Other Side

El explores the "Upside Down", in Stranger Things (2016 series)...

Medium Elise Rainier explores "The Further" in Insidious (2010 franchise)

(a generic astral netherworld of shadow and darkness)

The Other Side, AKA Limbo, The Upside-Down, The Further, The Void, Outside, Anwynn, The Dark Side, The Dark, The Darkness, The Deep, The Deeps, The Great Deeps, The Nether, The Nether World, The Netherworld, Beyond the Gate, The Abyss, The Underworld, The Afterlife, Nar-Mattaru, The Dungeon Dimensions, The Shadowlands, The Shadows, The Spaces Between the Spaces, Deep Dendo

In the Mythos

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...." - Psalm 23:4
"I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death; to a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness." - Job 10:21-22

Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit - a Dark Side.
- Introduction from Tales From the Darkside (1983 series)

...The darkness which filled the passage seemed to become suddenly of a dull violet colour; not, as if a light had been shone; but as if the natural blackness of the night had changed colour. And then, coming through this violet night, through this violet-coloured gloom, came a little naked Child, running. In an extraordinary way, the Child seemed not to be distinct from the surrounding gloom; but almost as if it were a concentration of that extraordinary atmosphere; as if that gloomy colour which had changed the night, came from the Child... running, with the natural movement of the legs of a chubby human child, but in an absolute and inconceivable silence. It was a very small Child, and must have passed under the table; but I saw the Child through the table, as if it had been only a slightly darker shadow than the coloured gloom. In the same instant, I saw that a fluctuating glimmer of violet light outlined the metal of the gun-barrels and the blade of the sword-bayonet, making them seem like faint shapes of glimmering light, floating unsupported where the table-top should have shown solid.... I saw the Child jump to one side, and hide behind some half-seen object, that was certainly nothing belonging to the passage. I stared, intently, with a most extraordinary thrill of expectant wonder, with fright making goose-flesh of my back. And even as I stared, I solved for myself the less important problem of what the two black clouds were that hung over a part of the table. I think it very curious and interesting, the double working of the mind, often so much more apparent during times of stress. The two clouds came from two faintly shining shapes, which I knew must be the metal of the lanterns; and the things that looked black to the sight with which I was then seeing, could be nothing else but what to normal human sight is known as light....
- William Hope Hodgson, "The Searcher of the End Room"

The "Other Side", also known by a variety of other names, is a place of darkness and shadow, beyond our world in an astral plane, similar to reality but more like a reflection or shadow of it, not in the spaces we know, but between the spaces, bridged or sealed by metaphysical "gates" or "doorways" or "bridges", an alien place full of shapeless and shadowy monsters waiting in the dark for an opportunity to cross over the Abyss into our reality. Typically, someone who finds him/herself traveling to the Other Side runs a risk of either never returning, or "coming back wrong" as an incomplete or empty shell of his/herself, or as a shell fill with some alien purpose, personality, and mind....

The Nameless Mist pervades the Other Side, and in the furthest reaches of this vast dark territory lay the Ultimate Gate, beyond which stretches the Ultimate Abyss, the Last Void where Yog-Sothoth dwells hidden in darkness.

Faerie Land (Deep Dendo)

Arthur Machen's Little People appear to live in a strange, alien, perhaps subterranean faerie land, "Deep Dendo", described in "The White People" as "...some great white place where they lived, where the trees and the grass were all white, and there were white hills as high up as the moon, and a cold wind...", "the sky... like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo..." (Arthur Machen, "The White People").

Much of the mythology about the faerie worlds these beings live in suggest that they normally exist in a parallel dimension (see the Other Side) and cross over into our world at times and places of uncertainty (liminality), when the veil between worlds is thin: cemeteries (places between life and death), dawn and twilight (times that are neither night or day), equinoxes (times where neither day nor night are dominant), frontiers and wildernesses (places that are neither completely unknown nor completely civilized), and so on. A journey into the shadowy faerie lands seems a bit like a journey into a nightmare version of the Dreamlands or through some kind of portal into some alien world.

Associated Mythos Elements

• race: The Drowners: Bugg-Shash and Yibb-Tstll
• films: appears in...
  • Event Horizon (1997 film)
  • Absentia (2011 film)
  • They (2002 film)
  • The Dark (2005 film)
  • Poltergeist (1982 franchise)
  • Insidious (2010 franchise)
  • Sinister (2012 franchise)
  • Under the Skin (2013 film)
  • Judas Ghost (2013 film)
  • Stranger Things (2016 series)