History Main / DarkWorld

* ''Film/SonysSpiderManUniverse'' is a CrapsackWorld full of supervillains and monsters who would prefer to not kill innocent people, and [[spoiler:since it is an AlternateUniverse to the more idealistic [[Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse MCU]] and other [[Film/SpiderManTrilogy Spider-Man]]- related universes, the SSU can be seen as this trope in comparison]].

* ''Comicbook/DarkNightsMetal'' introduces the Dark Multiverse to the cosmology of the DC Universe. It's a multiverse that runs entirely on FinaglesLaw, where ForWantOfANail turned pivotal events to their worst possible outcome, twisting the hope and nobility of DC's heroes into monstrous nightmares. Each world in it is said to be the worst nightmare anyone had at any point in their life come true. The best people can hope for there is to be traumatically deformed into monstrous beings, incapable of becoming anything like they were ever again before their worlds are erased, or die. The worst outcomes turn heroes into monsters immeasurably worse than the villains they fight, who are motivated to seek out uncorrupted worlds to take over [[ApocalypseHow when theirs ends]].

* When it was first brought up in ''Literature/ElfstonesOfShannara'', the Forbidding was never really seen, but it was given a vague description of being a dark and empty void to which the demons had been imprisoned. When we finally get to see it in the ''High Druid'' series, it was revealed to be a Dark World of the Four Lands.

* The Darke Halls in ''[[Literature/SeptimusHeap Darke]]'' are basically this.

* In John Metcalfe's 1920 short story ''The Bad Land'' 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 [[ThroughTheEyesOfMadness mentally unstable]].
* This is essentially what became of the Domain after the Skulltaker (not ''that'' Skulltaker) offered up the skulls of the Kurgan, Hung and Tong chieftains at the Black Altar in ''Blood for the Blood God'' by C.L. Werner. This is because the original leader of those clans used those lands to bargain with Khorne for power, but instead of using it to glorify the God of War as he promised, he used it to establish his own little kingdom. In essence, Khorne was just taking his due. The moral of this story, as said by the pants-shittingly frightening Norscan Khornate is: don't try to cheat a god.

* ''[[Literature/NightmaresAndDreamscapes Crouch End]]'', a short story by Creator/StephenKing, is about a family couple who gets lost in an unfamiliar district of London. The district looks almost normal with shops, restaurants, etc., and yet there's something off about it; its inhabitants include a couple of scary children and an ugly cat with a disfigured face. In fact, it gets even somewhat less scary when [[EldritchAbomination the actual monsters]] appear.

* The [[EldritchLocation Eleven-Day Empire]] from the Literature/FactionParadox series is this for the entire city of London, guarded by thousands of {{Eldritch Abomination}}s under [[RedSkyTakeWarning a pleasantly blood-red sky]], like something was forever burning, just beyond the horizon...

* {{Downplayed}} in Creator/RichardLaymon's ''Night in Lonesome October''. The protagonists tends to wander his home town late at night, and some really bizarre stuff happens. He ends up on streets he's never seen before, meets creepy passersby and cannibals that live under a bridge; the general feel is that the town at night is some realm completely different from daylight version of it.

* The afterlife for people who killed themselves in ''Film/WristcuttersALoveStory'' is essentially a mild version of this trope. It's just like the regular world, only less colorful and more depressing, and nobody ever smiles. And there's a black hole under the front passanger seat of the protagonist's roommate's car.

* ''Videogame/SunlessSkies:'' Apparently created and exploited for Worlebury-juxta-Mare, the dark world version being called the Off Season. It apparently occupies the same space, but all the rides and structures are in disrepair, everything is caked in awful filth and the various creatures are having nasty issues. Here is where the maintenance staff resides, and they can actually affect the regular version of the place and maintain it from the Off Season without being seen, keeping every last speck of imperfection they can remove from reaching the sights of visitors.

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom'': The Depths, the [[BeneathTheEarth vast subterranean regions]] where there's little light and where Gloom has drenched many places, technically exist in the same plane of existence as the Hyrule introduced in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'', just way underneath it. But like the original Dark World, its geography mirrors the layout of Hyrule: bodies of water on the surface have monolithic rock structure counterparts in the Depths, surface canyons are subterranean mountains and vice versa, mines in the Depths are right under towns on the surface, Lightroot fast travel spots have {{Sdrawkcab Name}}s of Shrines directly above them, and the entry method of diving into Chasms feels like a more involved version of entering the portals to the Dark World in ''A Link To The Past''. It's even where Ganondorf was sealed away in the distant past.

* ''Literature/SwansBraidAndOtherTalesOfTerizan'': Terizan goes into a parallel world like this via a MagicMirror, where she enters a version of Oreen that's (almost) completely empty and gives her unsettling feelings at once. [[spoiler:She is hunted there by an invisible pursuer before too long.]]

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom'': The Depths, the [[BeneathTheEarth vast subterranean regions]] where there's little light and where Gloom has drenched many places, technically exist in the same plane of existence as the Hyrule introduced in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'', just way underneath it. But like the original Dark World, its geography mirrors the layout of Hyrule: many bodies of water on the surface have BottomlessPit or monolithic rock structure counterparts in the Depths, Lightroot fast travel spots have {{Sdrawkcab Name}}s of Shrines directly above them, and the entry method of diving into Chasms feels like a more involved version of entering the portals to the Dark World in ''A Link To The Past''. It's even where Ganondorf was sealed away in the distant past.

* [=DigiQuartz=] in ''Anime/DigimonXrosWarsTheYoungHuntersWhoLeaptThroughTime''. It resembles a corroded, overgrown version of Tokyo, and miscreant Digimon behaviour there tends to have effects on the real world, up to and including the kidnapping of schoolchildren.
* ''Anime/DigimonUniverseAppMonsters'' has the same idea: an AR Field usually looks like the real world as rendered by a computer that's not very good at it. The colors are warped, the buildings look moldy and abandoned, the sky looks like the Digital World sky as seen in the ''Xros Wars'' era, and there are places where it looks as if the world is a hologram that's breaking up, letting you see a strange purple void behind it. The real world's technology is affected; if an attack hits a building in the AR Field, expect technology in the building to go haywire, power to go out, and even things like cell phones to stop working.
* The Dark Ocean in ''Anime/DigimonAdventure02'', gloomy home to digimon that... aren't really digimon, in thrall to a Franchise/{{Cthulhu|Mythos}} {{Expy}}.
* The protagonists of ''Anime/DigimonGhostGame'' can use a function on their digivices to pull themselves and their enemies into AR Field-like {{Phantom Zone}}s that resemble an altered version of their location that contains a single biome and a perpetual overcast that resembles the Digital World's sky from the original ''[[Anime/DigimonAdventure Adventure]]'' series. A later message from [[BigGood Hokuto]] reveals that the Digivices map environmental data recorded in the Digital World onto the characters' surroundings to create them.

* The ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse'''s ''ComicBook/{{Ruins}}'' takes place in a DeathWorld that runs entirely on MurphysLaw, where nobody has the RequiredSecondaryPowers necessary to keep their powers from killing themselves and everyone around them while the {{Badass Normal}}s just end up getting themselves killed.
* ''Comicbook/ImmortalHulk'' showcases the Hulk as a horror story and along with the darker tone comes the Below-Place. The Below-Place is depicted as the lowest point of existence and even lower than every hell. It was stated by Brian Banner, Bruce Banner's ArchnemesisDad, that the Below-Place is the foundation of the idea of hell. The Below-Place takes on the older interpenetration of hell being a place utterly devoid of anything and cut off from everything, including God. The Below-Place itself spans the entire multiverse and is a desolate landscape littered with signs of ruined civilizations copied from the multiverse serving as the dark mirror to creation. To make matters worse, while there are "people" in the below place called [[EmptyShell qliphoths]] that are duplicates of every sentient creature in the multiverse but still don't count as companionship as they are empty husk people and devoid of souls while spouting phrases their templates said during their lives with no real thought. If this dark existence devoid of all true life and contact with anything else weren't bad enough, there is the being trapped there since before existence began. A being of pure hate and the UnseenEvil in the multiverse that despises all living beings while wanting to annihilate everything to make all dead and hollow as itself. A being that has influenced every evil entity and person consumed by evil [[InMysteriousWays subtly]] without anyone even realizing its manipulations. The shadow below the multiverse and creation's other face....[[TheAntiGod The One Below All]].

* ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'': Adar tells Galadriel that Sauron made horrible experiments on the Orcs in his tries to obtain the power of the Seen and the Unseen World. The three priestesses from Rhun are reveales to be wraiths. When the Stranger defeats them, is implied they returned to the Unseen World.

* Not present in ''VideoGame/MaxPayne2TheFallOfMaxPayne'', but the game does feature a ShowWithinAShow entitled ''Address Unknown'', a spoof of ''Twin Peaks''. The show's protagonist takes a wrong turn while looking for SerialKiller John Mirra and emerges in "Noir York City", a ''Roger Rabbit''-like horror show of cartoon taxis and buildings with mouths. John Mirra is revealed as the hero's EvilTwin, of course, concealed beneath a fedora. (Both are played by ''Max Payne'' developer Sam Lake.)
-->'''{{Mook|s}}:''' Hey! I haven't seen it, now you spoiled it, thanks a lot.
** The nightmare sequences from the first game have a similar visual and gameplay effect to this trope, alternating between a dark and distorted version of the location he was in previously and some bouts of outright {{Bizarrchitecture}} and SurrealHorror, but are actually a result of Max [[ThroughTheEyesOfMadness suffering vivid hallucinations while dosed up with some sort of narcotic.]]

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom'': The Depths, the [[BeneathTheEarth vast subterranean regions]] where there's little light and where Gloom has drenched many places, technically exist in the same plane of existence as the Hyrule introduced in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'', just way underneath it. But like the original Dark World, its geography mirrors the layout of Hyrule: many bodies of water on the surface have BottomlessPit or monolithic rock structure counterparts in the Depths, Light Root fast travel spots have {{Sdrawkcab Name}}s of Shrines directly above them, and the entry method of diving into Chasms feels like a more involved version of entering the portals to the Dark World in ''A Link To The Past''. It's even where Ganondorf was sealed away in the distant past.

%%* Closed Space in ''LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya''. Gloomy.

** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom'': The Depths, the [[BeneathTheEarth vast subterranean regions]] where there's little light and where Gloom has drenched many places, technically exist in the same plane of existence as the Hyrule introduced in ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTearsOfTheKingdom'', just way underneath it. But like the original Dark World, its geography mirrors the layout of Hyrule: many bodies of water on the surface have BottomlessPit or monolithic rock structure counterparts in the Depths, Light Root fast travel spots have {{Sdrawkcab Name}}s of Shrines directly above them, and the entry method of diving into Chasms feels like a more involved version of entering the portals to the Dark World in ''A Link To The Past''. It's even where Ganondorf was sealed away in the distant past.

* Labyrinth Station in ''VideoGame/Splatoon2: Octo Expansion'' seems to take place in the tutorial area from when the main game is launched, except the atmosphere is dark and gloomy, with garbage lining the streets, tougher enemies, and sinister music.

* Amaterasu Server in ''VideoGame/DigimonWorld3'' 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.

* ''VideoGame/Doom3'' 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. And the "Resurection of Evil" expansion has an NonPlayerCharacter outright state that the [[spoiler:Delta Labs area is phasing in and out of the AnotherDimension, {{Hell}},]] creating a more tangible Dark World where the two intersect.

* ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime2Echoes'' takes this to the logical extreme with 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 (ridiculously quickly at first, then more slowly once you get certain upgrades) if you're not standing in a safe zone generated by certain crystals.

[[caption-width-right:256:Really? A LiteralPun?]]