A Door, or to be more precise, the door of a wardrobe or cupboard. With a fantastic story or magical adventure, if you go through and follow the lure that led you there. However, there was usually a price or penalty for straying into lands unknown, often with a dark undertone.

Narnia – a serious adventure ensues from this tale, and is one of the first ones I think of when it comes to crazy wardrobe lands.

Time Bandits – this is the second one I think of, again a thrill ride of events, with a demon like supreme being overshadowing the fun.

Poltergeist – not such a fun adventure on the other side of that door, and gives reason to wonder what might just be on the ‘other side’.

Monsters Inc – Doors to children’s bedrooms through their wardrobes, creepy as hell as a storyline. But because it’s animated and colourful, the weird under and overtones don’t seem to get discussed much.

Coraline – not quite a wardrobe or cupboard, but A Portal through a tiny bricked up door, not a wardrobe, but still the face of the portal to an alternate ‘reality’.

Alice in Wonderland – no door, but she fell through a rather long and strange tunnel. As with a few other tales of tunnels, the Woolpit Green Children and the origin of the cabbage patch kids. Although they are often said to be caves and tunnels, so the story widens once you start factoring in caves.

Winchester House (California) – a very strange house and one I was fortunate enough to visit many years ago. It has lots of features that don’t make sense, but one of them are doorways that open to solid brick walls – like the above in Coraline. And wardrobes that are doors to the next room. Weird on the face of it, but maybe not if it was perhaps for others to use, if you catch my drift.

But it seems there is definitely a theme of something lurking and using doorways as a gateway from somewhere else. And as I always say, it could just be imagination and good storytelling. Or it could be, something does have access through those portals, and is indeed, lurking…

(c) K Wicks