Fictional dark places

  

In an, in my view, overly broad definition of the concept of dark tourism this could also comprise travel to places that are not actually dark but played a role in fictional portrayals of something "dark" – in particular places that served as film sets for horror movies. This is in fact quite a field given the enormous volume of the film and television industry's output in this genre, and its touristic spin-off is surprisingly popular (esp. in the USA). However, as with paranormal tourism, I choose to exclude this here and rather stick to reality. Besides, such fictional dark places are covered elsewhere on the Web well enough already (see also other resources).

 
However: there are a couple of (potential) borderline (or overlap) cases that an exception can possibly be made for – e.g. the Third-Man tours of Vienna's sewers: the reason these tours are offered go back to a work of fiction (the 1949 film of the same name), but they do take you underground, into the dark (literally), in the same way as other tours elsewhere do without relying on such a fictional connection (see underworld tourism).

 
Another borderline case is that of Dracula-related tourism: the 99.9% fictional vampire story has a footing in reality too, thus travel to sites (esp. in Romania) related to the real historical figure of Vlad Tepes "the Impaler" may qualify as dark tourism after all (and is frequently marketed as something like dark tourism, even if the exact expression "dark" isn't used). But then again the historical background is centuries old – so it can only be considered part of the modernity-anchored concept of dark tourism through the fact that the Dracula-myth was, and regularly still is, popularized in contemporary media (cue Buffy and the Twilight saga), but then again mostly in a fictional way. It is a complex borderline case indeed …!