it was looking for a pilot to fly it home, but in the process, was kind of, sort of, you know, murdering all the bystanders.
7. Any Door in the Lost Room
Doors usually lead to a place on the other side of the door. If you happen to open any door with a special key in the sci-fi miniseries The Lost Room, all doors lead to one place. A motel room, specifically. Eerily clean, with a view of a desert, and detached from whatever room you just left.
Creepy, sure, but what if it turns out anything left in the motel room when the key exits said room mysteriously vanishes? Including your daughter? How about if every item within the motel room has some crazy power when brought into the real world, from boiling an egg, to blinding anyone looking in your general direction. Not the safest place for a door to lead.
8. Triana’s Closet in The Venture Bros.
When you rent out a section of a super scientist’s compound and your dad is a necromancer, your life is pretty strange and you’re probably fairly accustomed to odd things to begin with. Super villains trying to blow up your house, your dad attempting to summon the reanimated corpses of your landlord’s dead sons — you know, the usual. When it turns out your dad can actually traverse between the world in which you live and one not unlike Hell, that might be a little much. When you find out your dad keeps the portal to Hell in your bedroom closet? That’s probably more than a little much.
9. The Walking Dead’s Hospital Door
You get shot and subsequently fall into a coma. When you finally wake from said coma, you aren’t greeted by your wife and son, or even a doctor or nurse, but a dilapidated, run-down hospital. You didn’t get shot that long ago, you think to yourself, as you struggle to get out of bed, detach yourself from hospital equipment, and quench a mighty thirst.
Barely able to walk out of the hospital, you find that the whole establishment is in terrible shape — literally falling apart. There’s not a soul in sight, and you come across a door held tight with chains with the simple message, “Don’t open, dead inside,” and yet, for a room that houses dead things, something is shaking the door from the other side. Also, if there’s just dead inside, why shouldn’t you open that door?
10. The Basement Door in Angel
Sure, you’re a flip-floppy villain-hero who crossed the wrong dimensional demon overlords and got sent to what seems to be a pretty nice gated community, complete with two-story house, wife, and son. For some reason, though, you get this strange sense of terror coming from your basement, and also happen to get an equally strange sense of déjà vu whenever your wife asks you to grab a lightbulb from the shelf in the basement.
She insists, though, and it’s just a basement, after all. So, you get the lightbulb, and, weird, there’s a pile of hearts on the floor and the room is covered in sharp, painful-looking implements. Oh, and that huge green BDSM monster with the big knife standing behind you? He’s there for you. As a matter of fact, that’s a pile of your hearts, because you repeat the same day over and over for as long as the demon overlords want you to.
Honorable Mention: The Elevators in The Shining
I saw The Shining when I was just seven years old. It was easily the scariest, most horrifying thing I had ever seen up to that point. I slept with the lights on for days. I developed an aversion to red Kool-Aid. I deeply distrusted Jack Nicholson. It would be years (17, exactly) until I would watch the movie again, and be able to appreciate it as one of Kubrick’s best films, and one of the best movies ever made. I even got to write about it for this very blog.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently scary about the doors themselves. Everyone remembers them, and its an amazingly iconic moment in cinema, but it’s the blood that steals the show. With that in mind, they get an honorable mention. However, when people think of The Shining, they might quote a few lines, but the indelible image surely seared onto their mind’s eye is the elevator full of blood. While the movie veers into the surreal many times, it’s such a singularly bizarre moment that it demands to be remembered. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my fear of Kool-Aid.
Published: Jan 17, 2012 12:51 pm