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 …!
--- back to beyond dark tourism ---