"Certainly, he didn't expect to come home and find a clear inch of dust."
— Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
It's a place so dusty, the cobwebs are basically measured in depth. If there aren't cobwebs, everything has a layer of gray from all the dust anyway.
Heck, the only thing keeping dust from getting kicked up, everywhere someone walks around, is that it would be difficult to film (and be very uncomfortable for the cast and crew).
On the gritty end of Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty. One likely site for a Bat Scare.
A Sub-Trope of Scenery Gorn.
Compare Cobweb Jungle, Cobweb of Disuse, Trash of the Titans.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- This is the first obvious sign that something's gone weird with the world in the Second Urusei Yatsura Non-Serial Movie: Onsen Mark's house is absolutely covered from floor to ceiling, wall to wall with a layer of dust and mold.
Film — Animation
- Howl's Moving Castle: And poor old Sophie has to clean up the whole thing!
- Kiki's Delivery Service: A variation, when Kiki rents an apartment from a baker. She finds the entire apartment extremely dusty, however, after further inspection, the apartment is caked (no pun intended) in flour rather than dust.
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Upon arriving at the dwarfs' cottage, Snow White finds the place a complete mess, complete with dust and cobwebs everywhere, so she and her animal friends decide to clean the place to surprise them when they get back.
Doc: Why-Why, the whole place is clean!Grumpy: There's dirty work afoot!
Film — Live-Action
- Beetlejuice - standard decor for a haunted house, but Barbara, still getting used to being a ghost, is frustrated that she can't clean the place with the vacuum being inaccessible. When Adam suggests their being alone in the house may be Heaven, she mutters "Heaven wouldn't have all this dust!"
- Done for laughs in Casino Royale (1967). The daughter of Mata Hari is infiltrating her mom's Nebulous Evil Organisation, and is shown her mom's old room by a henchman who states "It's just the way she left it". The room is covered in dust and cobwebs, exactly as it would be after decades of neglect.
- Dagon has a staffed hotel that is at the same time coated in dust and cobwebs.
- Every time Draco Malfoy pulls the sheet covering the Vanishing Cabinet in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, another inch or so of dust has accumulated on it, far more than should have been possible since he has been continuously working with it.
- Not Roger Corman, but Vincent Price: House on Haunted Hill (1959). Also lampshaded, as Frederick Loren's wife asks him why he couldn't have had the haunted house he's rented for the party cleaned. Frederick responds "Atmosphere, darling. You know how ghosts are, they never tidy up."
- This trope shows up a lot in the Roger Corman Poe pictures; in the comedy adaptation of The Raven, Peter Lorre improvised the quip "Tough place to keep clean, huh?" as he and Vincent Price walk through an extensive and overly-cobwebbed room.
- Picture comes from the first act of the Roger Corman anthology film Tales of Terror, where a girl visits the home of her father, who let most of the place get this way after his wife died.
- In The Wolfman (2010), Talbot Hall is certainly untidy to say the least.
Literature
- In Amelia Bedelia, the titular maid added dust to a living room. Her rationale: To remove dust is to "un-dust;" therefore, to "dust" is to add dust. Her main character flaw was that she was Literal-Minded, and didn't quite understand figures of speech.
- The Dark Crusader by Alistair Maclean starts thus: A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That's how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room. The 'dusty man' is the protagonist's boss in British Intelligence.
- Appears all the time in Dracula, notably in the old wing of castle Dracula and in his purchased mansion.
- Miss Havisham's abandoned wedding feast in Great Expectations.
- 12 Grimmauld Place, in Harry Potter qualifies.
Live-Action TV
- The mansion of The Addams Family.
- The Avengers (1960s) - a Charles Dickens enthusiast has his manor house themed to the author's works, down to a recreation of Miss Havisham's dusty, cobwebbed wedding feast room.
- In Black Books the Cleaner highlights this as one of the worst features of the bookshop. While we can't see it, he does the traditional demonstration of wearing a white glove, running it along a surface, and showing how much dust it's collected. The surface in this example was the air.
- The Munsters: "Dusting" actually means spreading more dust around.
- Quentin Crisp lived in a notoriously unkempt home. In the TV drama based on his autobiography, he remarked that "the dust doesn't get any worse after a year". note
Podcasts
- Dice Funk: Stoneroot is this trope scaled up to an entire city. Anne covers herself in dust just to fit in.
- In The Magnus Archives episode "Vampire Killer" the eponymous Trever Herbert describes the house of Sylvia McDonald, the first vampire he killed (or so he says), as covered in dust and mould except for a narrow strip along the floor where she walks as if she has lived there for years but done absolutely nothing except walk through the place.
Professional Wrestling
- The Dungeon of Doom looked to have been built inside of a cave and probably could have used a good dusting.
Tabletop Games
- AD&D included a spell that made a house look this way, creating an illusion that it had been long abandoned.
Theme Parks
- Parts of The Haunted Mansion in the Disney Theme Parks are covered in dust and cobwebs. The cast members use a machine similar to a fertilizer spreader to spray fake cobwebs around just to keep it optimally dingy.
Video Games
- The Dusty Dungeon Level (DDL) from Ancient Domains of Mystery and the level below it, Very Dusty Dungeon Level (VDDL). They are pretty much Take Our Word for It though, as the graphics are too simple to actually show the setting.
- Pipit's house in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is so dusty that Pipit's mother actually pays Link to clean it with his Gust Bellows, a futuristic device resembling a leaf-blower. And then you learn where Pipit's patrol money winds up...
- The mansion of Luigi's Mansion, while not as smothering with dust as most examples, has enough that Luigi kicks up a trail of it wherever he goes, and most vacuumed objects give a puff of dust if they don't have any items within. Played a touch straighter in one basement room with large dust piles that have to be vacuumed up to proceed.
- One of the areas in Seiklus is a corridor covered in colossal amounts of ash that, thanks to wind blowing there, was confused with arctic area by many.
Western Animation
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Pinkie Apple Pie", Goldie Delicious's house is extremely messy, including plenty of dust and cobwebs. What looks like one of Goldie's many, many cats turns out to be a pile of dust inexplicably shaped like a cat.
- Spongebob Squarepants: This has happened to the Krusty Krab on a few occasions to emphasize the drought of customers they sometimes get. Sometimes to the point where Mr. Krabs has a spider dangling from the roof of his mouth.
