Wait, that's not the bathroom...
"You walk through the door to utopia and disappear."
— Dr. Hardcastle regarding SCP-4005
, SCP Foundation
, SCP Foundation
This is a door that opens to a location other than the one behind it; in time, space, and even outside of it! Its ability to connect two unrelated locations automatically qualifies it as a Cool Gate, even when the materials are of mundane make and manufacture.
How can this door bend space and time like a Dali painting? It may be a technological teleportation device, a Time Machine (or both). It could also be made through magic (which usually justifies it being otherwise mundane looking), and may lead to the Magical Land, Spirit World or Dark World. Lastly, it may be some form of "naturally" occurring gateway of Eldritch origin that leads to an Another Dimension.
Besides literal frame-hinges-and-leaf doorways, similar "transitory" and "connecting" objects sometimes play similar roles as portals. Wall-mounted windows that look out on different vistas than they ought to are the most common alternative.
This is a Super-Trope to The Lonely Door, where the "doorway" isn't built into a wall (it still needs to be a standard-looking door, not just a portal in the air). This is a Sub-Trope of Cool Gate, where you can find additional portals. See also Portal Book, Portal Picture, Pulled into a Mirror, and Television Portal for other objects that can serve passages between distant places and worlds.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Bleach: Senkaimon are doors that allow travel between the living world and the Soul Society, Garganta are portals that allow travel between the living world and Hueco Mundo or between Soul Society and Hueco Mundo. Also, there is a special doorway to hell, that opens for the collection of any Hollow that is cleansed of its post-death sins only for the saved soul to have pre-death sins that now need punishment.
- Blue Exorcist: A variant. The doors are completely mundane — it's the key that is used to open it which changes the location. This is a necessary system to get around True Cross Academy due to all the anti-demon traps.
- Doraemon: The Anywhere Door is a portable door that acts as a portal, enabling swift travel to distant places, such as different cities, continents, or even other planets. However, it requires precise thought about the destination, or it could take someone to an undesirable location, like space. The door's range is limited to a 10-lightyear radiusnote , making it a case of Awesome, but Impractical.
Comic Books
- Loki: Agent of Asgard ends with Loki and Verity stuck in an endless void after the Final Incursion has destroyed nearly everything. Loki considers popping in to Doom's Battleworld, or going to bother the Silver Surfer, then thinks against it and draws a door on the void. The final page is them inviting Verity to step through. It was several years later that it turned out the door led to Galactus' homeworld in the old multiverse, but Verity simply got reset back into her old life.
Fan Works
- Batman 1939: A door inside a closet in Giovanni Zatara's apartment is a portal to the House of Secrets.
- Kindness is Punk-Rock: When Eagly leads Peacemaker and Vigilante into the Quantum Unfolding Chamber they find a mysterious door that Peacemaker mentions wasn't there before, he and Vigilante then decide to go through it, leading them to Brockton Bay on Earth Bet.
- The Many Worlds Interpretation, by A.A. Pessimal: After contact is established between Unseen University of Ankh-Morpork and a fellow institution called Caltech in Pasadena, Sheldon Cooper re-opens such a portal door between the two colleges. Between them, Leonard and Howard inadvertently open other ways of passing between Pasadena and Ankh-Morpork. This causes complications for Ponder Stibbons and Vetinari may be moved to go into Sarcasm Mode. Vetinari does realise he gave the Caltech boys the keys to one of these portals, but he still isn't best pleased. Among other things a temporal paradox is created due to Sheldon's incautious over-excitement which results in multiple versions of Johanna Smith-Rhodes.
- Weird Incident Shit: The first page has "You" from Problem Sleuth break the window on their door. This transports them to Touhou Project's Gensokyo, but there's no door leading back to the office. You are stuck in a strange and colourful world.
Films — Animated
- Barbie and the Secret Door's plot revolves around a magical door that leads to the fantasy world of Zinnia.
- Howl's Moving Castle: The door leading out of the castle leads to four different places depending on what color its dial is set to. Three are the Wastes, Howl's shop in Porthaven, and Howl's shop in Kingsbury. The fourth leads through time.
- Monsters, Inc. 1 (and, by extension, Monsters University): This is how monsters are able to come out of children's closets and scare them. The monster world has a copy of every child's closet door that when given power will connect to their bedroom. The titular factory has a vault filled with millions of them, and the climax features Sully, Mike and Boo, as well as Randall, giving chase, running back and forth through multiple doors in the vault, causing them to end up in different locations around the world. When the doors don't have any power connected, those in the monster world, including the steel banishment door to the Himalayas, which Waternoose and Randall send Mike and Sully through, will open to nothing on the other end and the closet doors in the human world will just open as normal.
- Suzume: Doors in abandoned areas will sometimes become a portal to the Ever After. The Great Wyrm can reach the living world through these doors to unleash disasters, so Closers must find and lock them. Because the Ever After is not a place for the living, humans cannot enter these doors except for a single door currently located in Suzume's hometown.
Films — Live-Action
- The Adjustment Bureau: The Adjustors use any door to travel to any other door.
- Beetlejuice. Following the instructions in a book, the ghostly protagonists use chalk to draw a door on a wall, open it and walk through it into the afterlife bureaucracy.
- From Beyond the Grave: In "The Door", the eponymous door begins to exert a strange fascination over Seaton, and he finds that when he finally opens it, a mysterious blue room lies beyond. There, he finds the notes of Sir Michael Sinclair, an evil occultist who created the door as a means to trap those who entered through it, so that Sinclair can take their souls and live forever.
- The Matrix Reloaded. Morpheus explains that every door in the Matrix has a secondary tumbler sequence that leads it into an endless hallway that contains all of the doors in the simulated world, essentially a developer's backroom to quickly move between locations. The Keymaker is a program who has the ability to make appropriate keys to reach this location.
- Pan's Labyrinth: Ofelia uses a piece of magical chalk to create a door to the Pale Man's realm.
- The Return (1980) has the portal in the back of The Prospector's mine which may lead back to the alien homeworld.
- In Shredder Orpheus, Hades' goons carry Eurydice through a door to the Underworld that Orpheus's lyre-axe guitar forces open in pursuit. When Orpheus fails the test and turns around, it closes automatically to reveal a solid wall behind it.
Literature
- The Bell at Sealey Head: Emma keeps opening doors and finding Princess Ysabo. She never dares go in for fear that she can't come back. And one day when she opens the door to her grandmother's room, it shows the princess in a different room. She closes it, reopens it, and finds her grandmother's room.
- "The Big Front Yard", by Clifford Simak: Taine's house has been transformed, with the back and sides of his house on Earth while his front door acts as a portal to a different planet, which the aliens use to trade ideas (technology) between cultures.
- The Boy and the Darkness: Each world has three such doors that link it to a parallel world. In the novel, the Sunny Kitten takes Danny through one such door to a world perpetually covered in darkness. The door promptly gets destroyed by the Flyings. Danny manages to find the other two doors, but they get destroyed as well, leaving him stranded in this world. He has a final chance to return to his own world but sacrifices it to save his friend. Finally, the Sunny Kitten explains that the doors directly to Danny's world are gone, but there are other doors leading to other parallel worlds. Thus, they may be able to find a door to Danny's world there.
- Castle Perilous has 144,000 doors, each leading to an Alternate Universe, and they don't just wait for you to walk through — the portals wander, and actively seek out those who want to travel or get away.
- Chaos Gods: The Four Realms are connected by the Gates, large portals which transport people from one Realm to another.
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Two and a half examples:
- In Prince Caspian, when Aslan sends the four Pevensies home and some of the Telmarines to the deserted island their ancestors came from through a door made of 2 vertical sticks and a horizontal one on top.
- In The Last Battle, the door to the stable, which turns out to lead to Aslan's country (i.e. heaven) and not the inside of a stable that the Calormens are about to set fire to.
- Finally, the eponymous wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may qualify. It's a bit of an edge case, since the actual "portal" (when it's there at all) appears to be near the back of the wardrobe — rather than through the actual doorway.
- Chronicles of the Kencyrath: Within the Master's house, there are portals to all of the worlds that the Kencyrath had to abandon in their flight.
- The Dark is Rising Sequence: Powerful Old Ones (such as Merriman Lyon) are able to summon a magical gate (which looks like a pair of doors) that allows travel through time and space.
- The Dark Tower: Roland discovers a series of doors which allow him to look into other worlds, possess a specific individual on the other side when he steps through the door, and pull that person back through the door into his own world. This is how he eventually gathers his three traveling companions who follow him in the later books. The final book ends with him finding one at the top of the Tower itself, and realizing to his horror it leads right back to where his quest began, and he's been through it before.
- Daughter of Smoke and Bone: The door to Brimstone's shop. If you enter it from the outside, it leads to a nondescript laundry room. If someone inside opens the door and lets you in, it leads to the shop. If you're going from inside to outside, you can choose to come out in any of several dozen cities around the world.
- Deeper Up the Tower: The Tower seems to be full of these that take people from floor to floor, with yellow doors in particular being associated with Florian.
- Demon Road:
- Dacre Shanks has a magic key that can link any door to the interior of his dollhouses. Anyone the goes through will shrink. Shanks claims he can use the key to travel from a doorway to any other doorway but only he can control where, even if someone else is using the key.
- In Desolation, Mayor Jesper has a key similar to the in Dacre Shanks had that links any door to the cavern where Naberius is trapped.
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:
- Professor Chronitis's time-traveling study in appears as a door in a convenient wall, or cliff face.
- Reg's time machine uses the door to his bathroom to move from one timframe to another.
- "The Door in the Wall" in H. G. Wells' short story of the same name, which leads from a dismal West Kensington street in London to an enchanted garden.
- Enchanted Forest Chronicles:
- Combined with Bigger on the Inside, Morwen's house appears to only house about one room, but the door can lead to any of several rooms as desired.
- Mendanbar mentions that his castle has a door that can go to any room in the castle, but it's at the top of a tower, so getting to it in order to use it is not worth the trouble.
- House of Doors: The only way into the House of Doors is through one of its Doors, which function as portals, but only for those who are allowed.
- House of Many Ways: Each door in the titular house can lead to another room in the house or various places across the country depending on the combination of which way you open it from, which way you turn when walking through, and how many steps you take before stopping.
- Howl's Moving Castle: The door leading out of the titular castle leads to four different places depending on what color its dial is set to. Three are the Wastes, Howl's shop in Porthaven, and Howl's shop in Kingsbury. The fourth leads to another dimension — modern-day Wales.
- Hyperion Cantos overcomes the problem of space travel and communication with two different systems. The space travel system is essentially portals. Some very wealthy homes consist of rooms on different planets connected by these portals.
- Illuminated: In Fiat Lux, according to Roscoe, any door can lead anywhere if you're paying enough attention.
- "it's such a beautiful day": The Door is a device that can dial up any other Door in existence, and then allow you to step between the two places instantly. It is distinct from a normal door (which merely allows access through a wall) by the capital letters. Public Doors, like public telephones, are free-standing structures instead.
- J.W. Wells & Co.: The portable door is a door-shaped sheet of something that can be rolled up, but when put against a wall will open to the desired location.
- Labyrinths of Echo: In the last volume, Max and Melifaro end up in a magical reality where all doors are this for them: stepping through any kind of portal or door (even self-constructed) transports them to another world (seemingly) at random. When they finally make it back to Echo, Max discovers all doors still continue to function like portals to random universes for him, so he has to condition himself to check every doorway he passes through for this effect.
- Medusa's Web: In the house, there is a corridor lined with old doors from other buildings, set into the solid wall with no openings behind them. At one point, Scott whimsically knocks on one — and it opens, revealing the house it came from seventy years earlier.
- Myth Adventures: The Deveel race has mastered interdimensional travel to the point that they build their house's front door in one dimension and the rest of the house in another. In addition to the obvious benefits of being able to build a house of any size anywhere you want, it allows the Deveels to use their apparent poverty as a bargaining tactic. The customer sees you selling goods out of your "humble tent," never realizing the small door at the back opens up onto an otherworldly manor house.
- The Neverending Story: One means of getting around in the endless world is the Temple of a Thousand Doors (der Tausend-Türen-Tempel), which contains an infinite number of five-sided rooms with three doors each. Every door different in colour, shape, material, et cetera. To get to the place you wish to go, you only need to pass through the rooms until you find the door that reminds you most strongly of the thing/place/person you're looking for. This may take some time.
- Neverwhere: Door and her family can open up doors anywhere. Their home is a bunch of unconnected rooms.
- Nightside: Doors that open to distant locations, times, and/or realities are a dime a dozen, and one minor character even operates a business where people can pay to pass through any of the hundreds of Cool Gate doorways he's stocked his shop with.
- The Phantom Tollbooth: The titular tollbooth allows passage between our world and the Kingdom of Wisdom, though apparently only one trip each way.
- Ravenor: The tri-portal, a plain wooden door that opens through space and time. Originally, it used by special trained operators, to let the questions of those who came to them direct it; when the house was broken, Ravenor operated it to put his powerful psionic abilities into play.
- The Redemption of Althalus: The protagonists live in a house with as many rooms as they like, as large as they like (they occasionally have armies on the march through the corridors) and can open doors to literally anywhere on command. One of the protagonists attempt, out of curiosity, to open a door to "nowhere" — although they avert the attempt before they succeed, the concept is enough to freak out their patron goddess something fierce.
- Rough Draft: The protagonist is put in charge of a Warp Zone with several doors, each one leading to a different world. Throughout the duology, he meets several other "customs officers", whose places of residence feature doors to different worlds.
- Skyway, by John DeChancie: "Tollbooths" (no doubt named as a Shout-Out to The Phantom Tollbooth) which use miles-tall columns of virtual particles to create wormholes linking a vast Road across thousands of planetary surfaces.
- The Traitor Son Cycle: The world has seven interdimensional gates on it. The two we've seen so far both look like large and ornate doors.
- What The Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror: NON has a door to alternate dimensions. The first time we see it, they use it to bring John, Dave and Amy into a world that has been doomed with a planet-wide plague. The next time, a NON office-worker uses it to throw his coffee cup away. The third time, one of the Fuckroach larvae is thrown in there right before it hatches. The dimension wasn't empty, and all the humans there are retroactively turned into naked, mutilated slaves of a Draconic humanoid race.
- The Wheel of Time has them in at least four flavors:
- The redstone doorways look like empty doorframes, but walking through one will transport you to a dimension populated by weird aliens who see the future or grant wishes.
- The Waygates are built of finely carved white stone and have nice reflection visual effect.
- The One Power created Gateways for Skimming (travel via subspace) and Traveling (instant teleportation).
- There are also Portal Stones, which link not only to other portal stones in the world, but also to Portal Stones in Parallel worlds. Very handy, if not well understood at all.
- "Window" involves a scientist, Culvergast, whose experiments in Magitek accidentally creates a portal in the middle of the woods consisting of a large three-dimensional "window" that takes the space where his lab used to be (apparently erasing Culvergast from existence in the process). The other scientists and the US military to look in on a seemingly idyllic homestead setting showing a family of four and their dog. Initially, they believe the window to be impassable due to an invisible barrier, but after figuring out that it weakens for brief periods at a time, a grad student named Reeves crosses over to make contact and is immediately killed and eaten by the family, who turn out to be murderous cannibals.
Live-Action TV
- Are You Afraid of the Dark?:
- "The Tale of the Dollmaker": In the attic, the arched door leads to a suddenly life-size perspective of the dollhouse. In the dollhouse attic, the equivalent door leads to outside the attic of the original house - however, the space around this view ripples on touch, and leads to a safe landing on the lawn.
- "The Tale of a Door Unlocked": There are two miniature wooden doors. One opens into an impending fire hazard in the Allan house; the occurrence of said hazard, and provides instantaneous passage through one of the house's inner doors. The other leads out of the house, and into the Magic Mansion.
- Doctor Who:
- The set design and low lighting make it hard to tell, but in "Arc of Infinity" Omega's TARDIS, once it has taken off, appears to have existed as an extra tomb doorway in the wall of a crypt.
- "Terminus" reveals that the Doctor's TARDIS can, in emergencies, materialise as a two-dimensional door in a wall instead of a three-dimensional object.
- "The Girl Who Waited": A hallway full of doors connects all of the rooms in this facility. The portal aspect is that the rooms can be seperated in time.
- "The Giggle": The Toymaker moves around UNIT HQ's main room using unsupported doors.
- "Joy to the World": The doors of the rooms at the Time Hotel lead to rooms elsewhere in time and space. Many of them are themed; for example, the entrance to a tent takes the Doctor to a tent being used during Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mount Everest.
- "The Reality War": The Ranis use one of these to fetch someone from the Underverse. It's circular and bears the Seal of Rassilon.
- Kamen Rider Fourze: The heroes have instant access to their Moonbase by entering a locker hidden away at school grounds.
- Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger: Weaponized by a Monster of the Week, Door World. With his powers, the Zenkaigers are cursed in that every time they open a door (any door) they will be sent to a completely different location, even to different countries. Getting split up this way allowed Stacey to ambush Kaito/Zenkaiser and get the upper hand, but the other Zenkaigers manage to figure out how to bypass Door World's power: they grow giant and just head for Kaito's location.
- Legends of Tomorrow: In the final season, in the absence of the Waverider, the team's home base becomes an extradimensional duplicate of John Constantine's house, accessed by unlocking any door with a magic key John gives Zari. Unfortunately, opening the front door of the duplicate manor reveals that the dimension in question is Hell.
- The Librarians (2014): Jenkins uses the few magical artifacts he has in the Annex to build a "back door", a portal that connects a broom closet door to another door anywhere in the world. However, navigation is not easy and requires the use of sympathetic magic. Jenkins claims that it's a good thing he can even hit the target city. This allows the titular characters to travel the world without spending hours flying or driving. Unfortunately, it also leaves the Annex open to anyone who might stumble on the door from the other end (such as Morgan le Fay). Also, the pilot episode showed the Library itself having multiple doors leading to other parts of the world. In fact, the elevator that led to the Library was itself a portal, since the Library doesn't exist in our dimension. Later on, Jenkins manages to come up with a single-shot portable version, although that one appears to be used more as a link to the regular "back door".
- Locke & Key (2020): The Anywhere Key allows the user to travel through one door to any other in the world, only the user must have had to have actually seen the door to travel to it.
- The Lost Room: The Key can turn any door with a tumble lock into this, which is why Karl Kreutzfeld made sure all the doors in his home were of the sliding variety (he forgets about the door in his son's fake castle and another one covered by drywall). Technically, though, each door opened by the Key leads to the titular Room, at which point the holder of the Key can open the Room's door to whatever location he can envision.
- The Magicians (2016):
- "Word as Bond": Julia enchants a doorframe to make a single-use portal.
- "The Losses of Magic": Eliot's key creates a door in the Muntjac which takes him, Fen, and Frey to parts unknown.
- "Be the Penny": Eliot's key has the power to make any door open to any other, even across realms.
- "Do You Like Teeth?": It turns out all the keys have the property of opening doors to other places. Poppy doesn't get the chance to follow through since Benedict manages to take the key from her.
- The Ministry of Time: Each of the doors of time leads to a different place and age.
- No Soap, Radio, an ABC Sketch Comedy, uses the Hotel Pelican as a Framing Device for its various skits and routines. This trope is one of the methods used, where doors would open to whatever locale was convenient for the next gag.
- Space Sheriff Gavan: The members of the Makuu organization possess space manipulation powers even when a Makuu Space isn't active. There are multiple times in the series where Retsu walks through a door only to fall off a random derelict building or a cliff in the wilderness.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: "All Our Yesterdays" has the Atavachron, a machine that creates a portal door/wall to a time in that planet's past.
- Supernatural:
- "As Time Goes By": Henry's blood sigil transforms the closet in Sam and Dean's motel room to a portal through time in a flash of light.
- "Taxi Driver": The door painted in the Generic Graffiti, which Ajay uses to travel to Purgatory.
- Wizards vs. Aliens: With the appropriate incantations, the door that normally leads to Ursula's downstairs lavatory gives access to her magical chamber.
Music
- Daniel Amos:
- Doppelganger has a story in the liner notes which ends with the narrator stepping through a mysterious door that leads who-knows-where.
- Vox Humana starts with a reference to Doppelgänger's door, with the narrator in a desolate landscape with a storm-wave bearing down on him. And those notes end with the narrator stepping through another mysterious door.
- Gorillaz: The new Kong Studios apparently has various doors that allow teleportation to any given location in the world.
- TXT: In "Run Away," the boys escape to the other reality using a trapdoor on the bottom of the pool.
Podcasts
- The NoSleep Podcast: The many doors painted into the walls, ceilings, and floors in "The House of Painted Doors" lead to a dark...place where children are.
- SAYER: "30 — Doors": Several of Halcyon's doors become these unexpectedly, leading to other rooms, floors, or even dimensions that they are supposed to.
Roleplays
- Glowfic: Milliways sometimes "possesses" doors, turning them into portals leading to the bar. And when opened from inside the bar, its door will typically serve as a portal to the homeworld of whoever opened it, although it can be forced to open to somewhere else given the right magic.
- Haven City: Characters end up in a new City of Adventure after opening a mysterious door.
- Mahou MUSH: The Shitennou palaces are connected to the real world via such doorways. The most frequently-used is the door into Jadeite's palace, which is at the bottom of the stairs leading down to the basement of an abandoned house in Tokyo. Zoisite's palace connects to a cavern reached via the Paris catacombs; the door to Nephrite's is on the west coast of Canada, and it's speculated that Kunzite's probably opens somewhere into the Middle East (though no one has been in a hurry to test it).
Tabletop Games
- Lords of Gossamer and Shadow: All the Doors in the game are actual doors, connected to an endless staircase called the Grand Stair.
- Planescape: In Sigil, the City of Doors, you can find portals that lead anywhere, literally, if you know where to look. However, not all "bounded spaces" are made from doors, so the supertrope Cool Gate may apply instead.
- Pyramid: A magazine article detailing spells for d20 Modern, many of which were modernised versions of classic Dungeons & Dragons spells, had John Q's Hole in the Wall, a version of Leomund's Secure Shelter which, instead of creating a freestanding building, enchanted a door to lead into an extradimensional apartment.
Video Games
- AI: The Somnium Files:
- Some of the warehouse doors in So's Somnium are actually portals that warp Aiba to other parts of the map.
- The central mechanic of Saito in Boss's body's Somnium is navigating the factory using a complex chain of doors that teleport you to different places.
- Adventure Escape: There's a chapter in Midnight Carnival where a door goes to different locations based on the pattern and color of the buttons are pressed. The buttons are missing and have to be tracked down, in order to reach the final location. In universe, the portal door is probably accomplished by illusions rather than by wormholes.
- ANNO: Mutationem: At The Consortium's facility, one of their variants kept in containment is Variant 04249-9H: Dead Space. It is a door that immediately pulls someone into an abnormal space should it ever get opened, then the victim who opened it reappears besides the door after several hours, deceased with their body being too rotten to identify.
- Big Fun in Furbyland: The minigame In the Clouds features floating, gem-encrusted doors that will teleport the flying Furby into a pocket dimension filled with gems and jewels.
- BIT.TRIP Presents... Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien: In a cutscene, a door labeled "Broom Closet" takes the Commander to The BIT.TRIP.
- Build-A-Bear Workshop: A Friend Fur All Seasons: The workshop's yellow door is said to take you to Friendship Island. Going through it occurs offscreen, but on the island itself, the door is not attached to anywhere the workshop would be if it was simply a building there.
- Deadlock (2024): The signature ability of the Doorman is to create a pair of interlinked doors in any spot of his choosing, provided they can fit. After creating them, he can also close the portals at will.
- Ganbare Neo Poke-Kun: The door to Neo Poke's room apparently leads to everywhere in the universe.
- Guacamelee!: Some secret doors to Chac Mool can be found in the dungeons, also indicated with their unique icon from the map.
- Judgment Rites: A door appears at the end of "Though This Be Madness", and takes you to the next mission. It's unclear whether it's actually a portal, or whether the whole thing is nothing more than a holographic illusion.
- The Longest Journey Saga: The Shift is a single-use variant. April (and later Saga) opens it, steps through it, then it closes. There is one scene in Chapters where Saga keeps one open while other characters talk and even walk through it.
- Manifold Garden has these as the way to travel between different levels.
- Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing: One story has a time warp in one of the closets, which opens up to a random point in time and historical figures. They lock the door and forget about it - but when they go on vacation years later, the house sitter gets curious and picks the lock to the door - getting grabbed by King Richard III, who shouts "Infidel", and pulled in.
- MiSide Every door in the world of Hi Mita connects to every other door, and can be accessed Scooby-Dooby Doors style by the Mitas. The Player gains a limited version of this ability after being given a Ring by one of the Mitas which allows him to use a pre-programmed series of portal doors.
- Mystery of Mortlake Mansion has several small doors hidden all over the real-world mansion, each requiring a specifically-coloured crystal to unlock. Once unlocked, a colour/sequence/shape-matching puzzle must be completed in order to open a Swirly Energy Thingy leading to the "shadowy" version of the room in which the door is found. The shadowy mansion in Mystery of Mortlake Mansion has the same rooms as the real-world one, but connected differently (and illogically), resulting in several isolated groups of rooms which are not accessible from each other. Travelling from one group of rooms to another can only be done by returning to the real world and using another Portal Door.
- Nexus War: In Nexus Clash, the door of a fast-food men's bathroom has been overwritten with an unholy gate to the pits of Fire and Brimstone Hell. It's implied that this may be an improvement on its previous destination.
- Persona 3: In FES, during "The Answer", there is a door in the dorm which opens to whatever someone truly needs/desires at that time. For most of the game, it opens to the mall because the characters need supplies, but later in the game, they use it to travel to the moment when the Silent Protagonist makes his Heroic Sacrifice so that they can understand it and hopefully come to terms with it.
- Psychonauts: The Psycho-Portal is literally a tiny door that makes it possible for a psychic to enter another's mind.
- Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew: When on land, the crew always leaves the island through a doorway to the Below. These doorways can only be seen by the Cursed, and they allow the crew to reach another portal door on their Ghost Ship, the Red Marley.
- Theta vs Pi 8: Doors in the game function like this, transporting you somewhere else in the level.
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has a puzzle where you enter a house, and a portal appears on each door which leads you to a room in another house. There, each door is substituted by a similar portal, where you can change the destination. Your task is to reconstruct the correct layout.
Visual Novels
- hololive: A series of doors in a corridor serves as a hub menu for the spinoff, Doppelganger. Each door leads you to an encounter in a parallel Elysium, and an encounter with a doppelgänger. A seventh door makes itself available for the Omega Ending after all six encounters are completed.
Webcomics
- Arthur, King of Time and Space: Merlin's time machine appears as a heavy wooden door in the nearest available wall.
Mordred: Sire, the other side of that wall is the exterior hull of the ship and open space. Where did that door lead to?
Arthur: Everywhere. - Awful Hospital:
- The "out of order" door leads to the Abyss, a void that exists outside of all Zones.
- The Hospital and Morgue use a door-like device to access Zones that are generated from a being's "endosphere", opened by slotting whatever they're trying to enter in an associated machine and then simply opening the doorway, like when Dr. Phage diagnoses a patient by traveling "inside" it and when Fern enters the Corpse World of one of her own dead bodies.
- Blood is Mine: The entrance to Zone Fifty bunkers, powered and operated by Sufficiently Advanced Technology.
- DreamCatcher (Hazu): Due to running in between the two worlds, Riza gets plenty of use out of a couple — one being a door, the other being the dreamcatcher.
- Flipside: Creating a portal involves slapping a door-sized piece of enchanted paper on a surface.
- Kukuburi: The picket gate that lets Nadia into Inbetween. Also, some hats.
- MS Paint Adventures:
- Problem Sleuth features portal windows as one of the main ways to move between reality and the imaginary world. They are treated like ordinary office appliances and must be plugged into an electrical outlet to function; if they lose power, anything midway through gets Portal Cut.
- Homestuck: Four-panel windows, called "fenestrated portals", return and work the same way they do in Problem Sleuth. The only difference is that the path from one window to another involves a shortcut through the Furthest Ring.
- No Rest for the Wicked: It's surrounded by Creepy Crows, it has to be dug up, it's an ordinary door flat in the ground; and when they open it, it draws November and Clare in.
Web Originals
- Puzzle Clubhouse: Some of the adjacent rooms in Puzzle Clubhouse are obviously not physically adjacent in space.
- SCP Foundation has several.
- SCP-004 ("The 12 Rusty Keys and the Door") is a door and set of twelve keys. The door opens to a different place depending on the key used to unlock it. One key leads to a room of seemingly infinite size, one leads to an Eldritch Abomination which destroys the mind of anyone who sees it, while the other ten lead to Alien Geometries which are instantly fatal to human life.
- SCP-167 ("Infinite Labyrinth") is a white cube with a door on one side. When the door is entered, the interior room has two doors. When either one of them is passed through, it leads to another room with two doors. This can be continued as long as desired. The rooms that the doors lead to remain consistent between explorations.
- SCP-249 ("The Random Door") connects to a different random nearby door every time it's used.
- SCP-432 ("Cabinet Maze") is a steel storage cabinet. When its door is opened it leads to a large underground labyrinth of steel-lined corridors.
- SCP-616 ("The Vessel and the Gate"): Once every month, the center-left emergency door of a jetliner opens and becomes a portal to Hell, allowing demonic creatures to enter the Foundation's universe.
- SCP-1130-1 ("A Handy Shortcut") is a severely weathered metal door that appears when someone uses an interactive kiosk that provides free directions. The person using the kiosk is told to go through "'Maintenance Portal 26-Sigma". When they do, they end up in a confusing maze of rooms designated SCP-1130-2.
- SCP-1557 ("Giraffe Hell") can only be reached by passing through a free-standing door in Greenland. The door is 2.5 meters wide and 3 meters high, and has a surface temperature of over 2700 °C.
- SCP-2317 ("Door to Another World") is an inconspicuous wooden door that transports people who enter it into SCP-2317-Prime, a dimension that holds an Eldritch Abomination.
- SCP-2400 ("Temporal Dilation Facility") is a steel door set in a fragment of a concrete wall. When opened it leads to an apparently infinite plane of existence with ground similar to concrete and a star similar to the Sun overhead.
- SCP-2503 ("Estimated Distance: 9,216 Years"): The door of the master bedroom of a house in Canada leads to a Bigger on the Inside alternate reality consisting of a concrete path under a dark sky.
- SCP-4005 ("The Holy and Heavenly City of Fabled China"): People infected by a powerful cognitohazard become compelled to go on a pilgrimage to the supposed True China, which often leads to them entering some door, never to be seen again.
- SCP-004 ("The 12 Rusty Keys and the Door")
- Suzy's Strange Saga: The door to the Gray Building is this, and it leads to different worlds — not always the same ones.
- The Switch (OCT): Ravin can create these from any existing doorway. They lead to the Hedge.
Western Animation
- Craig of the Creek's "Doorway to Helen": Two doorways are set up to create a passage to Helen's "other dimension", but they weren't actually doing anything.
- The "Doors" series of animations (1 2 3 4) features a long series of these as a framing device for a collaborative animation, wherein the black protagonist must overcome whatever each particular animator chooses to be their obstacle to reach the door to the next stretch of his journey. Ranging from elaborate fight sequences, strange spatial effects, others in need of aid, the avoidance of dragons, awkward social interactions, to even his own past self, each segment lasts from a few seconds to no more than two minutes.
- Kaeloo: Smileyland, the show's primary setting, is full of doors, and some of them lead to other dimensions.
- "Let's Play Paranormal Stuff": Kaeloo, Stumpy, and Mr. Cat find a door that leads to the inside of Quack Quack's head.
- "Let's Play Interdimensional Hide and Seek": The four characters use the doors to play hide-and-seek, discovering an Alternate Universe, the world of "Let's Learn" as opposed to their "Let's Play".
- "Let's Play the Door": Stumpy finds a door that leads to the inside of Mr. Cat's head.
- "Let's Play Replicating": Stumpy tricks his clones through a door into another dimension by telling them that Ursula is on the other side.
- Miraculous Ladybug: The superhero Dean Gate/Doorman from the "Miraculous New York" special has the power to turn any door into a portal that leads to other doors, no matter the location.
- The Owl House:
- A major plot element in the series is Eda's portal door, which is the only known reliable method of freely passing between the human and demon realms. It can be folded up into a briefcase and moved as need be, but always opens to a fixed point in the human realm (the front door of a run down shack near Luz's house).
- The Secret Room of Shortcuts is full of magic doors that lead to other rooms in Hexside, which the detention kids use to peek on other classes and learn other types of magic. The doors don't need to open to other doors, instead creating doors out of whatever happens to be at the location (walls, lockers, etc.).
- The Simpsons: In a Treehouse of Horror episode, Homer finds a portal to the "third dimension" behind the bookcase.
That's weird, it's like something out of that twilighty show about that zone.
- The title character of Mot has the power to turn any door into a Portal Door that leads to any other door he chooses.
- Steven Universe: The entrance to the Crystal Temple is a normally-featureless door that is magically augmented by the Gems to open up to specific areas depending on which Gem activates it.
- Twelve Forever: Only in the pilotnote , Reggie had the ability to use her magical clay key-like totem to open a portal to Party Island behind doors of any variety by activating (or recharging) it with a Magical Incantation.
