Evil Elevator

Italian poster for *The Lift*. The tagline says: "The stairs... The stairs... For the love of God use the stairs."

Or Evilator for short.

...Sorry.

Unlike the Elevator Action Sequence trope, where it's a fight scene in and around an Elevator, this is just an Elevator, that seems to be out to get you and anyone else that dares to go near it.

Either because it's vicious, or it has a cruel sense of humor.

The Scary, or 'Evil' version is where the elevator cable suddenly snaps without warning - plunging the riders down, either a few feet to terrify, or to their deaths. Sometimes the cable breaks while someone is inside the shaft, squishing the poor schmuck. Or if it doesn't fall, it makes ominous, creaking noises, or has a tendency to get stuck between floors - the odds of the last increases during an emergency situation. This trope deals with elevators that apparently have a mind of their own. However, if the elevator fails due to explainable causes (bad maintenance, fire, earthquake), or because someone else damaged it, that's not an Evil Elevator, that's Elevator Failure.

When it's just mean, it jerk ups without warning, or drops. In very silly settings, this means the riders end up pinned to the ceiling, or flattened into a pancake. Often times, this kind of elevator has an operator that seems immune to the extreme forces that are apparently at work.

And of course, the doors closing can rip a man's arms off.

The main distinction between an evil and a mean elevator is that the evil is never played for comedy and usually results in someone dying, while the mean elevator leaves characters alive - but usually needing a change of clothes.

In Real Life, the modern-day elevator is safer than an escalator. However, if you are in a fictional setting, ride the elevator at your own risk.

The Hellevator is usually safe to ride, but the place it takes you to is decidedly evil and unsafe.

Examples of Evil Elevator include:

Films -- Live-Action

The title "star" of the Dutch-made horror film The Lift is a murderous elevator. Dick Maas, writer/director of The Lift, later remade the movie as Down (a.k.a., in its American DVD release, The Shaft).
Resident Evil has a woman getting decapitated as she tries to escape a trapped elevator. The reason she's trying to escape is that the crowded elevator she's in is stopped by the A.I. -- then they hears the screams from the elevator next door passing by as it freefalls from the top floor to the bottom.
Final Destination 2 had a similar scenario with a malfunctioning elevator. A woman gets her hair caught on a mannequin hook, panicks, and falls. The elevator tears her head off. Earlier it took off a guy's shoe.
Spies Like Us. The two Ace Tomato Company (eg. CIA) bigshots enter a drive-in theatre and activate the Pepsi machine. Next thing they know, they're screaming as they plunge down a Bottomless Pit to the Elaborate Underground Base.
- This was spoofed in Undercover Brother when the hero screams hysterically as he thinks he's plunging down a similar endless elevator shaft... only to realize he's just dropped a single story.
Inverted in 2007 horror film Blackout, where all the danger of the elevator is caused by the characters, rather than the elevator just endangering them on a whim.
In the second Omen movie a scientist about to expose the Antichrist is killed when his elevator stucks and a cable falls from above and bisects both the car and the guy.
Much of Devil takes place in an elevator. Though it's not the elevator as much as who's in it ...
In the film They, a victim of the boogeyman-like living night terrors tries to flee his infested apartment in an old-fashioned elevator, which proceeds to jerk up and down and rattle him half to death. Double subverted in that he makes it out of the elevator alive, only to be dragged down the open shaft by the night terror.
In Poltergeist III an entire skyscraper is taken over by evil spirits that can travel through mirrors. Of course, the elevators are lined with mirrors.... And if that wasn't enough, a character is pushed into an open elevator shaft by one of these now-corporeal entities.
The protagonist of Vamp has a close call with a malfunctioning elevator early in the film.
The elevator in Boo will only take you to the hospital's very haunted third floor, no matter what button you press.
In Mission Impossible, the elevator Jack is sitting on top of is sabotaged to cause it to move upwards rapidly, causing Jack to be killed by the machinery at the top of the shaft.
In Gremlins 2, the Gremlins commandeer one of the Clamp building's elevators with Kate inside it.

Literature

There is a variant in Survivors Quest. Survivors in the ruins of Outbound Flight rigged the turbolifts—think elevators IN SPACE, with repulsor beams replacing cables—to imprison the heroes and suspend them between two Dreadnaughts. If they tries to cut their way out, one repulsor beam would shut off and the other one would crush them against a Dreadnaught. The two action-oriented parties immediately blocks the cameras and gets to work getting out; the noncombatant party talks their way into getting released. The one including Mara Jade and Luke Skywalker gets out of this using Badass Back, a synchronized strike, and a Wire Dilemma. The one including Aurek Seven gets out by siphoning power from one cable and directing it to another.
In Dream Park, the AI controlling a horror-themed attraction speaks to passengers entering the ride via elevator. It informs them that it's tired of pandering to humans' craving for fake scares, and will see to it that one of them genuinely won't survive the experience. One of the passengers does appear to die horribly, but she's a hologram and part of the attraction.
In the The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth series, The Wall Of Clouds has an elevator that has a tendency to break and stop between floors. After several long minutes of terrified screams from the person using the elevator, it will again work and a dead body will be all that's left. It's implied that this has happened many times.
In one of the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, Luke Invokes this trope, he has to get a work crew out of a construction mecha during an emergency, and projects the image of a hungry maw over the elevator doors to make the workers take the stairs.
Common in Give Yourself Goosebumps, notably "Shop Till You Drop ... Dead!" and "Into the Jaws of Doom". Averted in "Elevator to Nowhere", in which the titular "elevator" is actually a dimension-hopping device and doesn't go up or down.
Philip Kerr's novel Gridiron, in which a computer-controlled building is taken over by a homicidal AI, has a variation. The evil computer kills a character by moving an express lift upwards at high speed, then stopping it suddenly. The victim is then described as "looking like Frankenstein's Monster".

Live-Action TV

During one episode of Fringe, an electrical manipulator gets in an elevator with several people and accidentally drives it into the ground.
One episode of The X-Files involves an elevator that is part of an office building's sentient computer network killing an investigator.
Supernatural: In 4.17 "It's a Terrible Life", a security guard gets killed by a malfunctioning elevator in a haunted office building.
The Bob Newhart Show
- Not evil but sort of cruel: after a therapy session, a pleased Bob is telling one of his regular patients (Mr. Carlin) how well he is coming along with his inability to make decisions. As they walk to the two elevators, Mr. Carlin presses the button and both elevators' doors open at the same time. He stares at them for a while and storms out the stairway exit.
- Bob himself is nearly done in on two occasions by a missing elevator car-and one time sees Death itself waiting in one that does arrive.
In the Kolchak the Night Stalker episode "The Devil's Platform", satanic magic sends the Victim of the Week plunging to his doom in an elevator.

Tabletop Games

Almost every elevator in the Paranoia RPG qualifies; they possess A.I., have very boring jobs, and tend to be very, very disgruntled. Thus appears in the book Extreme Paranoia: Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Shot set in the universe.
- One of the official missions uses malfunctioning elevators as a Running Gag, but it's presented more like poor maintenance.
The card game Hecatomb had a creature type that was all evil animated objects, one of which was an evil elevator.

Theme Parks

The Tower of Terror ride, in which a possessed elevator drops guests thirteen stories.
Rides like this appear all over theme parks in the U.S, often called Space Shots and Turbo Drops.

Video Games

Fairly common in earlier FPS games, the first Jedi Knight for example, but usually due to the physics involved. If you weren't getting crushed underneath the descending platform, you were being squashed between the lift and the corridor ceiling. And you can basically forget actually jumping while going down.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has one, or at least implied from the character's reactions. Alucard sounded terrified, while Richter sounded like he was dying while riding it!
- Subverted in Order of Ecclesia, where the elevator has Spikes of Doom on the bottom... but it's on your side, because you drop the thing onto Brachyura. Shanoa even gets off a Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner ("Go to Hell.") in the process. (In Albus mode, it's "Showtime!" instead.)
Half-Life has a minor evil elevator moment in which the elevator only drops a few feet, but it's right over a vat of radiation.
- There's also another elevator early on containing two scientists which drops from a lethal height. The event is timed so that it triggers a few moments after you reach it, so if you hit the button and don't know that's not what triggers it, you feel like a jerk.
Halo 3 had this in the second level.
First Encounter Assault Recon had a preoccupation with elevators that go about halfway and then stop, forcing you to crawl, bash, shoot and stumble your way through what should have been a 5-second elevator ride but instead takes at least an entire level. There's an evil version too: The player is making his way through the maintenance areas, passing through an elevator shaft. Without warning, an elevator freefalls down the shaft a few feet in front of you. Oh, but there is one (count them, one goddamn time) that you get where you need to go without getting shot at... the doors open just in time to see the person you were chasing driving away very quickly.
Every elevator in World of Warcraft that you can die from falling off has inevitably accumulated a kill count, but far and away the most notoriously evil are the Undercity elevators (coincidentally, the obvious way to enter the city), the Aldor Rise elevator in Shattrath City, and the real first boss of Serpentshrine Cavern.
- Those Undercity elevators really hate Tauren.
- And with Cataclysm's entry raid "Blackwing Descent" has one so evil that strategy guides have been written for it, and is being tracked on the official armoury.
- Also, Orgrimmar recently added some elevators to the top of a mesa, where the zeppelins and flight master are now located. However, because of what may be some kind of glitch, you'll occasionally just fall right through the platform.
Fifth boss in Radiant Silvergun is an elevator which tries to destroy the player with various components. It is also able to replace each destroyed component twice.
In Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, an evil spirit of Ocean House Hotel tries to drop a lift on you.
Variation: In the classic arcade game Elevator Action, the player can control his elevator to squash enemy agents passing underneath.

Real Life

There's a fair amount of people in real life that are so terrified by the possibility of the elevators being of this sort that they take the stairs.
And for a reason. It sometimes does happen in real life...
Not so much evil as stupid, the University of Chicago's Computation Institute has an elevator that has been lovingly termed the "Bogovator" due to its erratic behavior. Much like the bogosort algorithm it's named after, the elevator (so the joke goes) goes to a random floor when you punch in a number, and if it's right, the doors open; otherwise, it tries again. While this is not quite true, it has certainly been observed to go the wrong direction, and occasionally go the requested floor, forget why it's there, NOT open the doors, and go to a different floor instead. Possibly the only elevator that gets lost.