Dangerously Garish Environment

Dazzling, bioluminescent clusters of lichen light up the darkness, illuminating this fertile and overgrown Region in flickering neon colors. Don't let that lull you into a false sense of security however - the Azure Weald brings to mind the deep jungle, in all its splendor and horror - and much like its terrestrial counterparts, it is absolutely not out to make friends.

— Azure Weald description, Deep Rock Galactic

The Evil Counterpart to Amazing Technicolor World.

Some places are so pretty to look at, so they must be wonderful to be in, right? These are not those places. Gorgeous forests with bright flora and fauna may actually be filled with man-eating plants and bizarre predators. Neon colored dens of decadence full of luxury and entertainment may be fronts of insidious operations with malicious conspirators. Magical dreamworlds that may be too good to be true are actually carefully constructed to trap you.

Bright colors may be used to warn the audience that something is not right with the area à la warning coloration. It may also be used to bedazzle characters (and the audience) in order to hide its true nature. Sometimes, colors not usually common especially compared to other places within the story are used to showcase something unnatural.

Compare Bright Is Not Good (of which this is a sub-trope), Crapsaccharine World (with which this can overlap, but is distinct from since not all Crapsaccharine Worlds are colourful and not all Dangerously Garish Environments are big enough to be Crapsaccharine Worlds), and Subverted Kids' Show. Common for a Daycare Nightmare or Circus of Fear since daycares and circuses are often brightly coloured. Also compare Light Is Not Good. Contrast Dark Is Evil. Compare Sickly Green Glow for another trope associated with colour and evil, and Scenery Dissonance which is confined to one scene and can involve the opposite situation. If Hell is like this, it can overlap with This Isn't Heaven, and if Heaven is like this, it's often a Hell of a Heaven. Could be an Acid-Trip Dimension, Level Ate, a Sugar Bowl plagued by the Sugar Apocalypse, or Santa's Sweatshop. The background music for such places might involve Creepy Children Singing, Creepy Circus Music, Soundtrack Dissonance, or an Ironic Nursery Tune.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Final Fantasy: Unlimited: The environments of Wonderland are brightly colored and surreal. Besides the monsters that plague it, Wonderland is a hodgepodge of alternate universes that were swallowed up by Chaos.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Morioh is depicted with unusual coloration (such as yellow skies, green roads and purplish/bluish trees), representing the bizarre nature of the town, which is haunted by Serial Killers and not-always-friendly Stand users. This is quite notable as previous and later Parts have more realistic colors in their settings, barring the occasional color shifts.

Fairy Tales

• The Gingerbread House from Hansel and Gretel. It is after all an edible, candy-colored house that's implied to be designed to lure children^note Or humans in general.. While this isn't outright said to be the purpose, the witch does decide to eat the children once they arrive.

Films — Animated

• Played with in Coraline. The Other World is depicted much more colorfully in contrast to the real^note The Other World is not real in that it was created by the Other Mother and her minions world (which is far more dull in aesthetics). As the true nature of the world is revealed, numerous places in the Other World become less bright and more dim, gradually petrifying whenever one of the Ghost Children's eyes are found and eventually dissolves into a White Void Room.
• To some extent, Bald Mountain in Fantasia. At the climax of the infernal festivities, numerous demonic minions dance maniacally against rainbow-colored flames from hell, with some even mutated by Chernabog himself or being set on fire alive for his amusement.
• In Finding Nemo, the "Drop-Off" has a beautiful pink anemone, bright green seaweed, and other colourful flora. It's also home to a predatory fish, who eats Nemo's mother and destroys most of her eggs.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie Boogie, the only monster in Halloween Town who actually kills people, lives in a casino-themed lair. This lair has blacklights that can cause everything to glow vibrant neon colors. This fits with the Creepy Jazz Music associated with Oogie to show that he's Bright Is Not Good to contrast the rest of Halloween Town's Dark Is Not Evil.
• Toy Story 3: Downplayed for the daycare known as Sunnyside. Its door has a rainbow painted on it and the walls are decorated with brightly-coloured decorations, as is typical of a daycare, but it's not as brightly-coloured as many examples of the trope. Also, the daycare is not a bad place for the workers or the kids, only to the Living Toys and even that's only the case for the "Caterpillar Room", which houses the younger kids who play with them in rough ways.
• Trolls: Combined with Everything Trying to Kill You. For some reason, the environment surrounding the Trolls' village is this and Sugar Bowl at the same time. By which we mean it's all made up of felt and wool and glitter and things, barring the odd translucent organic tissue.

Films — Live-Action

• Annihilation (2018): Area X is full of brightly-colored plants that have The Shimmer (which… shimmers, and which can infest humans if they encounter them, driving them to madness and/or death, including turning them into some of the brightly-colored plants).
• Avatar: Pandora's beautiful biofluorescent flora and fauna sometimes make you forget that the atmosphere will kill you in minutes and the fauna can shrug off 30mm autocannon rounds.
• Beetlejuice: "Saturn", the bizarre place where the ghosts that try to leave their house end up in is a weird and feverish realm with a bright yellow desert, red and twisted rock formations and an Alien Sky with a looming green gas giant planet, home to the striped, nested mouth-ed Sandworms that immediately attack any visitor.
• Black Rain makes neon-lit Osaka look like an especially dangerous and threatening environment for Strange Cop in a Strange Land NYPD detectives Nick and Charlie.
• Child's Play 2 has its climax taking place at a Nightmarish Factory of the Play Pals Toys, which unlike your typical dark and gritty industrial hellhole, it's instead a clean and brightly colored establishment that ends up being uncanny in the way of this trope.
• Color Out of Space (2020): The more the titular color infects the surrounding land, the more vibrant it becomes, with the plants and animals becoming a shade of bright magenta.
• The Final Programme (the adaptation of The Cornelius Chronicles novel of the same name) has the mansion of Jerry Cornelius' late father, a location best described as a labyrinthine Mod-era psychedelic art exhibit-slash-discotheque, if it had been designed by "Jigsaw" Kramer. A significant chunk of the story involves Jerry's assault of the place in his mission to retrieve a MacGuffin stored within and kill his hated brother, which leads to the slaughter of everybody that Jerry recruited to assist him with this task.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: The surface of Ego the Living Planet appears to be a amazingly beautiful if slightly trippy '80s psychedelic wonderland… But this trope comes into effect when it's revealed Ego is an Omnicidal Maniac who wants to assimilate the universe, and can grow crackling energy tentacles from the formerly-beautiful scenery.
• The Muppets' Wizard of Oz: Just like the literal poppy field in the original movie (and the book it was based on), the nightclub called "Poppy Fields" qualifies. It has vibrant neon signs and is decorated with a flower motif, but it knocks the protagonists unconscious.
• Running Scared (2006): The couple who briefly "rescue" Oleg live in an extremely bright apartment, all in vivid primary colors that matches the kids' games and toys they have. Because they are murderous pedophiles, and they use it to lure kids and for their own fantasies when they abuse and murder them.
• Dario Argento's Suspiria and its successor Inferno (1980) run on this trope. Both films feature exterior and interior shots illuminated with colorful lights which lends to a dream fever like atmosphere. Pat's Rasputinian Death is perhaps one of the most iconic examples.
• The Wizard of Oz: The poppy field has brightly-coloured flowers, but the flowers are enchanted to put Dorothy, Toto, and the Cowardly Lion to sleep.

Literature

• Animorphs: The Iskoort city consists of brightly-colored platforms all stacked on each other like giant Lego bricks. However, they have no railings, and it's a long way down to the surface.
• Coraline: The Other World is very colourful, with bright clothes on the people, flowers, etc., but it's run by demon-like creatures who want to kill Coraline. Unlike in the movie, the world doesn't become less colorful but instead it becomes less defined, and is described as looking like a drawing.
• The Hunger Games: The arena for the 50th Hunger Games is a bright, idyllic paradise with mountains and a forest. It then turns out that practically everything in the environment is poisonous or man-eating, and the beautiful mountains are actually volcanoes.
• The Neverending Story gives us Perelin, the Night Forest. It's vibrantly colourful, breathtakingly beautiful, and grows so quickly and aggressively that it would take over all of Fantasia if Grorgrimmar, the Many-Coloured Death, didn't blast it to sand every morning.
• T'telir, from Brandon Sanderson's novel Warbreaker, is a Deadly Decadent Court where the people virtually worship colour, so everything is vibrantly coloured, from the building to people's clothes.
• Unwind: Happy Jack Harvest Camp is a picturesque location nestled on a pine-covered ridge with a lovely view of the mountains of Sedona, where the boys' dorm is painted light blue, the girls' dorm is lavender, the staff uniforms are shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and the surgeons wear bright yellow. It looks and sounds like a summer camp, but it's actually a place to hold Unwinds before they're dismembered and turned into organ transplants.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of Get Smart, there is a disco-type place full of colourful lights and spirals, but it turns out that the songs they play there have subliminal messaging and encourage high school students to do the bad things mentioned in the songs like "Kill, kill, kill" and "Flip off the dean".
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Downplayed for the planet the crew visits in the episode "Justice". It's not that bright; it just has vibrant green grass and pink-clad citizens. Similarly, it's usually as happy as it looks, but the downside is that the punishment for all law-breaking is death.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Way to Eden" shows a group of space hippies taking over the Enterprise to fly to a "paradise planet." The planet is beautiful enough, but everything on it is lethal, and the hippie leader dies when he refuses to believe it.
• Star Trek: Voyager: The episode "The Thaw" has the dimension in the minds of the people in stasis that features a circus that looks fun because the characters wear colourful clothes and it has bright lights and objects. However, it is run by a Monster Clown who's the embodiment of fear.
• In Squid Game most of the gameplay arenas are dominated by primary colors, in contrast to the much darker hues of the outside world.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: The First World, a plane of existence that serves as Golarion's version of the Land of Faerie, is said to have been the gods' "first draft" at creating the world. It is a garishly and wildly colorful world that is as unpredictable as it is beautiful, and it is easy for mortals who enter it to become lost forever even if they don't fall victim to ill-advised pranks by the native fey.
• Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K:
  • Because Slaanesh is the god of hedonism, pain/pleasure and other excesses, his followers dress in bright, clashing colors both for their own enjoyment and their enemy's discomfort.
  • The Slaanesh-aligned Noise Marines of 40K wear hot pink and black, one of the few color combinations that still registers after millennia of deliberate Sensory Abuse.
  • Eldar Harlequins dress in brightly-colored motley, while other Eldar tend to dress in primary and secondary colors. Dismissing them as prancing fools is the first step to defeat.

Video Games

• Bugsnax: Snaktooth Island definitely has elements of this, with colorful food-like inhabitants (the titular Bugsnax) that are all too happy to ram, immolate, or freeze you. Or force themselves down your throat to convert you into more of themselves and feed the island.
• Caves of Qud: The Rainbow Woods is so named for the colorful poisonous mushrooms and flowers. It's also a labyrinthine hell filled with primordial ooze that spawns endless quantities of hostile sludge monsters.
• Danganronpa is known for its signature 'psycho pop' style, using flashy colors, hot pink blood and clashing patterns to contrast the morbid, psychological nature of the Killing Games. The Funhouse in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair accentuates this, having bright red and green walls covered with the images of strawberries and grapes, with a trial ground full of obnoxious patterns and colors.
• One of Deep Rock Galactic's biomes is the Azure Weald, an underground jungle full of bioluminescent plant life that makes spelunking a psychedelic experience. It's just as infested with Glyphids as the rest of Hoxxes IV, and even with the glowing plants, it's still dark and difficult to navigate, making it easy to take a wrong step and plunge over the side of a chasm.
• Destiny 2's Black Garden falls firmly in this category. The colors are bright and eyecatching (though slightly more subdued than most examples of this trope), and the lore can only be described as pure Nightmare Fuel.
• In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, the titular Isles are the home of the Mad God Sheogorath, and are split down the middle to represent the dual nature of madness. The Northwestern half of the Isles, Mania, represents aspects of madness that can be considered positive (such as artistic creation and the spark of invention), and is full of technicolor plants and brightly covered monsters, but is every bit as dangerous as the southeastern half, Dementia.
• Far Cry: New Dawn has a lavish setting filled with vibrant flora that blooms around the post-apocalyptic landscape. It's this setting where the player must defend his turf against the brutal Highwaymen.
• Moshi Monsters:
  • Subverted for the circus known as both Cirque du Bonbon and Cirque du Moshi. It is a pretty standard circus with colourful tents, etc, but it used to be the villains' base. However, the villains moved to another base and the circus stayed.
  • Zigzagged for the Candy Cane Caves. They're caves full of candy which can be mined and a river full of jam, but occasionally they get taken over by the candy-themed villain Sweet Tooth. When not corrupted though, they're just as fun as they look.
• In Scaler, the Chimerum world is a lush, glowy rainforest with exactly two (2) NPCs that don't want you dead. One of the more dangerous enemies can turn invisible at will, so don't get distracted.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: Sector Bootes is modeled after a red light district and features tacky, rococo yet grimy and decadent set pieces with clashing colors and an overall awful taste. The leader of the sector is Mithras, an Evilutionary Biologist that decided to conduct experiments on the stranded crew of the Elve ship. This allowed him to discover that humans need things like "blood" and "oxygen" to exist.
• Many of the most garishly-decorated levels in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 are also the most dangerous (most notably, the "Chemical Plant Zone", "Casino Night Zone", and "Metropolis Zone" levels).
• After defeating the Wall of Flesh in Terraria, the world becomes infected with two new biomes: the Corruption or Crimson (depending on the world), an Evil Tainted Place filled with nasty beasts, and the Hallow, a brightly-colored fairy-and-unicorn-themed world that is every bit as deadly as its Evil Counterpart.
• The domains of the Chaos God Tzeentch and, to a lesser extent, Slaanesh, as depicted in Total War: Warhammer III. Both feature bright blues and pinks as well as often scintillating, changing colors. Both are nightmare worlds full of Daemons.

Web Comics

• Sleepless Domain: While a normal city in most respects during the day, by night the City itself becomes a technicolor battlefield between monsters and magical girls. Between the hours of 10:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., deadly monsters flood into the City, while the Inner Barrier forms a seal along the walls of the City's structures to protect civilians. The appearance of the Inner Barrier changes from night to night, but its variations are often ominously vibrant — one particular night featured bright orange walls and a pink river, while another was succinctly described by the author as a "primary color hellscape".
• Snarlbear: The Rainbow Dimension. Almost everything is brightly colored, from the rocks to the trees to the wildlife to the people. It is also full of dangerous beasts and magic.
  Flint: ...if you happen to like lurid hellholes... this place is a magical wonderland.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020): Downplayed for the cuter version of Earth seen in "The Cutening", which is very brightly-coloured and has things like anthropomorphic objects and Amazing Technicolor Wildlife. It's not dangerous so much as mind-numbingly annoying to the Warner siblings, to the point where they claim to be losing their minds, but it's really more an exaggeration. However, one aspect of this world is that all the dogs are puppies, and they're all sad.
• Gravity Falls: "Weirdmageddon Part 2" takes place in a colorful fantasy land designed to protect Mabel from her tragic reality. This being Mabel's fantasy, it's extremely adorable, energetic, and popping with fun neon colors and sparkles. However, as soon as the threat of reality sets in, the place breaks down into a nightmare and tries to eradicate anybody who supposedly threatens Mabel's happiness.
• Rick and Morty has Froopyland, a colorful Sugar Bowl dimension created by Rick as a “safe” place for a young Beth to play in. Because Rick didn’t think through his invention, this trope comes into play. There’s no actual environmental hazards, but it’s easy to get trapped in and starve to death since there are no food sources other than honey (which don’t provide much nutrition anyway) and the local wildlife. The former is exactly what happens to Beth’s childhood friend, who only managed to survive by mating with the wildlife and eating the offspring. In addition, the mutated wildlife end up gaining predatory behavior resulting in the dimension becoming an actually dangerous place besides its design flaw.

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