The realization hits you like a brick in the jaw.
"Hey! Are you tired of real doors clutterin' up your house? Where you open 'em and they actually go somewhere, and you go into another room? Get on down to Real Fake Doors!"
A door opens to an unexpected impasse, most characteristically a wall. This wall is often made of brick.
This can be a simple error if a character is navigating Studiopolis and mistakes a (genuinely fake) Prop door for the real thing. But when it happens with a door that should be real, it indicates something has gone deeply wrong. The building has changed its configuration, someone has tried to seal the room, the character has discovered A Glitch in the Matrix, or some sort of Mind Screw is happening.
A variation occurs if a Portal Door has been subjected to a Portal Slam: instead of the other end of the portal, only an unadorned wall can be found behind the door. It can also occur with other coverings, such as curtains over a window. See also The Lonely Door, which may seem pointless or fake to any who do not perceive its Portal Door nature.
Compare Bizarrchitecture, Mobile Maze, Painted Tunnel, Real Train.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In Tintin: The Seven Crystal Balls, Haddock runs into a wall behind what turns out to be a prop door at the theater.
Films — Animated
- Monsters, Inc. 1: Portal Doors not connected to power will open to nothing. Waternoose banishes Sully and Mike by sending them through a door to a remote cold area and then disconnecting it, causing it to open to nothing on the other side. This also applies to the closets the factory uses, which open as normal in the human world when not connected to a powered door, and especially when those closets are destroyed.
Films — Live Action
- This helps form a Bookend in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. When Forge Fitzwilliam gets arrested at the denoument, they attempt to escape the wintry prison through the same method Edgin and Holga used in the beginning... only to discover that the window had since been replaced by brick.
- 1408: As soon as Mike fully realizes how dangerous the room really is and tries to make a break for it, it creates a brick wall behind the front door so he can't leave.
- The Matrix: Played for Drama when the pursuing villains trigger A Glitch in the Matrix to trap the protagonists. Behind a curtain where a window should be, there is a brick wall, preventing them from escaping the building.
- During the "Make 'Em Laugh" number in Singin' in the Rain Cosmo opens a movie prop door, "discovering" a prop brick wall behind it. He pretends to slam into it, then pretends that his face has been messed up by the collision.
- See How They Run: Köpernick, fleeing from a killer backstage at the theatre, sees an exit sign above a door...only for it to be a prop door in front of a brick wall. He's promptly offed.
Literature
- In Coraline, this occurs one time when Coraline is going to the Other World, with a brick wall appearing behind the door.
Live-Action TV
- iCarly: A locker variant occurs in "iGet Pranky": During Spencer's Pranking Montage, he manages to prank Sam by (somehow) installing a brick wall inside of her school locker.
- Doctor Who
- A mundane version occurs in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" when Ian opens a door and nearly falls to his death, as the stairs have been destroyed along with most of London.
- In "Father's Day", when the Doctor leaves Rose to stay with her father after she saved him, the TARDIS turns out to be completely empty, with the doors opening to the inside of a box as one would normally expect.
- At the end of "The Pandorica Opens" and through the beginning of "The Big Bang", River Song is stuck in a time loop inside the TARDIS where she plays around with the controls a bit and then runs to the door to try and escape, behind which is a solid concrete wall.
- "The God Complex": The Doctor tries the doors in the hotel lobby only to discover a brick wall behind them. Also, there are no windows behind the curtains.
"Big day for a fan of walls."
- At the beginning of "The Zygon Inversion", when Clara is trapped in the Zygon pod, and thus in a dream state, she notices some weirdness about where she is, and then attempts to leave, noticing that the front door to the apartment she's in opens to a brick wall, and the curtains appear to just be attached to the wall, with nothing but more wall behind it.
- Early on in "Heaven Sent", the Doctor uses a psychic link to open a door and escape from the creature, and it opens to a very short corridor, functionally just another wall.
- The Goodies: In "The End", the Goodies open their front door only to run into a featureless wall of concrete, as their office has just been encased in a solid block of concrete (as a result of Graeme's architectural design to prevent squatters moving in). The gag is repeated at the end of the 2005 documentary Return of the Goodies.
- In an episode of The Greatest American Hero, Ralph and Bill are checking out an ordinary house that's going to be torn down, to see if they want to buy any of the items inside. Ralph opens a door and finds a blank brick wall behind it. However, his super-suit lets him see and then walk through the wall and into a sort of "ghost room" beyond.
- Walker, Texas Ranger: Trivette encounters one in Season 2's "Unfinished Business". While he and Walker are on the trail of Petey Cevara, a guard tells him he can't enter a bar through that door, but Trivette pays no attention and beats him up, shoots the lock and opens the door to find out too late it's bricked up.
Video Games
- Antichamber has the exit door be this. Except for when it isn't.
- In the "Communications" level of Doom³, there is a door covered in blood, with a white light above it that turns red to the sound of a pounding from the other side. Approaching it causes it to burst open to reveal a wall of flesh and teeth, and a gigantic snapping mouth to lunge out at you, before pulling back as the door slams shut.
- A couple of these can be found in Lost Bastille in Dark Souls II. There's one door that contains a corpse sealed into the walls, and a door that just drops down nowhere but death.
- The House of All Worlds in Dreamfall Chapters has a door in the living room that apparently opens into a brick wall. Saga, a Playable Character who grew up there, learns that this was a deliberate design decision by her father, and, in the final chapters of the game, destroys the brick wall to open a Shift into Arcadia at just the right moment to bring Kian (her future adoptive father) from the brink of death and save the day when everything seems lost.
- Fallout:
- Fallout 3: SatCom Array NN-03d has a nearby door that, upon opening, reveals a concrete wall with graffiti on it which reads, "FUCK YOU".
- Fallout 4:
- In a remote region of the wasteland, there is a concrete structure with a very conspicuously placed door. Opening it reveals a red skull decoration with the words "you look nice today!" Doing this spawns a Siege Breaker Sentry Bot right around the corner.
- If you follow the mysterious little girl up to the attic of the Grandchester Mystery House in the Nuka World DLC, you see her run through a door, shutting it behind her. Opening it leads to both a wall and one mother of a Scare Chord. And the realization that she is a ghost.
- The Kiddy Kingdom fun house in Nuka World, naturally, has several of these.
- Used as one of the many surreal events in Layers of Fear, sometimes with messages scrawled on the brickwork behind the door.
- The first LEGO Star Wars game has, in one level, a room containing a bunch of doors that can be opened by droids. One of those doors, when opened, has just a brick wall behind it. One does wonder whether it was a Missing Secret or simply a gag, given the stuff found behind the other doors.
- Luigi's Mansion: A hazard found in the corridors. If Luigi tries to open one, it will slam him into the wall. There is even a trail of coins on the floor leading to one to bait players into falling for the trap.
- Portal 2:
- A chase sequence ends with a door labeled "GLaDOS Emergency Shutdown and Cake Dispensary. Keep Unlocked.", which falls over when you approach it. And like most test chambers, the "wall" it was on is a series of movable segments, which then come apart to show empty space behind it. GLaDOS mocks you for falling for her Schmuck Bait, but you actually had no option but to try the door.
- Downplayed in a later sequence, where a massive door is opened to reveal a more mundane door (that actually leads somewhere)
- Played with in Scratches. After Micheal Arthate finds a hidden room in the blueprints of Blackwood Manor, the supposed door is hidden behind wallpaper, and when Micheal cuts it open, he finds that the door's been bricked up. The only other way to get in is by rappelling down the outside of the house and entering through the window.
- In The Stanley Parable, it can happen that you come across a door behind which you find a brick wall.
Web Animation
- During the Happy Tree Friends episode Home Is Where The Hurt Is, Giggles opens up a door, only to find a brick wall.
Web Video
- In the Guaranteed* Video "Mr. Basement", the Anthropomorphic Personification of basements gets killed, causing every basement in the world to disappear. The protagonists, the only two who still remember what basements were, find that the door to their basement now opens to a brick wall.
Western Animation
- In ChalkZone, one of Rudy's attempts to get into the impenetrable forest is to use his magic chalk to draw a door. Doors created this way usually work, but this door opens up straight into a wall of more tree trunks.
- Played with in DuckTales (2017). In one episode, the characters find out they're trapped in a Show Within a Show, at which point the door to the room they're in becomes this.
- Family Guy: In "If I'm Dyin's, I'm Lyin'", when Peter tries to complain to a network executive about a show being cancelled, the secretary tells him he can't go through a particular door, which Peter disregards and walks into a brick wall. The secretary tells him "No, you can't go in there because that door leads nowhere. Use the one next to it."
- Zig-Zagged in the Popeye cartoon "Private Eye Popeye". After Olive Oyl's butler steals the gemstone that Popeye was tasked to protect, he makes his getaway through a seemingly normal looking door (though he does not open the door fully, so the audience can't see what's behind it yet). However, when Popeye then tries to follow the butler through the same door, he immediately runs into something. It is then that the door swings open the rest of the way, revealing a brick wall.
- The Trope Namer is Rick and Morty episode "Rixty Minutes", featuring an advertisement for 'Real Fake Doors' which may be mounted on a wall, but don't actually open.
- A common occurrence in Tex Avery MGM Cartoons, where a character tries to go through a door, only to open it and crash into a brick wall with a sign reading "Imagine that—no door!" This happens in Red Hot Riding Hood as the Wolf tries to escape Grandma's apartment, and then in the Screwy Squirrel short The Screwy Truant when Truant Officer Meathead tries to capture and return Screwy to school.
Real Life
- The Winchester Mansion👁 Image
in San Jose, California, the former home of William Wirt Winchester's widow, Sarah Winchester, contains several doors that lead to nowhere. Local legends say she intentionally built with several of these to confuse the vengeful ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles, but evidence suggests these were actually former balconies that collapsed into other parts of the house after the great 1906 earthquake. - Sometimes can happen as a result of dividing up a house into multiple units. You don't want one tenant to just be able to waltz right in to another tenant's part of the house now, do you?
