Extremely Dusty Home



"Certainly he didn't expect to come home and find a clear inch of dust."

- Dumbledore, Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince

It's a place so dusty, the cobwebs are basically measured in depth. If there aren't cobwebs, everything has a layer of gray from all the dust anyway. Heck, the only thing keeping dust from getting kicked up everywhere someone walks around is that it would be difficult to film (and be very uncomfortable for the cast and crew).

On the gritty end of Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty.

A Sub-Trope of Scenery Gorn.

Compare Cobweb Jungle, Cobweb of Disuse, Trash of the Titans.

Anime and Manga

 * This is the first obvious sign that something's gone weird with the world in the Urusei Yatsura Non-Serial Movie: Onsen Mark's house is absolutely covered from floor to ceiling, wall to wall with a layer of dust and mold.
 * A variation in Kiki's Delivery Service is when Kiki rents an apartment from a baker. She finds the entire apartment extremely dusty, however, after further inspection, the apartment is caked (no pun intended) in flour rather than dust.
 * Howl's Moving Castle. Poor old Sophie has to clean up the whole thing.

Film - Animated

 * The Dwarfs' home in Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, and all takeoffs from it.

Film - Live-Action

 * Picture comes from the first act of the Roger Corman anthology film Tales Of Terror, where a girl visits the home of her father, who let most of the place get this way after his wife died.
 * This trope shows up a lot in the Roger Corman Poe pictures; in the comedy adaptation of The Raven Peter Lorre improvised the quip "Tough place to keep clean, huh?" as he and Vincent Price walk through an extensive and overly-cobwebbed room.
 * Not Roger Corman, but Vincent Price: House on Haunted Hill.
 * Dagon has a staffed hotel that is at the same time coated in dust and cobwebs.

Literature

 * Miss Havisham's abandoned wedding feast in Great Expectations.
 * Appears all the time in Dracula, notably in the old wing of castle Dracula and in his purchased mansion.
 * 13 Grimmauld Place, in Harry Potter qualifies.

Live-Action TV

 * The Munsters' house. "Dusting" actually means spreading more dust around.
 * The mansion of The Addams Family.

Tabletop Games

 * AD&D included a spell that made a house look this way, creating an illusion that it had been long abandoned.

Theme Parks

 * Parts of The Haunted Mansion in the Disney Theme Parks. The cast members use a machine similar to a fertilizer spreader to spray fake cobwebs around just to keep it optimally dingy.

Video Games

 * The mansion of Luigi's Mansion, while not as smothering with dust as most examples, had enough that Luigi kicked up a trail of it wherever he went in the mansion and most vacuumed objects were give a puff of dust before releasing any items within. Played a touch straighter in one basement room with large dust piles that had to be vacuumed up to proceed.
 * ADOM: The Dusty Dungeon Level (DDL) and the level below it, Very Dusty Dungeon Level (VDDL). They are pretty much Take Our Word for It though, as the graphics are too simple to actually show the setting.
 * Pipit's house in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is so dusty that Pipit's mother actually pays Link to clean it with his Gust Bellows, a futuristic device resembling a leaf-blower. And then you learn where Pipit's patrol money winds up...