"This was no chicken, it was evil manifest."
— Kahlan Amnell (on the Chimes of Death), Sword of Truth: Soul of the Fire
It's big, powerful and nasty. It's not humanoid, but familiar all the same.
This trope is for Eldritch Abominations that either naturally resemble (somewhat) ordinary animals, or else possess Animorphism and spend a good deal of time in the animal form. A Draconic Abomination takes the form of a dragon in particular. If the abomination has similar behavior to its non-eldritch counterparts, it might also be an Almighty Idiot.
See also Botanical Abomination for similar perversions of a different part of the natural world.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Most of the Juuma from 3×3 Eyes resemble grotesque animals of sort carrying supernatural powers and bound to the life of their user, consuming a bit of it each time they're conjured (as such, only Wu, who benefit from Complete Immortality, can safely handle them). Most of them resembles insects or arthropods (Tu Zhao, for example, looks like a crab-like critted with a massive set of double blades on its tail) and range from rather mundane (a snake made of lightning or a giant salmon with a body made of gaseous shadow) to bizarre (a quartet of lizard-like tiny bipeds with an exposed brain in a dome for a head).
- In Animal Land, the Chimeras that Giller uses are unnatural monstrosities that aren't anything compared to the relatively natural-looking animals of Animal Land. A number of them look more like they come from Berserk than a lighthearted animal manga.
- Berserk:
- The Beast, Guts's Enemy Within and possibly the sentient incarnation of his hatred and rage (and boy does he have a lot of both), usually takes the form of a large canine with lightning bolt-shaped eyes. The Berserker armor's helmet, which was previously skull-shaped, now resembles its face when Guts wears it.
- Several Apostles have animalistic One-Winged Angel forms, most notably Zodd (pantherlike minotaur), Rosine (gigantic moth), and the Count (humongous slug).
- A lot of Hollows in Bleach have animal-like forms.
- Blood-C: Some of the Elder Bains have animal-like forms, including a "spider" and a "rabbit".
- The kutsutsura encountered by Marisa in Chapter 13 of Forbidden Scrollery takes the form of an undefined animal made out of black smoke.
- Hellsing:
- One of Alucard's alternate forms is a many-eyed Hellhound that he calls Baskerville.
- The Captain, in his wolf form, more resembles this than a traditional werewolf.
- From Kakurenbo, one of the demons, Blood-Taker, is a giant vaguely-mechanical lion-dog. That hunts down children.
- My Hero Academia: Vigilantes: In the main series, it's mentioned that animals can very rarely have Quirks, and here we see an example. "Queen Bee" is in fact a mutated bee with a Quirk that allows her to control a human host, while also directing her hive of bees. She enters the host's body through their left eye, leaving it permanently ruined. The only way to get her out is to kill the host, then rip the queen out of the eye, and revive the host with a defibrillator. And Villain Factory apparently has more than one of these bees...
- Naruto has the Tailed Beasts, huge beasts made up of chakra with a set number of tails that rank their hierarchy within them, but are otherwise exaggerated versions of living animals like a fox or raccoon dog. The Ten Tails that they originate from does not resemble any natural creature and is more alien than the rest of them, though even it has an animalistic form -- in this case, a rabbit.
- Some of the Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion look like animals; Gaghiel is an aquatic creature that looks like a cross between a shark, a whale and a pliosaur, Arael is an Energy Being that looks vaguely like a gigantic bird and Matarael looks like a Giant Spider.
- The Raven in Princess Tutu. He's a monstrous, shadowy entity with a corrupting influence who only vaguely resembles a giant bird.
- Kyubey from Puella Magi Madoka Magica is ultimately revealed to be this — and doubles as an Adorable Abomination.
- The web-manga Something Like A Cat is about a young boy who finds something that resembles a black cat, aside from the fact it doesn't seem to have any mouth or legs, and takes it in as his pet under the impression it actually is a cat. Despite the facts it seems to shrink when bathed, collars go through it as though it has no solid anything under the ball of almost-fur, it can stick to the ceiling, prefers bread rather than meat, can entirely engulf small children, can split into pieces and merge back with no consequences, makes Black Speech sounds and can shine brightly in the dark, whatever it is, it's content to otherwise behave as a loyal pet.
- Many beasts in Toriko, particularly if they're from the Gourmet World. Case in point, the Ficasdaltonphant
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Arts
- As this article from Bogleech points out that Western dragons were depicted with this trope until very recently. This is because they were meant to be symbolic of Satan, thus not to be admired as badass or fearsome, but despised as vile and sickening — a point that the article discusses at length and is heavily emphasized in the art.
- The "Persian Three-Legged Ass", a colossal unicorn-like beast mentioned in Persian myth, which, while not the original unicorn myth, is most certainly related. Read here.
- Many paintings by Salvador Dalí are famous for depicting horses, elephants and similar animals with spindly, enormous legs and other nightmarish features.
Comic Books
- Faith Dreamside gives us Belu, a monster who consumes old discarded dreams. He resembles a massive snake with horns, wings, two sets of eyes, and a face that's split lengthwise.
- Hound: Morrigan in monster form is a gigantic crow-like beast with red eyes.
- Marvel Universe brings us the Makluans, a race of highly advanced aliens who strongly resemble (and are said to inspire) the dragons of various folklore. They were even worshipped as gods at one point in history. Perhaps the most iconic member of their race is Fin Fang Foom, whose name translates into "He whose limbs shatter mountains and whose back scrapes the sun".
- Requiem Vampire Knight had Aiwass, a Lord of Limbo in the shape of a mandrill monkey.
- Shazam! has the Hyperfly, the matured form of Mr. Mind. In this state, the previously inch-long caterpillar-like Mr. Mind has grown into a planet-plus sized winged insectoid which is capable of shifting between dimensions at will and devouring space/time. Debuting in 52 (Week 51, Day 7), the Hyperfly is responsible for the distinct 52-world multiverse that DC Comics occupies, having selectively devoured portions of each universe's history and causing it to mutate into its distinctive form, when originally they were all identical to each other.
- Several supernatural critters in Silk Hills take this form. The deer-thing outwardly appears to be an aggressive and wild deer, but to certain victims it reveals a human face buried in its neck, and the deer's body can absorb people whole. The godly entity that Celia encounters while tripping on moth dust is an unfathomably large mass of moths taking the shape of The Mothman, and the victims of the moth cultists transform into gigantic mothlike creatures, too.
- Supergirl story Supergirl's Greatest Challenge: A planetary explosion caused by a doomsday device turned a laboratory bird into a humongous energy being who is powerful enough to destroy planets by accident. Despite its body being a white-outlined, translucent and intangible mass of positive ions -which led Kara to call it Negative Creature-, it still looks like a giant bird of prey.
Fan Works
- Besides the Will of Evil: Reiziger was once a perfectly normal caribou, but whatever he is now, he most certainly isn't one anymore. He maintains the appearance of a normal caribou (if one with solid red eyes) most of the time, but then his mask will drop or "blur", at which something becomes visible that is vast, amorphous, dark and hungry, with far too many antlers, eyes, teeth and mouths. The author explicitly compares him to Nyarlathotep and Azathoth in a couple of end-of-chapter notes.
- The Bridge: Several.
- Grand King Ghidorah superficially resemble dragons like those found in Equestria and in Terra's ancient past, but is a 100 million year old cosmic entity. His insides are made of molten, golden ichors and the closest equivalent he has to a vital organ is a crystalline sphere inside his chest that houses the souls of all those he's devoured.
- The three Primordial Aspects of Terra also resemble living animals but are even older and predate life on Terra. Enjin looks like a chimera of different primates, but has Combat Tentacles forming an external rib cage and is made of physical mana.
- The Nexuses of Light and Dark Magic in Equestria, Harmony and Grogar, look like a pony and a goat respectively. Each is a Physical God whose power is on the same level as the Big Bad Bagan who is also a god.
- Child of the Storm has a lot of them:
- Fenrir, a colossal (and vile) wolf capable of eating an Asgardian whole (considering that said Asgardian was Sif, and he'd bitten her hand off, she just cut her way out from the inside).
- Jormungandr, the Father of Dragons, and one of Surtur's Great Captains, an absurdly huge dragon that Thor has previously defeated... by throwing him into a neutron star.
- The Elder Wyrm, one of Jormungandr's many children, and a fully fledged planet killing wingless dragon the size of a mountain.
- Children of an Elder God: The first enemy fought by Shinji was an Eldritch Abomination which looked like a giant spider. Later on, Asuka fought a green, crab-like Elder God.
- Codex Equus: Many instances exist in the Codexverse, but it especially applies to the deities of Equus. Since deities have a different biological nature from mortals, they stop aging the moment they achieve godhood, only becoming more eldritch and Stronger with Age over even millennia. The most prominent example is the Alicorns - according to Queen Mzazi, the older an Alicorn is, the more they start becoming eldritch in nature. Signs include a wing color gradient, multiple wings, elemental/ethereal manes and tails, elemental/ethereal wing feathers, a mutated Cutie Mark, and increased physical size.
- Golden Scepter is a divine Eohippus/Pony hybrid due to being a son of one of the Thirteen Empyreans, and because deities in the Codexverse get Stronger with Age, his true form is an ancient Alicorn with Eohippus traits (which his sons would inherit to a lesser degree), six wings made of holy fire, and a mane and tail made of black spatial energy, displaying scenes of stars and yellow giants, and a Holy Halo. Dr. Endless Dreams has once described his true form as "a star in living space". However, he is a benevolent example, as he is a Reasonable Authority Figure, a loving husband and father, and a Living Legend. He usually appears as a normal-looking Alicorn or, in certain situations, an Earthpony stallion named 'Revelation' to be closer to mortals. A canonized Codexverse drabble reveals that at some point, he started to grow his fourth set of wings, something that Queen Mzazi noticed during a friendly visit.
- Queen Mzazi is also one, being in Golden Scepter's age-group yet is 'older' than him. While capable of assuming a 'normal' Zebralicorn form or even a mortal form to mingle with her peers or her children, her true form is that of a gigantic Zebralicorn goddess with eight wings made of lightning, a pink and green mane and tail made out of lightning storms. As a full-fledged Zebralicorn goddess, she also has chimeric traits like an Abada's short nasal horn and the Zebrican Kelpie's legs which are made of solidified water. According to her, her eldritch appearance is the result of her eons of uninterrupted growth, and Alicorns in general would develop eldritch traits at around her age. Despite her supernaturally eldritch appearance, though, she's both a very benevolent goddess and a highly-respected Queen, and loves her mortal Zebra children.
- Isati of the Abyssinian pantheon is a feline variant. Much like the similarly ancient Golden Scepter and Mzazi, she can assume a "casual"-looking divine form when around mortals, but her true form is described as as a huge (though smaller than Mzazi, who's older than her) and ancient saber-toothed lioness whose mane burns in a shape that makes her head resemble the summer sun, while her tail and fur also burn constantly. However, as is the case with most ancient divines, she is a very benevolent, motherly, and even playful individual who loves both her divine and mortal children, and will protect them from even her own tyrannical children if need be.
- Queen Andromeda's true divine form as a Celestial Pony goddess is described as a much larger mare with six wings, and a mane and tail made of solar storms. It's noted that in this form, she looks rather similar to Golden Scepter, whose true divine form is also a six-winged Alicorn, except his hair is made of black spatial energy and his wings are made of holy fire.
- The god of Requited Love, Canteros, often appears as one due to being so old. Like his father, Amareros, it's implied that he's really an Eldritch Abomination who often changes his appearance because his true form might affect the sanity of even lesser divines. His most favorite form to appear in is that of a tall and handsome blue Alicorn with a shimmering pelt, huge yet beautiful iridescent butterfly wings (with the maximum being ten), a rippling mane and tail made of iridescent light blue energy, a Holy Halo made of rainbow-colored light, and a "Cutie Mark" depicting a flock of butterflies in the shape of a heart with some flying away. Despite his eldritch appearance, however, he's a benevolent god devoted to spreading Love and giving mortals their happy endings.
- Due to being an Alicorn goddess who lived during Pre-Known History, Midday Messenger is as ancient and powerful as Golden Scepter. Her 'default' form is a blue-furred Alicorn with a mane and tail made of white energy that's always flowing north, a wing gradient going from blue to white, and a radiant halo behind her head. Her true form is a massive Alicorn with six wings made of wind, and her mane and tail shows images of various places that she's previously traveled to when looked at.
- Unlike her husband, Prince Clear Voice, and most of her in-laws within the Terran Royal Family, Princes Applejack/Veritas is relatively more eldritch in comparison and, due to her belief on Honesty, far more willing show off traits of her true Alicorn form, like the Musical Pony's chest gem and the Sea Pony's aquatic gills/tail. She also has one large eye concealed on the underside of her wings, the left eye being "Cruel Truth" and the right eye being "Kind Truth", something that no other Alicorn has. Being a demigoddess of Honesty and Truth, Applejack/Veritas doesn't see any reason to not show everyone the full scope of what she is.
- Much like his mother, Prince Excelsius' true form is incredibly eldritch due to devouring various deities, infernal beings, and other sapient lifeforms. In his case, his true form is described as a towering Alicorn whose body is lined with light-reflective materials like crystals and glass, his mane and tail are of rippling golden light that shows off moments in history where pride was used for both good and evil, and his wings are mirrors of hardened, golden light that show viewers a reflection of their own potential magnificence. His presence is constantly surrounded by a soft glow (though he can choose to appear blindingly radiant if he wants to), his Cutie Mark is also glowing, and his head is adorned with a balefully radiant halo of light.
- Following her absorption of Ymlezt'xix, Dr. Endless Dreams became an Eldritch Abomination that still resembles a Pony mare, but is so distorted that she now looks like the twilight of a dream, her body existing in physical reality, the dream realm, and several other adjacent dimensions simultaneously. Her body produces numerous tentacles that she can shape into Alicorn-like wings, and she has No Mouth as well as eyes that display an endless loop of herself looking back when looked at. She also possesses a strange mindset and all kinds of eldritch powers. Despite her transformation, though she's still a benevolent mare at heart.
- After re-Ascending, Moon Ray Vaughoof (now King Tunglið Hreinsar Innlausn-Heimdrasil) becomes an eldritch Alicorn whose appearance changes depending on certain cycles — his Alpine form is essentially a rotting corpse covered in dead foliage, his Equus form is made of clouds and space with his 'head' made of multiple faces of himself from different timelines/dimensions, and his Silicon form is a tree-like Alicorn covered in healthy foliage. His most consistent traits in all three forms are his electric guitar Cutie Mark, ten wings, a purple wing gradient, a white streak in his hair, a multilayered halo, and a pair of great antlers. Because his true forms drive people mad through sheer presence, he starts using either his "default" Alicorn form or his mortal Earthpony form so he can interact with mortals and young deities safely. That being said, his transformation left him with an alien mindset (albeit a benevolent one), including unique emotional and thought processes that are different from the norm.
- Silk Dawn's true divine form is a massive, glowing peacock-like entity made of light, with multiple eyes all over her form. Her 'default' Alicorn form is also eldritch to a lesser extent, being an Alicorn with a mane and tail made of rainbow energy.
- Prince Varázsló is an Alicorn-Deer Draconequus hybrid god who, alongside his twin brother, was turned into this by Tuzu, the Magic Primeval to protect him from the effects of the Well of Eternity. In Varázsló's case, his true divine form resembles less a hybrid and more a shifting, distorting mass with mirror-like butterfly wings that show future versions of the person looking into them, a mane and tail that break into sparkling orbs that show various future scenarios and alternative realities, and eye-holes that inflict existential dread by showing the dark expanse of space. As a consequence, anyone who is not an older deity has to wear 'Perception Filter' glasses to protect themselves from insanity when interacting with him while he's in his true form.
- Joyous Freedom, a Pony-turned-Demon goddess, has a true divine form where she's an equine Demon goddess who rivals (ex-)Princess Celestia in height, with eldritch traits like large, curved demonic horns, golden-yellow draconic eyes, a mane and tail that form ribbon-like locks with pink tips, and pink vein-like contours covering her horns with eye-like bulbs adorning them. She also has what appears to be a single throbbing demonic vein going from her neck down to just above her groin, with a bulbous red demonic eye surrounded by a baleful green ring. In this form, she has a beautiful, alluring presence that incites lustful attraction in even the most upstanding mortals, usually males, though it's noted she can change her appearance and species at will.
- Following the 'Cosmic Prophet Debacle', Prince Healing Song/Medela Cantor Cahaya's true divine form became this thanks to prolonged exposure to Caelum Filum. His true form is an eldritch Alicorn whose bottom half has a forest-green pelt made of grass, flowers, and other foliage, while his upper half is made of solidified golden light, with forest-green spots dotting his body to make him appear as a Light Elemental encased in a 'crumbling' earthy shell. His mane and tail are also composed of golden light, but of a lighter hue. His most eldritch trait is his face, which shows mirrored reflections of whoever's looking at him as their best selves. His wings, while relatively staying the same, has feathers made of golden light. His Cutie Mark has mutated further to include a patch of actual flowers on his flank and sun 'rays' that are actually lines illuminating light. His overall appearance shifts depending on his actions - he looks withered and dim, with dying plants and foliage, if he starts reverting back to his old toxic mindsets, but becomes healthy and radiant again once he lets them go. It's noted his appearance is symbolic of how people and their potential can be affected by what they learn and/or believe in.
- A Diplomatic Visit: The fourth story in the series, The Diplomat's Life, introduces them in its final arc: The Umbrum Forces after assuming solid forms, looking like phantom horses in advanced state of decomposition with scrawny and skeletal bodies and perpetually exposed teeth. Rabia also counts, but prefers to appear as a mass of shadows in the shape of a pony.
- Enter Ken Finlayson features Moloch the Death Raptor as an owl-like animalistic abomination.
- Equestria Divided: The Laughing Mare was once Pinkie Pie.
- In the Worm/Bloodborne crossover Hunter, Beasts have this appearance. Sophia is the most notable, as she's the first one seen in Brockton Bay.
- Maiden's Illusionary Funeral has Ran's One-Winged Angel form be a gigantic monstrous nine-tailed fox. Contrast with her mistress Yukari, a shapeless mass of darkness and eyes.
- My Perfect World, Shattered: The beast that the narrator encounters appears to be one, with the latter noting that zoologists would've declared it a new species before the former destroys everything he had painstakingly built, and the final line referring to it as a hedgehog. Because it's just how Dr. Robotnik perceives Sonic the Hedgehog.
- Queen of Shadows: The Weaver, the entity living under Lord Rokutaro's castle which he's allied with, is an animated mass of crystal in the shape of a spider.
- Ruby and Nora: The Wendigo is a fully sentient Grimm with a humanoid body, but a deer skull for a head.
- In the Magical Girl Crisis Crossover Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights, Joker's Merry-Go-Round, a nightmarish techno-organic tower upon which hundreds of captive Magical Girls are subjected to unspeakable agony, uses their combined suffering to produce its end product: a white swallowtail butterfly. That is, the butterfly is entirely pure white, without a single speck of another color. It casts no shadow and no shadows can be cast upon it, and it captivates anyone who looks at it. Joker immediately encases it in an Anti-Magic field for later use.
- Thousand Shinji: In addition to animal-shaped Angels such like Gaghiel — a cross between a shark and a whale — or Matarael — a humongous spider — the Beasts of Chaos were the pets of the new Chaos Gods: a hawk, a hound and a crow warped into monstrous, ferocious or even putrid creatures.
- The Long Eventide: Hypnos the nyx vaguely resembles a sloth, but looks distinctly wrong in ways that the narrator is reluctant to describe, with it stated that looking at him too long without blinking would yield the sight of something even worse than the "not-sloth" he currently appears to be. He's summoned by going into a meditative state that places the person at the "threshold of dreaming" and then calling his name, and his kind is stated to be capable of Demonic Possession if the summoner isn't vigilant.
Films — Animation
- In Aladdin, Jafar takes the form of a colossal king cobra during his final battle with Aladdin.
- All Dogs Go to Heaven depicts Satan as a Big Red Devil in dog form.
- Brave features Mor'du, a giant, demonic bear which roams the wilds of Ancient Scotland, and attacked Merida's father.
- Dumbo features an infamous Disney Acid Sequence when Dumbo the elephant gets drunk and begins hallucinating some reality-shattering Pink Elephants. The Spanish dub is even worse, changing their song to "Souls of Terror" and describing them as Satan's relatives.
- In Fantasia 2000, the segment based on the Firebird Suite depicts a truly otherworldly and nightmarish firebird — more like a primordial embodiment of destructive fire than like the benevolent creature in Igor Stravinsky's original ballet.
- Played for laughs in The LEGO Ninjago Movie with Meowthra, a terrifying cat-like Kaiju beast summoned by a powerful talisman to destroy the city... who is, of course, just an actual house-cat who just happens to have stumbled on a LEGO city with the help of a laser pointer.
- The Dazzlings of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks. In their true forms they are visually merhorse sirens. Similarly to the Windigos they're extremely powerful, ancient entities that consume hatred and use it to power themselves up, have the ability to warp minds with just their song, and being alien from both an equine and human perspective, looking more like aquatic Windigos than ponies.
- In The Princess and the Frog, some of the Friends on the Other Side have an animalistic shape.
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has the bounty hunter wolf that follows Puss through the entire movie. His shadow can be seen underneath a door to another room, he can appear seemingly everywhere, and can even summon Hellfire to trap his victims. It becomes justified with The Reveal that he's not a bounty hunter at all; he's literally Death incarnate.
- The Secret of Kells features a brief encounter with the Dark One, Crom Cruach, who vaguely resembles a serpent.
- Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas: Eris' pet monsters are constellations in form of animals (with the exception of the Sirens, who are humanoid). The ones encountered as Cetus, a draconic cephalopod creatures, the giant bird Roc, an massive anglerfish that doubles as a Turtle Island, and within Tartarus, Sinbad and Marina are nearly attacked by a giant scorpion, a lion and a lizard.
Films — Live-Action
- In Annihilation (2018), an alien presence had landed on Earth and has turned a small coast town into a place where all signals (be it radio signals or DNA) are reflected back into itself again and again, mutating all life within again and again. Any living thing - plant or animal - mutates, genetic information swapping and mutating its inhabitants, making any human or animal there into one of these. Special mentions goes to a a bear-like monster with a skull-like face that can mimic its prey, roaring at the crew with Shepard's dying screams while they are tied to their chairs.
- The Black Demon: The titular creature is a monstrous, undead-looking megalodon. According to the locals, he has been sent by Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, to punish the greedy who take from nature.
- Captain Marvel (2019) has Goose the Flerken, who is assumed to be an ordinary housecat until she extrudes tentacles from her mouth and eats the Tesseract. She also has a Black-Hole Belly; she devours several Kree soldiers at once without leaving a single trace behind.
- One possible origin for Irys from the Gamera franchise falls under this. It suggests that Irys is actually Suzaku (AKA the "Vermillion Bird") of Asian folklore and is the ancient mortal enemy of Gamera (Who is said to represent Genbu the tortoise in this case). Of course, Irys doesn't really look like a bird. Rather, he/she/it looks more like some sort of bipedial creature with spears for arms and numerous tentacles coming out of its back.
- The Gyaos (Gamera's arch-enemies throughout the franchise) themselves in the Heisei era Gamera films are genetically mutated bats/birds/reptiles that resemble giant mutant pterosaurs. They reproduce asexually, can regenerate, and have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. They're viewed less as giant animals and more like flying omens of death.
- Godzilla:
- Godzilla himself qualifies being a giant ancient dinosaur (or dinosaur-like creature depending on the numerous versions of the character) who is seen as a Physical God rather than a mere kaiju.
- The film Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! take this even further by having Godzilla as a vengeful zombie-esque monstrosity resurrected by the forgotten souls who died in WWII to punish those who had forgotten them in the modern era. Not even the combined efforts of Mothra, Ghidorah (who happens to be a juvenile Orochi), and Baragon are enough to stop him. Keep in mind that the aforementioned three are considered to be ancient gods themselves.
- The Shin Godzilla version of Godzilla is shown going through rapid Hollywood Evolution to adapt to his environment, opening his jaw wider than past Godzilla and it splitting in half when he fires his Atomic Breath, being able to shoot the Atomic Rays out of his tail and dorsal fins as well, and his tail sports a human-like skull with a eye and jaw—and has several smaller human-sized versions of him coming out of it.
- King Ghidorah, Godzilla's archenemy, is what happens when the villain of a Cosmic Horror Story comes in the form of a giant golden dragon with three heads and a penchant for exterminating entire planets.
- Mothra and Battra both fall under this as well. Both of them being giant butterfly-like beings with immense power and are worshiped as gods. While Mothra is a more benevolent example, as she protects both Earth and humanity from other abominations, Battra is far more violent towards humankind being an enforcer of maintaining the balance between nature and technology. And, then there's Leo, a male Mothra who can take on different forms (IE: Aqua Mothra, Rainbow Mothra, Light-Speed Mothra, etc.).
- Godzilla himself qualifies being a giant ancient dinosaur (or dinosaur-like creature depending on the numerous versions of the character) who is seen as a Physical God rather than a mere kaiju.
- Jack & Diane: The werewolf, which can only be said to somewhat resemble a wolf. It's a very grotesque, vaguely lupine monster.
- The Lair of the White Worm has the eponymous antagonist Dionin, who's a "worm" in the antiquated sense meaning "serpent." It's a colossal white snake-god who is worshipped by a race of reptilian vampires, which it's the progenitor of.
- In Panna a netvor (Czech adaptation of Beauty and the Beast) Netvor (the Beast) is a giant bird-like beast who drinks blood of animals and people to survive.
- Moder from The Ritual has a body that appears to be that of a large elk overgrown with plant matter, with the addition of protruding spines from the vertebrae and an additional set of human-like hands by her hips. Her head is far more monstrous, resembling a headless human torso with antlers for arms and arms for legs, with a vaguely human head with glowing eyes where its crotch would be.
- Tales from the Darkside: The Movie: The "Cat From Hell" segment implies this. What seems like a domestic black cat is actively out to get revenge on an old man who got rich on cruel Animal Testing. The cat first seems to just accidentally kill a person by being on the stairs at the wrong time, but then it smothers a woman as she tries to sleep, later shrugs off point blank bullets from a hitman hired to kill the cat, and then kills the hitman by an Orifice Invasion through the mouth despite being far too big to fit.
- In The Thing, the monster spends most of its time as an Alaskan pack dog. You catch a glimpse of what it really is, before it proceeds to eat all the other dogs. It also appears very much like a spider/insect-like organism in the prequel and in Carpenter's movie it still retains arthropod features like random insect legs. More horrifyingly, in the novel that inspired all of this, it is also heavily implied it assimilated an albatross, so it can now fly. That said, there's no way of knowing what it really looks like, if it even has a "true" form at all, rather than being purely amorphous. Heck, its nature as an abomination is debatable.
- Hell, even before the Dog-Thing outed itself, the dog it was disguised as was off-the-scale creepy. It's no spoiler to point out that something's Just Not Right about that dog from the first time you see it. It stands perfectly still, and stares, and never wags its tail. Apparently the Animal Actor who played it genuinely unsettled the rest of the cast.
- Thor: Love and Thunder: Gorr the God Butcher, basing on the drawings of his late daughter, creates a bunch of horrifying, nightmare inducing beasts resembling some of the Earthly ones. The most notable designs include a spider, a dragon, an eel, a scorpio and a... porcupine.
- In V/H/S/94, Ratman/Raatma is a just barely mammalian-looking creature with a grotesquely elongated skull with eyes at the very end and a mouth that spans most of it, rabbit-like ears, extremely long and gangly human-like limbs, and a long and rotund body that it cannot easily move (forcing it to awkwardly crawl). It also has some kind of ability to compel people to worship it, and drools some sort of horrifically strong black acid that rapidly destroys flesh or brings someone under its thrall, depending on its whims, and its devotees can also projectile vomit that acid. Word of God is that it's of extradimensional origin and stumbled into this world, and it is in great discomfort and reacts to its discomfort in a destructive and extremely dangerous way.
Gamebooks
- Many monsters in Lone Wolf would fit this. Most notable is Demonlord Tagazin, who appears as a huge sabertoothed jackal.
Literature
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: One possibility behind the Cheshire Cat's reality-warping abilities, and the fact that he seems to have powers that other Wonderlanders don't. He's a more benevolent example, though. Just don't ask him for directions.
- The titular monster in Owl Goingback's Crota is one of these. It looks somewhat like a bear, except that it's markedly bigger, has only tufts and a mane of red hair on scaly skin, and has glowing, evil yellow eyes. It is actually an immortal being of supernatural evil, old enough to remember the dinosaurs and completely invulnerable to non-magical harm.
- The Cthulhu Mythos has more than a few of these:
- From H. P. Lovecraft:
- Cthulhu himself, with his distinctly octopoid features.
- At the Mountains of Madness has giant, blind, albino mutant penguins living in Antarctica. Although unsettling and strange, however, they are presented as still just mundane animals. The Elder Things are Starfish Aliens in the sense that their heads, at least, literally resemble starfish.
- The piscine Deep Ones and their half-human children in The Shadow Over Innsmouth are a borderline example, since they're implied to be relatively low on the cosmic order and comparatively comprehensible to humans. The gigantic Deep One that shows up in the earlier short story "Dagon", however, is a more straightforward example.
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has the "moon-beasts", who look like gigantic pale toads with a squirming mass of mollusc-like tentacles for a head. Their henchmen, the denizens of Leng, are mostly humanoid abominations but have a few unsettling animal traits, such as hooves for feet. The ghouls that appear in this story and, more centrally, in Pickman's Model, are also hoofed humanoids, with eerily canine faces, and some of them are described as hopping like kangaroos.
- The title characters of "The Cats of Ulthar", who also cameo in the above Dream-Quest.
- The monsters in "The Festival". We're never told what they do look like, but we're given enough creatures that they vaguely resemble that we can infer they were beastly creatures.
They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.
- From Clark Ashton Smith:
- The Seven Geases features the deity Atlach-Nacha, who resembles a huge, hairy and hideous black spider.
- The recurring deity Tsathoggua and his extended family, who tend to have batrachian (frog/toad-like) looks, mixed with those of a bat and a sloth in Tsathoggua's own case.
- From Frank Belknap Long:
- The titular monsters from The Hounds of Tindalos are often depicted as literally hound-like in most fanart and guest appearances in other media, although the original story never really shows them. They may simply be "hounds" in the metaphorical sense as implacable hunters.
- The Horror From The Hills features a vampiric creature called Chaugnar Faugn, who looks just enough like an elephant to make all of his more alien (or lamprey-like) features all the more disturbing.
- From H. P. Lovecraft:
- In the Discworld, the Dungeon Dimension Abominations are explicitly described as having been re-assembled from bits of other creatures, none of which are unremarkable in themselves, but almost as if the leftover spare parts from the Creation have been shaken around in the box and tipped out to see what random accretions emerged.
- The title character of Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest is a short, unsettling creature that vaguely resembles a penguin.
- The Skinwalker from The Dresden Files usually takes on forms that vaguely resemble real animals but twisted and corrupted.
- In the Eternal Champion multiverse created by Michael Moorcock, the "Evil Aspect" of the Gods of Law is often known as "The Original Insect", and portrayed as a monstrous, hideous insectile thing so large it can swallow planets whole, simply sitting in space and sucking up stars, planets, moons and everything else with an insatiable hunger, refusing to stop until it's consumed all of reality. Including itself.
- The titular "Sun Dog" from Stephen King's Four Past Midnight is closer to this than a dog. A magic camera will produce pictures only of the dog, and each one is slightly different. It becomes clear that they form a sequence; the characters can flip through them like a flipbook and watch the dog move, and they can even be transferred onto film to create a short movie. Either the dog or the camera is able to exercise More than Mind Control to trick users into taking more and more pictures, and the more pictures that are taken, the closer the dog comes to escaping... and the less like a common dog and more like this trope it becomes.
- It also has a minor tie-in to Rose Madder: the dog is referred to as a Hound Erinyes, while the minotaur in Rose Madder is called a Bull Erinyes.
- The Inheritance Cycle has Shruikan, Galbatorix's dragon who has grown to immense proportions and power through dark magic. When he flies overhead before the final battle, he blots out a large portion of the sky. And he's an Omnicidal Maniac and a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
- In It, the second-to-final form of the eponymous monster is a spider. This is only because the spider is the closest humans can come to comprehending the Deadlights — its true form — and stay sane.
- The Last Unicorn: The Red Bull is older than the Unicorns, isn't confined to a set shape or size, and is utterly indestructible and its origins are completely unknown. Its only weaknesses (so to speak) are a mild aversion to sunlight and that it's bound to serve anyone who is utterly without fear. It seems, however, that if the opponent is strong enough to oppose it successfully, it will instead retreat. Though few ever do.
- Moby-Dick: The title character is rumoured to be one. A number of sailors claim that Moby Dick is not actually a whale, but the apparition of some supernatural entity, which purportedly cannot be killed and exists everywhere in space at once. Ahab in particular treats it as the living personification of evil and misfortune. Over the course of the novel, the narrator increasingly treats not only Moby Dick, but all sperm whales as being an example, equating them with various mythological monsters (particularly the Leviathan), claiming that no human being can ever get even remotely close to making an accurate visual depiction of one, and even explicitly referring to it as a Physical God towards the end. A Giant Squid witnessed by the crew of the Pequod gets a similar treatment in one chapter; Ishmael describes it as "an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life" with "[n]o perceptible face or front" and "no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct", and Starbuck claims it to be even more terrifying than Moby Dick itself.
- In Neverwhere the Beast of London is believed to have started life as a runaway pig from a butcher; centuries of feeding on sewage and its own vileness has made it much, much more than that. Hunter mentions having killed similar monstrous animals in cities all over the world, including a blind albino alligator in the sewers of New York, a bear that spoke to her in an ancient human language in Berlin, and a giant, man-eating black tiger in Calcutta.
- Old Kingdom Trilogy: Mogget is an incredibly powerful Free Magic spirit bound into the service of the Abhorsen bloodline. While his true form is basically a fireball, his sealed form is a small white cat who's just stopped giving a damn about who he offends. The Disreputable Dog is similar, but she takes the form of a dog of her own volition. Mogget and the Dog are actually Yrael and Kibeth, two of the Bright Shiners, the all-powerful Free Magic beings that created the world north of the Wall. Kibeth helped create the Charter, while Yrael ran from the Seven and Orannis, and paid for his cowardice and disloyalty by being forced into the shape of Mogget.
- In Simulated there are two good examples in the virus swarm and the literal bug both found within the Good Gracious Host.
- In The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, the jukiere, or jook-toother tiger, from Demane's homeland is some kind of animalistic, necromantic sorcerer in the form of a green-furred tiger, with Super-Speed, Super-Strength and a Healing Factor thrown in. It eats only pigs or people, but only when they're particularly fresh and likes its hide-out to stink to high heavens of death and decay.
- The more powerful beast gods of Spice and Wolf are implied to sometimes reach this status, but the title most definitely goes to The Great Bear Who Hunts The Moon. He ate Yuetsu. The country.
- The Stormlight Archive has Thunderclasts (giant dog-shaped monsters of living stone) and Midnight Essence (animated smoke contained within a skin vaguely like that of a weasel). Also possibly the chasmfiends, enormous creatures like carnivorous lobsters the size of a largish apartment building. They are natural creatures (aside from having to use a bit of magic to get around the Square-Cube Law), but still nasty and scary.
- From Sword of Truth, the Chimes of Death, for whatever reason, take the form of a chicken. It's implied they possessed whatever was nearest to their victim at the time of summoning. They inhabit other things as the book goes on.
- The main characters of Dean Koontz's The Taking encounter several monsters that look like various types of animals, but the only one that actively threatens them is a giant insectoid horror lurking in a church basement.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- In The Silmarillion Ungoliant is equal parts Giant Spider, Mother of a Thousand Young, Eldritch Abomination of eternal hunger, and Unlight darker than total darkness. Same thing (but to a lesser degree) applies to her greatest daughter, Shelob from The Lord of the Rings.
- In the Tolkien Universe, if an animal can speak and is surprisingly large, it is a safe bet that it is an angelic or demonic entity wearing an animal body (the latter being eerily beastly, too). Examples include the giant Eagles who serve Manwë, and in Beren and Lúthien, Huan the horse-sized, talking wolfhound of Valinor and the giant wolf Carcharoth.
- Too Many Curses: The hellhound manifests as a gigantic mutant dog cloaked in black smoke, which seeps constantly from its body except when it's badly wounded or poisoned. It stalks and devours undead creatures, corporeal or ghostly, and consigns them to Hell regardless of whether they're evil or not.
- In the Warhammer 40,000 short story King of Ashes, a young Magnus the Red ventures into the Warp for the first time and encounters animalistic avatars of the Chaos Gods. Khorne appears as a scarred wolf with blood-matted fur, Nurgle as an undead moth with the eyes of a fish, and Slaanesh as a multicolored cobra with a human face. Tzeentch, meanwhile, appears as a hunched figure with the heads of three different birds stacked one atop the other.
Live-Action TV
- The "Demodogs" from Season 2 of Stranger Things are only marginally canine in appearance, with hairless skin and the Demogorgon's trademark unfolding maw. Their movements and behaviors seem very dog-like, however.
- Pistvakt's second season introduces a monstrosity called "Bjärven" (roughly "the wolver-bear"); a big, hairy and bloodthirsty beast said to be the result of a bear mating with a wolverine.
- The Terror revolves around a arctic exploration crew that find themselves hunted by a monstrous creature resembling a polar bear. It looks like a normal bear from a distance, but if you’re unlucky enough to get close, you’ll notice details like it’s unnaturally long neck and disturbingly humanlike face. It’s a living weapon that was created by the gods, but has since become a borderline God of Evil to the Inuit people living in the region.
- Lovecraft Country:
- The Shoggoths vaguely resemble gorillas, and have super speed, jump through the trees, somehow remain hidden until they attack, are weak to light, and can turn people into Shoggoths with their bite.
- Kumiho are fox spirits who rape men with their tails to take their souls.
- The first episode of the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared TV adaptation features a four-eyed dog-like creature called the "Carehound" that "treats" dissatisfied workers at Peterson's and Sons and Friends by swallowing them whole, brainwashing them and then spitting them out as contented drones. It also appears to have some ability to distort the flow of time, as Duck Guy stayed in its stomach for 40 years without visibly ageing at all.
Myths & Religion
- Norse Mythology features Fenrir, Managarmr, Hresvelgr, Ratatöskr, Nidhoggr, and Jörmungandr. Norse Nautical Folklore has the Kraken.
- The Bible has Behemoth, Ziz, and the Leviathan. Also the Second Beast from the Book of Revelation, which is described as bearing many crowns atop many heads, and is variously depicted as as being draconic, catlike or serpentine. Beelzebub and Amon are also noteworthy examples.
- Several angels like the cherubim are mishmashes of animal parts, mostly lion or bull heads with eye covered wings.
- Romani Mythology: Ana's children range from an evil two-headed bird to a hairy hagfish to a vagina beetle to a mass of kitty and puppy heads, all demons responsible for diseases.
- Classical Mythology: Various one-of-a-kind creatures are the offspring of gods and serve as the (mostly) mortal enforcers of some and the enemies of others. They are powerful monsters with the appearance of several animals jumbled together. On that note, pretty much every creature spawned by the brood of Typhon and Echidna qualifies. In particular, there's Cerberus, the Hydra and the eagle that fed on Prometheus' liver.
- In Egyptian Mythology, Apep (or Apophis), the ultimate evil, the embodiment of all wrongness, chaos, and depravity in the world looks like a giant water snake. Ammit the Eater of Souls, which devours those judged unworthy after death, combined the features of the three most formidable animals known to ancient Egyptians: lion, hippo and crocodile.
- In Aztec Mythology, Cipactli, the monster that dwelled within the Primordial Chaos, is described as a cross between a crocodile, a fish, and a frog, with every limb joint replaced by an extra mouth. It took nothing short of Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl working together to put it down.
- Quite a few of the gods of Aztec Mythology could qualify. Quetzalcoatl himself, for example, is a Giant Flyer who resembles a cross between a snake, a bird and a dragon. He's not evil though. Even the Aztec Mother Earth counterpart, "Coatlicue", was often depicted as a monstrous amalgamation of serpents which the gods defeated and subdued to create the earth.
- Quite a few of the gods of Aztec Mythology could qualify. Quetzalcoatl himself, for example, is a Giant Flyer who resembles a cross between a snake, a bird and a dragon. He's not evil though. Even the Aztec Mother Earth counterpart, "Coatlicue"
- Some cryptids could potentially fall under this trope, such as the less-humanoid depictions of The Jersey Devil.
- Those who don't consider them Humanoid Abominations might consider the Mothman and its bigger nastier cousin the Owlman to be this; they're both creepy specters that look vaguely like birds with glowing red eyes. The former always arrives before a disaster and the latter terrorizes folks for no discernible reason.
- The Basilisk/Cockatrice. It's a horrifying monstrosity resembling a cross between a chicken and a serpent. Its breath can wither crops, poison water and kill passing birds. Its gaze can either kill you or turn you to stone. Its very birth denotes how wrong its existence is, as it is born when a rooster lays an egg which is then incubated by either a toad or a snake (or sometimes the other way around). The only organisms immune to the monster's deadly gaze or its reeking breath are weasels and roosters, the former can kill the beast with ease, while the call of the latter has a fatal Brown Note effect on it.
- The Beast of Gévaudan of French folklore, at least in stories where it's not just an unusually large wolf (or a different kind of wolf).
Music Videos
- The music video for "The Wolf" by SIAMÉS features what initially appears to be black wolves made of shadows, but they alternate between their wolf shape and a crawling, shapeless mass of arms. They are also incredibly durable, smashing through walls and blocks of concrete and still keeping close pace with their prey. It's implied through the music (and confirmed by Word of God) that each wolf is a physical manifestation of a person's flaws. For Glasses Man and Skater Girl, it's drinking/smoking respectively to feel better about pushing away their problems in life. The only way to destroy it is to stop running from them/your problems and facing them head on, symbolically defeating them.
Podcasts
- The Beast in The Adventure Zone: Amnesty is a bizarre amalgam of different animals on a bear body. Not different aspects of animals, literally entire bodies of different animals jutting out from the bear torso in a patchwork. It also leaks a black oil that can gather more carcasses and deploy them as minions.
- Binary Break: The corrupted Nekton from episode 2 looks like a large black cat at first glance, but it has too many eyes, mouths and tails, and they're spouting out at odd places - like it's glitching.
- Welcome to Night Vale: The Beagle Puppy in Year Four. He seems cute at first, but as he made more appearances it became clear that he was more than what he seemed. As the year went by it was revealed that Chad had summoned the Puppy, and that the Puppy was responsible for the Strangers coming to Night Vale. Everyone who looks at him gets the sudden urge to get a dog along with an unending need to vomit. In Who's a Good Boy? Part 1, Cecil has the misfortune of seeing what may be his true form, standing on his hind legs and a not quite dog-like face and a horrifying voice. The kicker: his words imply, if not outright state, that he is Satan himself.
- The Magnus Archives has a few of these show up as avatars of The Flesh. "Cruelty Free" focuses on a pig farmer who finds a large pig has suddenly appeared in his pens. After it kills many of his pigs, it nearly lures his brother into its maw in a hypnotic trance... and is strongly implied to have done so to a performer at a traveling circus camping on the farm grounds.
Tabletop Games
- Blackbirds RPG: The Golden Messiah's most powerful servants are the Primum Slugs, massive quantities of living gold in the shape of slugs. Their mere presence warps the world around them and the minds of onlookers, turning the land to gold and Mind Rape surrounding mortals into brainwashed devotees of the Golden Messiah.
- Some of the Mysteries in Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine manifest in animalistic forms, most notably Typhon (a giant snake, not related to Chuubo) and Hedge the Fang (an eyeless, skinless cat). There are also the horses of the Riders, whose nature is unclear.
- There are a number of demons, devils and assorted other extraplanar unpleasantnesses in Dungeons & Dragons with a resemblance to some sort of animal or insect. The Abyss, for example, has the spider-like bebilith, while the hellcat and the advespa (a sort of evil wasp creature) rep for the Nine Hells.
- For non-extraplanar horrors, aboleths vaguely resemble three-eyed fish with tentacles (the precise nature of the fish varies by edition), but are aberrations with psychic powers, genetic memories, and the ability to secrete ooze that mutates humans into its aquatic slaves.
- Exalted:
- Many behemoths resemble gigantic monstrous versions of animals, which are implied to have come first; there are references to "animals and the behemoths they were based off of".
- Most of the Yozis resemble gigantic environments with many also having forms that resemble strange and transcendent humans, but Isidoros usually has the form of a monstrous black boar with innumerable tusks, great many-lobed eyes and thick barbed hairs, so large that his hoof prints are canyons and his back brushed against the sun, moon and stars.
- This is a possible fate for chimeric Lunar Exalted.
- Two of the Elder Evils from Forgotten Realms—Dendar the Night Serpent and Kezef the Chaos Hound (based on the Midgard Serpent and Fenris Wolf from Norse Mythology).
- Dragons are this in Iron Kingdoms, being "lizards" in sort of the same way that Cthulhu is a "squid". Dragons have a thing called an athanc; while the athanc exists, so does the dragon, and dragons grow in power by devouring each other's athancs, with the entire breed created when Toruk the Dragonfather divided his athanc and ended up attempting to recover the parts again. Exposure to dragon blood is mutagenic, with things like the satyr-like Satyxis islanders or the sundry array of Body Horror facing the corrupted Nyss coming about through dragon exposure. Toruk is essentially a dragon god; he is worshipped in the darkest places of the Iron Kingdoms, and once used his dragon breath to turn a regular pirate ship, the Atramentous, into a haunted emissary of his will. His most notable spawn, Everblight, divided his athanc between his warlocks, essentially spreading his malign intelligence through most of the Nyss elves; the Nyss have become increasingly monstrous since.
- Magic: The Gathering: Phyrexia has strange ideas about what constitutes a creature, Green-aligned New Phyrexia in particular. As a matter of habit, Phyrexia swaps and recycles body parts between organisms, living or dead, organic or otherwise, with little regard for whether or not what they're making actually needs those parts. For example, the Rot Wolf; if you look closely◊, you can see that it does not contain any actual wolf.
- The "Eldritch Moon" set saw Eldrazi mutation run riot across Innistrad, meaning that temporarily a lot of things were part of an Eldritch Abomination. Notable creations from this included a selection of Eldrazified werewolves, plus a selection of crabs, fish, insects, and even mammals, with an Eldrazi boar being present.
- The Amkhata from Mummy: The Curse are what happened when somebody rather broken decides to make an undead servitor from the bodies of several animals, usually ones sacred to the lost empire of Irem. What they get is a chimeric monstrosity that can exist in and out of reality and endlessly hunts for Sekhem, the very energy that powers mummies.
- Pathfinder:
- Rovagug bears more than a slight resemblance to a centipede, albeit one large enough to undo creation. His "spawn" Chemnosit the Monarch-Worm takes after its father.
- Kazavon, the draconic champion of Zon-Kuthon, was powerful and evil enough that killing him and splitting his soul into seven pieces still didn't erase him as a threat.
- Many Qlippoth have a passing resemblance to various reptiles and amphibians, arthropods and worms, and fish and marine invertebrates.
- The bebiliths from Dungeons & Dragons also appear in Pathfinder, but instead of spider like demons they're the children of the Qlippoth demon Lord mazzmezz who resembles a spider with way too many legs, fangs and spinerettes.
- RuneQuest. In the Glorantha campaign setting one major empire has an enslaved Chaos god/demon/thingy called the Crimson Bat, which looks something like a giant bat.
- Shadowrun has a lot of these in the form of magical beings like the totem Spider which plots world domination and manifests as a huge spider in astral space, and the Sega Genesis game has Thorn, a dog or coyote-like malevolent spirit.
- A Gangrel Methuselah is very likely to be this in Vampire: The Masquerade, more than the rest of their other Gangrel brethren, due to their age. Then again, there is always ••••• •• Restore the Mortal Visage...
- Ennoia, The Gangrel Antediluvian might be considered as one of the more extreme versions of this trope, considering the way her childer look.
- And, every so often, vampires like to make these. On the lower tier, you have hellhounds, the catch-all name for dogs and other animals ghouled by the Tzimisce and altered with Vicissitude to make miniatures engines of war (and that's before we get to the big engines of war like the Vohzd). On the top tier, you have the Typhonian Beast, uplifted from an extinct species by Set himself via blood magic and possessed with a terrible sense of malice. At least, until Ennoia stole it and handed it to one of her kids for safe keeping because it was the last of the kind, which you can imagine went over great with the Setites.
- Some demons in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 resemble animals, like Flesh Hounds, Juggernauts (metal rhinos), and Screamers (flying manta rays). The best examples are Lords of Change, giant humanoid birds that are so powerful they're considered omnipotent and omniscient, only losing whenever Tzeentch feeds them false visions.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse says that, back in the old days, Banes would possess animals to create bestial fomori to serve as siege engines; this is where legends like the manticore came from. In the modern days, however, human fomori tend to be less conspicuous.
Visual Novels
- Unlike the rest of the spirits in Spirit Hunter: NG, the Screaming Author resembles a disturbing, crane-like figure, with metallic wings and bird feet molded to its flesh. This is a result of Yakumo's surgical alternations when it was still alive.
Web Animation
- Hazbin Hotel: Many of the demons in Hell appear to be human/animal crosses. In particular are Angel Dust and Alastor, who are a spider demon and a deer demon respectively.
- Sock Series: Sock is a heavily stylized, smiling hamster... oh, and he's a reality-warping God of Evil.
- RWBY: The world is infested with mysterious creatures known as the Grimm. Mostly resembling animals and mythological beasts, they are black beings with white plates and glowing red eyes. Their bodies evaporate into smoke when they are destroyed, they lack souls and Aura, are drawn to negative emotions like a magnet and seem to be trying to destroy humanity. Scientists have no idea what these creatures are or how they function, and every time they think they've made a breakthrough, something new comes along to defy comprehension. The Grimm are actually created from divine Pools of Annihilation, filled with an unknown inky substance and are creations of the God of Darkness.
- Velma Meets the Original Velma: It's not exactly clear what Scooby is, but he's clearly far more removed from a normal dog than his canon counterparts were: He can stand perfectly on two legs, extend his body in lethal ways, and rewrite reality to Restart the World and reincarnate his closest friends. He also speaks in garbled yet elegant English.
Webcomics
- All Night Laundry: The Hound is an unstoppable undead dog resurrected by an Eldritch Abomination. Its body is made of bone and mud, it's incredibly fast despite having mangled hind legs, it never makes a sound, and it grows bigger with every encounter.
- Erma: In "The Vet", in hopes of finding a pet that can survive Erma's Adorable Abomination presence (regular pet-shops keeling over en-mass when they tried finding one there), they decide to visit a supernatural pet store. It houses a variety of these, including a wolf-monster, a bat-monster, a grub-creature, a giant-fly and a suspiciously normal looking puppy standing in-front of a massive pile of bones. Apparently he was "teething at the moment." They eventually come across an old gypsy caravan selling a breed of puppies that are "a special rare breed" that "not even man can explain" They adopt one of them, naming him Sirius later discovering that he possesses Type IV Undead Regeneration.
- Gunnerkrigg Court:
- Coyote, pictured above, may or may not possess a true form; when viewed in the Ether, he's an amazing technicolor mass of teeth, eyes and star-filled tendrils. According to him, he used to be an ordinary coyote before a delirious dying human saw him as a deity. Since (again, according to him) human belief can manipulate the ether, Coyote then became a deity for real.
Coyote: My secret...is this...I. DO NOT. EXIST!- Later on in the comic, Ysengrin ends up becoming one after Coyote gives him his strength. Ysengrin then proceeds to eat Coyote's corpse, transforming him into an even more animalistic abomination.
- Kill Six Billion Demons: The Mad God Gog-Agog is worms. As in, she is a Hive Mind made up of several planets' worth of worms, capable of aggregating them into human-like Worms-That-Walk in order to interact with mortals. Flashback panels reveals she mostly looked like collections of worms wearing hooded cloaks and wielding scythes back during the Universal War, though at present she prefers clowns.
- Nature of Nature's Art has a rather trippy example suggested at the end of the Lycosa storyline. Gladicosa posits that Lycosa herself isn't a real spider, but an entity formed from the abandoned individuality of the members of Venom 8.
- Used in this Nedroid strip. Indeed, they are not in a petting zoo.
- Questionable Content has Randy the Bandicoot. He is eternal.
- Becquerel and the G-Cat from Homestuck are First Guardians, giving them Reality Warper powers. Justified: They have the First Guardian genetic code, but were otherwise cloned from ordinary Earth animals. Trolls with the power to psychically command wild animals can use it on Bec and G-Cat.
- Beasts in Stand Still, Stay Silent are non-human mammals who were infested by the Rash. While they retain some semblance of their original self, they're far closer to this trope. Cthulhound is a charming example.
- 2Masters: The Master of Heaven, Yehveh, is a Shining Noble Bird of Prey, and a god In-Universe. It also takes the form of a lady when... moving...
- Wilde Life has Hanyi the Worldeater, a giant frog who wants to...well, guess. That said, "eating the world" seems to be a long-term plan; in the meantime she's mostly just Oscar's Tsundere friend.
"She's fine. Actually, she might be a little bit evil...but benign, I think. Pretty sure."
Web Original
- The subreddit "imsorryjon" is dedicated to reinterpreting Garfield, of all characters, as one of these. It can range from darkly hilarious to extremely creepy in execution.
- Goodbye Strangers has several. The main ones are the titular strangers, which are weird creatures that look like brightly colored worms or lizards, but their behavior and biology is very strange. They don't appear to be alive or sentient and are obsessed with seemingly meaningless activities like taking apart analog clocks, building shrines, or spending all their time crying. And many of them kill humans in extremely gruesome ways. But their are several other weird creatures in the setting such as the meoms, which are cute catlike aliens, that are also able to form absolutely massive entities called megameoms that look like gigantic alien cyborgs with vaguely angelic and cat-like features. And the Animalarians look like living drawings of animals but what you are seeing is just a small part of a higher dimensional being.
- Many of the creatures from the Sandsverse are hinted to be more than just animals that sell random substances and troll each other. Horace, the Boar of the North, for example, shows his age as a boar superimposed on a chart of the universe's life cycle.
- The SCP Foundation has contained a number of these, some of the most notable being SCP-1055, SCP-682, SCP-334 and SCP-953. Almost everything with the "animal" tag qualifies as one of these.
- The Cicada Lord is one of the biggest, a Celtic god whose brain was scrambled by its worshippers being converted to Christianity, leading to it believing that it is the Christian God.
- The Cicada Lord
- Horror artist Slimyswampghost on Tumblr has many bizarre abominations, humanoid, eldritch or otherwise, but the one who most exemplifies this trope is Long Horse. It is an entity resembling a horse's skull attached to an impossibly long and bendy neck, which continues twisting and bending all the way into eternity. He displays the ability to enter people's dreams and one post implies that he's far more ancient than initially thought, existing since the caveman days and possibly even longer. Unlike most examples, he's largely benevolent, at least according to Word of God, being curious by nature and "well-meaning". That said, he has a tendency to herald terrible things happening in the future.
- The titular entity in There's a god in my woods takes the form of an emaciated deer with deformed antlers and a mass of half-decayed, undead birds and possibly something more where its stomach would be. Thankfully, it leaves the protagonist alone.
- We Are All Pokémon Trainers has ♨č▒⢫╠␣☣ł₤舸▟, or the Glitch Nidorino, a representation of the fear of death that merely takes the appearance of the first being it encounters in the material world, in this case being Vinollo the Nidorino. Luckily unlike most other Glitches it's friendly if its mission isn't to beat the fear of death into you.
- Whateley Universe: Way too many of the animal-like things in "Tennyo Goes to Hell", given where the story takes place.
- The aliens from Twitter Story Earth 5 AR are described as giant compared to humans and possess animalistic heads. They speak a language that their "babies" cannot understand, the females breastfeed their children with "THE MILK" and their adopted humans have little understanding of what exactly they do when not caring for them.
Web Video
- Night Mind: The host, Nick Nocturne, is always depicted as a (sometimes anthropomorphic) black cat with two sets of eyes: one green and one purple. However, that's just his Shapeshifter Default Form, so he may actually classify as a full-on Eldritch Abomination instead.
- Satellite City: The Kivouackians are a mix of this and some more upright designs that look like humanoids with varying degrees of weirdness. Many of them have traits from multiple different varieties of furry earth animal, like Shuck, who resembles a large black hellhound-creature but with horns and a smushed bat-like face, Felicity, who's like a mixture of a donkey and a dragon, and Winifred, who's sort of like a cross between a (wingless) furry dragon, a deer, a horse, and a lizard. The show's ostensible protagonist, Sullivan, keeps them as houseguests at a middle-class manor in rural England. Most if not all of them are older than the current universe and came from a place that existed before our own, can be dismembered and put back together without apparent permanent harm, and see humans as inferior creatures who don't deserve to survive, but they usually stay inside Sullivan's house because most of them (the animal ones, at least) aren't much bigger than a large dog and are vulnerable to human weaponry.
- There Will Be Brawl: The final form of the not-of-this-earth Mr. Game and Watch is an octopus.
- In fan-made horror short "Velma Meets The Original Velma", the HBO incarnation of Velma Dinkley meets Scooby-Doo, who is revealed to be a godlike Reality Warping being in the form of a Great Dane. He reveals that all he wanted was to hang out with the gang and have fun, but they kept questioning how he is able to talk, or having flashbacks to their prior incarnations. Each time, he reacted with panic, brutally mauled them all to death and then reset the universe, hence the franchise's frequent Continuity Reboots.
Scooby-Doo: I love you. You know that, right? I love all of you. But I don't understand... why you keep remembering.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time:
- It's eventually revealed that Jake the Dog is essentially this. He was born from a shapeshifting alien giving his father Joshua a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong, which is why he has shapeshifting/sizeshifting powers.
- As is Gunter the penguin, who turns out to be the weakened form of a primordial space god named Orgalorg.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender:
- The first series has a couple of the spirits, including Koh the Face Stealer, a giant centipede with a face that can change from human to animal to just about anything, and Wan Shi Tong, a giant Ominous Owl with an extendable neck.
- The Legend of Korra continues this trend with the spirits of light and dark, Raava and Vaatu, which resemble gigantic flatworms. Also, many Dark spirits have more or less vaguely animalistic forms, which counts.
- Centaurworld: The Nowhere King is an ancient, evil, deathless being resembling a giant, wasp-bodied monster made out of black tar, with multiple skeletal deer legs and a deer skull for a head.
- Final Space:
- The Arachnitects, ancient and wise beings with mastery of space-time who created and imprisoned the Titans and created the universe, look like giant, talking mechanical spiders which live in lairs made of ethereal webs.
- And then there's Werthrent, a vile snake god on Ash's homeworld who imprisons all the sacrifices he devours in a pocket dimension where they're cursed to endless agony while he feeds on their life force.
- The Lion Guard: Scar, who was killed off by his hyena minions at the end of The Lion King (1994), returns as a hate-fueled demonic lion coated in hellfire, a stark contrast to the heavenly apparition of his brother Mufasa.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- The Ursa Minor and Major are bears — except they are quite literally made out of stars. And the size of a building in the case of the Ursa Minor — which is just a baby. Its mother, the Ursa Major, is the size of a hill and probably the most humongous monster of the whole series, only on par with former-Dragon Lord Torch — the biggest dragon in existence.
- The Windigos looks like horses, but they are intangible, live in the atmosphere, feed off hatred, and generally appear otherwordly. The closest things the series has to true Lovecraftian Horrors besides the Ursas, and indeed seem to be worse than them in this regard; they greatly resemble Ithaqua, a beast that came from the mind of H. P. Lovecraft himself.
- Ōban Star-Racers has Canaletto, AKA the Timeless One. He is a looming, powerful humanoid alien resembling a cross between a Crow and a tarantula, and is thousands of years old. He can seemingly glimpse the future and manipulate events in his favor, even while imprisoned in a giant bird-cage. And while he's certainly smart for a giant bird, he also has an unfathomable hatred of all life, and looks to wipe us all out when he gets out of his cage. Also, he's the villain of a racing show.
- Rick and Morty had a telepathic cat who refused to explain its origins. When Rick scanned its mind to figure out what it is, whatever he saw was horrible enough to make him, a man who prides himself on having seen every horrible thing the universe has to offer, almost attempt suicide.
