Humanoid Abomination

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But human flesh was too frail, too paltry to hold the terrific essence that was Khosatral Khel. So he stood up in the shape and aspect of a man, but his flesh was not flesh; nor the bone, bone; nor blood, blood. He became a blasphemy against all nature, for he caused to live and think and act a basic substance that before had never known the pulse and stir of animate being.

—Robert E. Howard, The Devil in Iron

In more recent horror works, dark things from beyond the fringes of mankind's consciousness are prone to showing up in forms that for all intents and purposes look like good ol' Homo sapiens (and in many cases, actually were humans until they went beyond the pale). They may be improbably pretty, albeit prone to seeming a bit off, perhaps even having a Red Right Hand. However, they may also look like a human form made twisted and horribly wrong, as good old Slendy shows us in the page picture. Alternately, expect fetuses. May be A Form You Are Comfortable With. Compare Bishounen Line, where the monster's most powerful form is humanoid, and Living Bodysuit, when a human body is possessed by the Eldritch Abomination.

Has surprisingly little to do with Humans Are Cthulhu.

Compare Tortured Abomination and Human Alien.

Examples of Humanoid Abomination include:

Anime and Manga

  • Kaworu, and to some extent Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Also, the 18th Angel is Lilim, or mankind.
    • On a less spoiler-ific note, the Evas themselves could also qualify. Breathing, flesh-and-blood monsters made from human psyches.
    • Shinji from the end of the second "Rebuild of Evangelion" could also qualify, considering that he transformed into a ethereal form with red eyes and proceeded to mind rape an Eldritch Horror, all just to get Rei back.
  • In Haruhi Suzumiya, Kuyou Suou / Suou Kuyou (the proper order is is purposefully left unknown). While the other Humanoid Interfaces are weird, Kuyou is described by the narration as simply wrong. Her ordinary movements like walking seem to defy the laws of physics in inexplicable ways, and her words and motivations are even less comprehensible than the others. Kyon is terrified to simply be in her presence.
  • The Mad God Asura from Soul Eater is still recognizably human in appearance... but his mere unsealing creates a wave of insanity that critically weakens the good guys while creating new enemies and empowering existing ones.
    • As of ch72, this seems to be the case for Death the Kid being a 'fragment' of one of the Great Old Ones, i.e Shinigami. The Index refers to him as part of the "madness of the rule of law" which would fit.
  • Any Claymore unlucky enough to awaken becomes one of these. There's a reason why Claymores on the edge of awakening beg their fellow Claymores to kill them before it's too late.
  • The Godhand from Berserk and most Apostles' true forms still retain at least some traces of human appearance, some of them (namely, Slan and Femto) more than others; somehow, that just makes it worse.
  • The homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist have roughly the same chemical makeup as a human being. However, the Philosopher's Stone that makes up their "core" gives them near-immortality, insane regenerative powers, extremely creepy powers, and tortured souls giving them energy. Even further along the line are Father and Hohenheim, who also look very human, but are actually living Philosopher's Stones.
  • Guu sorta looks human. She doesn't really try that hard to fit in, but only Hale notices the off parts.
    • Her infrequently-seen grownup form qualifies as well.
  • The Enigma of Amigara Fault. What people who enter the holes seem to become after passing through the faults. Really, that's the most logical way to explain how the hell they're still alive.
  • A lot of Franken Fran's operations (a well as those of her creator) result in things of the sort. Adorea is the one you see the most though.
  • Alucard looks more or less human despite the unnatural pallor, red eyes, and sharp teeth. However, he consists of the hundreds of thousands of souls of the people he has devoured, and the true form he shows when using his powers seems to consist entirely of eyes and darkness.
  • The proxies from Ergo Proxy, most definitely. They are literally man-made gods designed to restructure the Earth.
  • The eponymous character from Serial Experiments Lain probably counts, as the God of the Internet in a world where the internet is increasingly indistinguishable from the real world.
    • Not the only one, either. Eiri Masami, Lain's creator and the self-styled God of the Wired, fits the part just as well, and in the end he even loses the Humanoid part of the description when he tries to physically remanifest in the real world.
  • The Stands in the manga Category Freaks.
  • Pick any main character from the anime Mnemosyne. Especially anyone who happens to be both male and female.
  • Aizen from Bleach becomes this after merging with the Hogyoku, taking on a number of humanoid forms during the final battle.
  • According to Masashi Kishimoto, he had planned from the start for all members of Naruto's Akatsuki to be Humanoid Abominations. He did quite a good job: there's one half-human, cannibalistic Venus Fly Trap who can clone an entire army from himself; a half-man half-shark with a freakish One-Winged Angel form; one man with mouths on his hands and a big one on his chest; a particularly nasty one whose entire body is kept together with thread (provided he doesn't feel like letting his hands take a stroll on their own); someone who transferred their soul into that of an identical human-sized puppet; and the defector, a man whose true form is a gigantic monstrous snake entirely made up of smaller snakes, who simply dons human bodies. There are some hints that the secret leader of Akatsuki, Uchiha Madara, might be one as well. Konan and Itachi are the only Akatsuki members so far who haven't displayed a borderline Lovecraftian Superpower, and even those certainly had the power of an abomination, with Konan being able to massively remold the landscape by creating massive structures with her origami, turn herself into paper and even sprout paper "wings", fight on par with/almost killing Madara /The Masked Man/whoever the hell he is of all people, and Itachi being oughtright called invincible/curb stombing many strong characters hard enough to drive them mad with his sheer godly perfection, when he doesn't outright use his supernatural mind rape powers or burn people with black, inextinguishable flames from hell, and both dying without us ever seeing their true potential. In fact, these two are probably the strongest Members of Akatsuki, barring Tobi and Nagato, with the fact that they're technically still human only making them scarier.
    • Naruto is notable because the Starter Villain Zabuza made reference to this early on in the story, that ruthless ninja like him pretend and aspire to be rid of their humanity, figuratively anyway (ie. human feelings). The miscreants of Akatsuki mostly made themselves the way they were, so the likes of Orochimaru, Sasori and others could be taken as ninja who took this lesson literally and actually try to be a Humanoid Abomination.
    • The Jinchuuriki themselves, when in their Version 2 form. Their blood mixes with the beast's chakra, forming a humanoid aura with glowing eyes and mouth, and the body features of their respective beast (such as Naruto's fox ears). The drawing style of the anime emphasizes this by making it look scetchy and surreal.
    • Sasuke probably counts as one as well, now that he has completely gone nuts and archieved power like Madara's.
      • The version 2-Forms have nothing on Naruto's six tailed-form, which is the above plus a creepy skeleton.
    • Kabuto started out a normal human, but after absorbing the cells of Orochimaru, copying Suigetsu's power to turn himself into liquid, taking some of Karin's lifeforce rich Uzumaki cells to increase his own healing ability, and training under the White Snake Sage to become a Sage (and deliberately absorbing enough environmental chakra to mutate into a dragonlike being), he's not anymore.
    • Some would argue that the First Hokage himself, the founder of Konoha, qualifies as well. For one thing, Wood Release is revealed to not be a Senju bloodline trait; it is an elemental form completely unique to Hashirama Senju. His younger brother and the entire rest of his family don't have the capacity to use Wood Release, and the few ninja that do specifically need to graft or splice Hashirama's DNA into their bodies. 99% of these transfers result in instant death (as Orochimaru discovered imbuing Yamato and fifty infants with Hashirama's cells) and failure to control the power will eventually turn you into a tree. Perhaps more freakishly, Hashirama had a Healing Factor comparable to medical jutsu that required no techniques to execute, something his own granddaughter needed to master medical ninjutsu just to imitate; the result of this means that Hashirama's cell samples are very clearly trying to take on a life of their own when used by Danzo, Madara, or Tobi; Danzo and Madara have Hashirama's face growing out of their anatomy due to the cell splices, and the skin around the grafted area is clearly mutated. More ominously, Tobi's sample of Hashirama's DNA has grown into a gigantic plant with part of Hashirama's body growing from it; an infinite number of white Zetsu grow from this very plant. Finally, Hashirama is the only person whose very chakra can outright control Bijuu, while the best Uchiha can do is utilize extremely advanced genjutsu to hypnotize them. There are increasing implications that Hashirama was not completely human, causing some fans to question if Madara's obsession with stealing his power was really such a wise decision...
    • His life-giving, Bijuu-controlling chakra and an intense Healing Factor may not be so unusual considering that Senju are revealed to be related to Uzumaki. Kushina stated that many members of her clan had a very special chakra, giving them an insane vitality, a very long lifespan and making them ideal hosts for the tailed beasts. For example, Karin is able to heal people by simply giving them her blood/chakra to drink. On the other hand, this may also means that Senju and Uzumaki weren’t completely human to began with and puts a destruction of Uzushiogakure in a new light.
    • The Uchiha clan deserves some special mention here. It's hinted that even normal Sharigan users can use jutsus that can alter reality, with advanced users who have stolen another family member's eyes being able to summon an implementable cloak of demonic energy and drive others insane with just a quick stare. It makes sense since, in all reality, they are distantly related to the Senju and thus the Uzumaki clans.
  • Some of the stronger foes from Sailor Moon qualify. Especially in the manga, where it turns out that all of the series' Big Bads are fragments/manifestations of Big Bad Chaos itself.
  • The eponymous character of Vampire Princess Miyu falls more under this than traditional vampire origins. She's explicitly of the same breed as the much less humanoid Eldritch Abominations she hunts, and is tasked with sending them all back to their original dimension.
  • A lot of the higher-level youkai in Inuyasha, but especially Naraku and Mouryoumaru who go between Bishounen (...ish, in Mouryoumaru's case) and gigantic mass of tentacles, insectile legs, razor sharp diamonds, spiritually poisonous acid-gas and void. And in Mouryoumaru's case, he's actually a telepathic Fetus Terrible Soul Jar who's wearing a Lovecraftian horror as a bulletproof vest.
  • In Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro the title character is a half-man, half-bird daemon who disguises himself as a friendly assistant. However, his smile is impossibly wide, all of his teeth are pointed, his eyes are unnaturally made (as well as being an unnaturally bright shade of green), and his hands remain demonic claws when not hidden under his gloves.
  • Ultra Gorn-fest Arm of Kannon is full of these things. Some of them are man-made, while others are the unlucky bastards that come into contact with the eponymous Arm.
  • The final episodes of Final Fantasy Unlimited reveal the main characters to be a pair of these. Fortunately they want nothing to do with the whole matter.
  • In A Certain Magical Index, the entity known as Aiwass has been implied to be something like this.
  • In D.Gray-man the independent Innocence Apocryphos. And like everyone else in the series, it also wants a piece of Allen.
    • The Noah (including the Earl), Level 4 Akuma, and Alma Karma have a similar sort of vibe as well. There's a reason so many people find the series to be so freakishly horrifying.
  • The enigmatic and rarely seen General Winter from Axis Powers Hetalia, who oddly resembles an old man in a WW 1 uniform, is basically this. Then again, this could also apply to the Nations themselves depending on how one views their very existence.
  • Tsukune's black ghoul form in Rosario + Vampire is about as creepy as it gets, and is implied to have a similar composition to Alucard. No, not that Alucard.
    • Well, considering that Alucard has an entry a bit up, it's not like it would be much of an improvement...
  • Saya from Blood C.
  • The Dragon Knights in Noein, despite being (mostly) good guys. Not to mention Noein himself, ruler of Shangri-La, who often appears as a floating golden mask surrounded by a vague humanoid outline, out of which human limbs emerge.
  • Angel Sanctuary: Rosiel and Sandalphon may qualify. Rosiel has an immortal, slowly rotting Organic Technology body that's basically made of Naughty Tentacles and Squick. (Said rot has been Mind Raping him since before his birth). Sandalphon, on the other hand, is definitely an abomination. It's the 'humanoid' part that's up for debate.


Comic Books

  • Doctor Manhattan of Watchmen fame shows signs of becoming this throughout the story due to his growing detachment from, well, everything. He embraces some part of his humanity in the end though.
    • He embraces humanity, sort of, but not his own. At best you could say he recognizes the value of humanity. What he actually does though is to go off to a galaxy far, far away to play God.
  • Many DC Comics abominations have a basically humanoid appearance: Anti-Monitor, Mandrakk the Dark Monitor, Nekron...
    • As of Final Crisis we can probably add Darkseid to the list.
    • Batman's enemy Poison Ivy may look human, but she isn't. Like Swamp Thing, Pamela Isley died, and a plant hybrid was born...
    • The Shade looks and acts human enough (though some artists do portray him with a certain pallor), but his powers are taken straight from the fabric of a dimension holding a godlike Eldritch Abomination and have essentially become one with him, making him ageless and virtually unkillable, not to mention terrifyingly powerful. Thankfully for us, he's generally a fairly nice guy (not a hero by any means, but definitely not an outright villain either) and is perfectly willing to leave you be... that is, unless you attempt to attack Opal City. In that case, all bets are off.
    • Mr. Mxyzptlk in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?
  • According to leaked material from when Cross Gen tanked, Miranda Cross from Ruse was going to be revealed as a Lawbringer of the Negation.
  • Cassandra Nova, Professor Xavier's Half Identical Evil Twin. She is actually a mummadrai, a malevolent spirit specifically meant to be an Evil Twin to somebody—in this case, Charles Xavier. Xavier's first heroic deed was to fight her in the womb and he succeeded in ejecting her from their mother. The mummadrai survived and eventually created a body for itself that was essentially a wizened female version of Xavier himself. She's essentially a Complete Monster with Psychic Powers equal to those of Xavier himself, if not greater. Who happens to look like a little old bald lady in a wheelchair.
  • The true Starro was recently revealed to be one of these in the R.E.B.E.L.S. series.
  • Parallax turns its host into one of these. The other eight Entities also technically qualify when they possess someone, although some of them are nice enough about it and non-homicidal enough that it's easy to forget.
  • Libra was a run of the mill supervillain until his own superpower stealing device backfired on him when he tried to target the entire universe with it and become a god. After being spread out across the cosmos, he eventually reformed on Apokolips and swore fealty to Darkseid. In Final Crisis it is revealed that he was turned into an embodiment of the Anti-Life Equation itself who can't be targeted by the Spectre. Other than that, he lacks the Nigh Invulnerability most other Abominations possess and was apparently killed by Lex Luthor.
  • Umar, the sister of Doctor Strange archfoe Dormammu, is about as powerful as her brother and about as evil. Unlike her fire-skull brother, she looks completely human (and a fine looking human at that).
    • This wasn't always the case however. She once had a form similar to Dormammu's(And it's said she was more powerful than her brother in that form), but she became mode locked when she took a human form and decided to have sex with one of her servants.
      • Then again, ol' Flame-Head himself looks about as humanlike as at least half the examples on this page; some recent appearances have given him a more skull-like face and horns, but he still has normal human proportions (well, by comics standards).
  • JSA villain Johnny Sorrow Was Once a Man, but after spending 60 years being subjected to the tender ministrations of the King of Tears, he isn't anymore.
  • The Hulk fits this trope. He is incredibly large by human standards (with sizes seeming to range anywhere from seven to fifteen feet Depending on the Artist), but still looks more or less humanoid in appearance aside from his skin color and powerset (which actually includes the ability to interact with spirits!), and to top it off was created by an attempt at turning gamma rays, a naturally occuring form of raditation across the universe into a weapon!
  • The Ghost Rider is another example. Depending on which version you're reading about, you're dealing with either an ancient elder God/Demon named Zarathos, an angel/demon/human hybrid made from the soul of a genuinely good man named Noble Kale, or something else altogether. The creature is little more than human bones wrapped in strange flames in appearance. The powerset more than makes up for the difference though. Again depending on which Ghost Rider you're dealing with they will have different powers, though some of them overlap between Riders. But all of them are humanoid, and in the case of Noble Kale actually started out as a human and turned into a humanoid abomination AGAINST HIS WILL by agents of Heaven and Hell.
  • Mad Jim Jaspers crosses into this realm thanks to his abilities being strong enough to make him nigh-omnipotent, with it being heavily implied that he exists partially in a metaphysical realm, as well. He's so powerful that his entire continuity had to be destroyed to prevent it from becoming infectious and warping reality in other continuities. Earth-616 also has Jaspers, and he's even more powerful. It took an invincible, infinitely adaptable killing machine that the original Jaspers created and that escaped from the destroyed continuity to bring the 616 Jaspers down. It transported him to a reality-free area to deprive him of fuel for his abilities. The resulting toll on the being was so great that he was put down without much difficulty by Captain UK.
  • Spawn. Every Spawn Was Once a Man, but after dying and being empowered by Hell they aren't anymore. They are basically living supernatural WMDs that scare the crap out of the forces of Heaven and Hell whenever they show up. Their Heavenly counterparts, the Anti-Spawn, differ only in the source of their power (Heaven) and are just as feared.
  • A good chunk of the main characters in Lucifer come out like this. The title character and other angels, fallen and otherwise, appear like Winged Humanoid types most of the time but certainly don't behave very human and their powers are far beyond.. The Silkman looks like a man made of silk and Jin En Mok look like the last human they ate.
  • Jean Grey becomes one of these whenever she goes into full-blown Phoenix mode. Arguably, she could also qualify in her normal non-Phoenix mode, as could most other mutants since the majority of them are physically indistiguishable from normal humans when not actively using their powers. The source of their powers—experiments on proto-humanity by a race of god-like Energy Beings from beyond—gives mutants even more of an eldritch feeling.
  • The Eternals of Marvel are indistinguishable from humans. They are also immortal and incredibly powerful (almost Physical God level) thanks to their ability to channel cosmic energy. It's worth noting that the same experiments that created the Eternals also created mutants and the monstrous looking Deviants. All three of these groups are technically still human but understandably have difficulty thinking of themselves as such at times.
  • Serial killer and dark magician extraordinaire, the eponymous Richard Pickman of Kiling Pickman is certainly an example of this trope. He looks human, but is immortal, can control minds, shapeshift into a hideous snake-like creature, and can only die when his heart is cut out.


Fan Works

  • The Biggest Bad from Super Milestone Wars 2
  • Aeon Natum Engel. It's Neon Genesis Evangelion transposed in the Cthulhu Tech setting, with elements from FEAR. That's really all you should need to know.
  • Rei (and The Ree) from the Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic Nobody Dies. She got Nyarlathotep's autograph. There was also flirting and fistbumping, the latter of which caused the collective sanity of the universe to falter for a split second.
  • In the Fuku Fic The Return it looks like the succubus Darkstar is heading down this route, her Grandmother BlackSky qualified for this trope several millennia ago. Arguably this version's Sailor Pluto too.
  • Berry Stoo and Mariah Susanson in Latias' Journey appear as a rather muscular and handsome man and a gorgeous woman respectively. But everyone seems to pick up that something is horribly wrong with them. Obviously overlaps with Parody Sue.
  • Yet another Evangelion example is Shinji and Warhammer40K, which also has Kaworu, though he is far, far worse than the original, as well as Shinji himself, who is becoming something so obscenely powerful even he doesn't know what will happen.
  • No Regrets on the Axis Powers Hetalia Kink Meme (warning for Gorn) fulfils a request to portray the nation-tans this way.
    • This also seems to be the usual perception in Hetalia fanfic if the perspective is from a human.
  • Psyko, the warped Evil Counterpart to Sleepwalker was originally human before he was exposed to a wave of perverted demonic energy from the Mindscape. It completely fried the brains of every other human in the area, but he simply absorbed it and turned into a humanoid... thing with bone-white skin, a skull-like face, bone-like spikes growing out of his body, insane glowing eyes, and teeth as long as a man's finger.
  • Yuuka Kazami in the Touhou fanfiction Imperfect Metamorphosis is horrifically powerful, inspires petrifying dread by her very presence, not even Yukari knows what the hell she is (and notes that her powers are disturbingly ineffective against her), and even with the Shadow Youkai running around and causing a mess of everything nearly everyone treats her as the bigger threat. Later events reveal she's actually a Great Old One, straight out of Lovecraft.


Films -- Live-Action

  • Kagutaba in Noroi the Curse.
  • The whisperers in Knowing.
  • Grendel's mother in Beowulf appears as a sexy siren. Her son Grendel plays this trope more closely, albeit he is pretty much just a giant deformed zombiesque humanoid, and her second son is a wyvern style dragon, which is not alien looking at all and actually quite awesome.
    • Although the second son can also take the form of a golden human male, fitting the trope quite well.
  • In Conan the Destroyer Dagoth looks handsome as a statue, but turns out to be not quite as expected when brought back to life.
  • The Tall Man from the Phantasm movies can quite easily pass for a (admittedly somewhat creepy) human- he's anything but.
  • The Harvesters in The Deaths of Ian Stone are an odd case. They're essentially the gods of their setting, and it's stated they made The Multiverse just to farm humans for their tasty, tasty fear. Their power over their surroundings is difficult to overstate, and their natures seem incomprehensible to humans—but their motivations are instantly recognizable to any junkie, and they can be as petty and flawed as any human. Two of them prove they can be as noble, too, and even as loving.
  • Freddy Krueger probably counts - technically he's just an Undead Reality Warper who only exists in the dreams of children...
    • The version of Freddy in New Nightmare is definitely an example. It's actually a full-on Eldritch Abomination, who simply found playing the role of Freddy fun.
  • In Dagon Paul is one.
  • Judge Doom skirts this trope and flat out Eldritch Abomination in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. On the one hand, yes, he is humanoid, much thanks to being played by Chrisopher Lloyd, but there's always something uncanny about him... When he finally reveals his true nature, well, sure, he's still played by Christopher Lloyd, but all bets are off concerning whether is his actual, true form, the one beneath the make-up, is "humanoid"...
  • The Lord Marshall in The Chronicles of Riddick, who is explicitly referred to as no longer being a man, but a "holy half-dead". Having allegedly travelled to the Underverse, he has gained such control over his own soul that it grants him extra-sensory perception, abilities, and the power to take the souls of others.
  • The Cenobites in the Hellraiser series. Their characterization varies from film to film. In the first film they're extradimenasional "explorers" obssessed with sadomasochistic pleasure and pain. In other films, they're purely evil, demonic creatures who want to destroy the world.
  • The ghosts from The Grudge probably count. They look human, but everything else about them is just so bizarre and alien that it's really hard to think of them as just spirits of the dead.
  • In The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, the latter could be seen as a more benevolent version of this Trope, as she's sort of a living, sentient pool of lava that can assume the shape of a teenage girl.

Literature

  • Darren Shan loves this
    • The Saga of Darren Shan has Mr Tiny, a malevoulent being who has time traviling power, can ressurect the dead, tames dragons eats children, and watches natural disasters that takes many lives, as if they were sport events. He set up the whole plot of the series, because he was bored by humanity getting closer and closer to peace, and he could not interfere with it personally.
    • The Demonata has Lord Loss a roughly humanoid demon, who has pale skin with a tinge of red, from literally sweating blood, has only stubs of legs, and has eight arms, from which only two ends in "proper" hands, the other six stumbs as well, and he feeds on the misery of humans. Nadia Moore, his human servant became this after she came back wrong. One of his familiar, Artery has Too Many Mouths, instead of hair, he has different types of parasites feeding on the flesh of his head, and has flames in his eyesockets. Aside those, he looks like a toddler. Argueably Grubbs, the hero of the story also turned into one after turning into a magically enchanted werewolf.
  • Arguably angels in His Dark Materials, which are near-Energy Beings that look like architecture but that humans see as Winged Humanoid in shape.
  • Nyarlathotep, the messenger and soul of the Outer Gods in the Cthulhu Mythos. He doesn't seem to have an actual body (being a sentient representation of the will of the Outer Gods), but he can manifest in the physical world using Projected Avatars. He seems to prefer manifesting in a form that is indistinguishable from a human. Mainly because he's a Chessmaster who enjoys manipulating humans, and that's rather difficult to do if you manifest as a skyscraper-sized betentacled monstrosity.
  • Helen Vaughan from Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan was the inspiration for Lovecraft's Wilbur Whateley and may well have been the first Humanoid Abomination in modern literature. She is the daughter of an Eldritch Abomination who seduces men into partaking of her unknown horrors, driving them to madness and suicide.
  • Precision, from Hell's Children.
  • Discworld:
    • In The Light Fantastic, everyone expects the Things From The Dungeon Dimensions to come storming into our reality with tentacles waving, but all they need is one mind. And when Rincewind looks into Trymon's eyes, it's every bit as horrific as anything involving tentacles and Alien Geometries.
    • While we're on the subject of Discworld: ELVES.
    • I Shall Wear Midnight introduces the Cunning Man, the shade of a fanatic witch-hunter who was so obsessed he went on even after eventually having no body. He appears as a man in black with empty holes for eyes (no, not empty eye sockets, HOLES, you can see through them) and Invisible to Normals; to those who can perceive it, he also appears to exude a terrible stench, though rather than an actual physical stench this is their mind's perception of the corruption in his. He can use mirrors, pictures and the like to enter the world, and can possess the bodies of others.
      • To hammer home how utterly wrong he is, it should be noted that, in Discworld, the eyes always show a person's true nature. Even the gods can change anything about their appearance except their eyes. Now the Cunning Man has nothing there, as in seeing into the front and out the back of his head.
  • In the books, Mary Poppins is shown as a near godlike entity that appears out of nowhere that pretty much imposes fear and respect. The Movie shows her as being more kind though.
  • Randall Flagg, especially in The Stand, and to a lesser extent in the other books by Stephen King where he is the Big Bad or The Dragon. In The Stand one character claims that Flagg is actually Legion, the Biblical demon horde that Jesus cast into a herd of pigs.
  • The Beast, AKA Martin Chatwin from The Magicians is mistaken for an Eldritch Abomination at first, but during the climactic battle, his Evil Gloating reveals that, as a boy, he escaped into the fringes of the Fillory world and accepted the darker magic of its inhabitants wholeheartedly, transforming him into a god-level power.
  • Sadako from The Ring can arguably be considered to become one in the sequel novels. Her continued existence threatens humankind's survival, and it may be far too late to stop it from happening.
  • Johnny Walker from Kafka on the Shore is either a humanoid abomination or just a crazy guy who may or may not be the main character's father. It's rather... unclear.
  • The Vord Queen from the Codex Alera looks like a beautiful Marat woman, but because her personality and mannerisms are what you'd expect from the central intelligence of an Omnicidal Horde of Alien Locusts, it's pretty obvious upon first meeting her that she's not. On the occasions when she tries to act more human, the result is just a foray into the Uncanny Valley that makes her even creepier.
  • In JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth saga, Sauron is indicated to have fit this trope when he so wished. It was through his good looks and his charm that he was able to corrupt the Numenorians into declaring war on the Valar, resulting in the destruction of Numenor and the West being placed forever out of reach. After his body was destroyed in said deluge, however, his soul returned to Middle Earth, and his form remained terrifying and monstrous from there on.
  • Cassandra, the antagonist of Full Tilt, appears as a young woman with red hair and blue eyes. It's made apparent almost immediately that she's very old and very powerful, and that she created the supernatural Amusement Park of Doom in which most of the story is spent. However, she tends to either influence things from a distance, or get involved through use of weaponry rather than magic—her only direct demonstration of her true nature is a Stealth Hi Bye.
  • The Star Wars Expanded Universe has Abeloth: Her true form is an alien woman with huge lips and ten tentacles in the place of arms, but she can take the form of humans she has absorbed, including Callista.
    • According to the Expanded Universe, Palpatine was one of these as well before being Killed Off for Real. He had delved so far into Sith lore and power that he became more or less an embodiment of the Dark Side itself. He had to keep cloning himself new bodies since his own dark powers kept consuming them.
      • This seems to happen from time to time to Sith who immerse fully into The Dark Side
  • The Shrike in Dan Simmon's Hyperion is a ten foot tall, four armed razor covered thing that can manipulate time and indescriminately kills anyone who gets too near the "Time Tombs" on the titular planet.
  • The Clockmaker, from Alastair Reynold's The Prefect. Can assume any shape, but it's default form resembles a stretched out human form, spindly and quicksilver. Enjoys wanton slaughter and leaving intricately designed clocks and trinkets around...which may or may not be Body Horror-inducing booby traps.
  • Several monsters and demons from the Fablehaven series fall under this trope, such as Ephira, Nagi Luna, and the Singing Sisters.
  • Angleton, AKA the Eater of Souls in Charles Stross' The Laundry Series is eventually revealed to be this. Subverted in that he's undeniably one of the good guys, even if he lives in the Uncanny Valley and therefore frightens the hell out of his subordinates. What happened was that he was summoned and bound in the 1930s, taught to pass for human, and eventually Humanity Ensues. Strangely, it's implied that he believes in decency and fairness more than the people around him--he's not averse to pulling a few strings for Bob and Mo's sake.
  • Harry Potter:
    • Dementors are ten-foot wraithlike monstrosities that steal positive emotions and cause people to relive their worst memories. Their faces are almost always veiled; underneath, they have no eyes or nose—just a mouth. They use said mouth to administer the "Dementor's Kiss"—they suck out their victims' souls, leaving them in a vegetative state, with no consciousness, for the rest of their lives.
    • Arguably Voldemort—originally he was a human, but after splitting his soul repeatedly, he became less and less human over the years, until he was truly an abomination. He also Came Back Wrong, and not only because they were working with only a small fraction of his soul.
  • Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Truce of The Bear" was about a vicious bear that tricked people by standing up like a human in order to induce pity, and then ripped them to shreds.
  • All over the place in The Dresden Files. There's the two Faerie Queens, Mab and Titania, who are unfathomable even by fae standards, the Lords of the Outer Night in the Red Court, and Shagnasty the Skinwalker.
  • The Myddraal from the Wheel of Time are comparativel minor examples, but they still qualify. Born among the Trollocs, they're a throwback to the Trollocs' human heritage, but warped by the Black Magic that created them- they resemble eerily pale, graceful humans except that they have smooth skin where eyes should be and have a number of bizarre abilities that cannot be explained by the series' main magic system. They're also absolutely devoid of emotion except for cold-blooded sadism and are all completely identical in terms of appearance and personality. Even human villains who encounter them are prone to remark on how unnatural they are.
    • One could make a case for recurring villain Padan Fain. Though he starts out a fairly pathetic Punch Clock Villain, after merging with the malevolent spirit of Mordeth he went completely off the deep end and developed a host of unnatural powers, to the point that he's one of the most powerful, evil entities in the setting and is one of the only things the above Myrddraal fear. Perhaps most tellingly, recent sections from his POV have begun referring to him as "the creature that had once been Padan Fain", hinting strongly that he's no longer truly human. Oh, and he has plans to off both the Chosen One and the God of Evil, and might just be capable of doing it. From Nobody to Nightmare, much?
    • Shaidar Haran is an abomination even among his fellow Myrddraal. It's telling that the Dark One uses Shaidar as his mouthpiece.
  • Rasalom from the Repairman Jack series and Adversary Cycle.
  • The Old Kingdom's Greater Dead are like this. While all Dead spirits are slight abominations in some way, the Greater Dead (such as Kerrigor and Chlorr) retain human form, while having eerie powers beyond normal necromancy. In addition, we have Hedge, a necromancer whose power consumed him, a Feline Abomination in the form of Mogget and, in the third book, the Bright Shiner Astarael, who appears as a very tall woman.
  • The Cenobites from Hellraiser films and The Hellbound Heart novel by Clive Barker. They exist in a separate universe and exist only to test the human mind and ability to feel sensation to their very limits. Those humans who reach their limits are turned into Cenobites themselves.
  • Gideon Winter in Peter Straub's Floating Dragon. His true nature is never really revealed. He takes on the form of a dragon during the final conflict of the novel, but afterwards the protagonists find his skeleton, which looks human, aside from a few deformities.
  • Lord Ombra and his ilk from Peter And The Shadow Thieves and subsequent books. From a distance he appears to be a man in a dark cloak, but is acually a being of pure shadow.
  • Judge Holden from Blood Meridian may be an example of this trope. Throughout the book, he demonstrates his capacity as a Complete Monster, but it isn't until the end that he actually aludes to being a supernatural entity. We never find out what he is.


Live Action TV

  • Illyria's original form, from Angel, was a massive tentacled creature; she's an Old One, a shout-out to H.P. Lovecraft. But since she's stolen Winifred Burkle's body, we mostly see her looking like a blue version of Fred.
    • Mesektet in the 'White Room' at Wolfram and Hart, a member of the Ra-Tet, an aspect of the god Ra (she was not an Old One herself, though). She appeared as a 13 year-old girl.
    • Jasmine. The most we could get from her true form was a shadowed mass of tentacles and is mentioned by her abandoned demon followers as the "Blessed Devourer". Those who are immune to her mind-control charms don't see her as a beautiful woman but a corpse filled with maggots, and her true name cannot be pronounced by human words (Angel needed a stitched up demon follower because it was the only thing capable of saying her name and breaking the spell).
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer had one of these as its Season Five Big Bad. Glorificus, aka Glory, was an exiled hellgod that was reduced to using a hapless human host as a timeshare. Whenever Glory takes control of its (male) host, it looks like a glamorous woman. Even in this form Glory is a Nigh Invulnerable superstrong menace that can rob people of their sanity and eat it.
  • Nearly all of the stronger adversaries in Supernatural qualify for this trope, since nearly all of them either use human forms or hijack human bodies. Demons fit this even more since all of them used to be human themselves.
    • "In heaven I have six wings and four faces, one of which is a lion!" Yeah. The Angels live and breathe A Form You Are Comfortable With.
    • As do The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The oldest and most powerful one, Death the Pale Rider appears as a middle-aged man driving a Cadillac. Being Death he can kill anyone on a whim and claims to be as old as, if not older, than God and that he will be the one to reap God when the universe ends. The others also look more or less like ordinary humans. More or less.
    • Eve likewise possesses a human body to traverse the Earth, as do the Leviathans.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Time Lord Victorious and other insane Time Lords may qualify for this; they are near-immortal, incredibly powerful beings that appear human on the outside, but whose biology shares little with ours - and even if the Doctor himself does not qualify, the Time Lords at the end of the Dalek/Time Lord War most certainly do.
    • The End of Time played it up a lot with the Master. He has a cult that conducts depraved rituals in his name, and several ancient and eldritch-seeming books devoted to him. He is himself completely bonkers, even by Time Lord standards, yet capable of easily conquering the world in a couple of hours when the Doctor snaps him out of his funk. The real clincher though, is the bit about plaguing the entire planet with bad dreams by his mere presence, a feat that really seems a hallmark of an Eldritch Abomination.
    • Some parts of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe (Dave Stone's books, specifically) suggest that the Doctor we know is a guise adopted by an Eldritch Abomination. Lawrence Miles' Faction Paradox series plays with this idea a lot, too.
      • The new series plays with this possibility often. Just for starters, he gets numerous enemies to back off simply by telling them who he is ("I'm the Doctor. Basically... run.), he inspires genuine fear in his enemies, including the Daleks, a species deliberately designed to not feel any emotions aside from hatred, and the reason the entire sixth season was based around a conspiracy to kill the Doctor was because apparently simply speaking his True Name would end the universe.
      • Consider this description of the being the Pandorica was designed to hold: "A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world." It's the Doctor.
    • The Celestial Toymaker, in the original series serial of the same name, resembles a middle-aged Caucasian man dressed in Mandarian robes who engages in silly, over-sized versions of board games and toys. He however controls his own universe and has vast powers over time and space. In one Expanded Universe novel, he is depicted more horribly and is outright stated to be using the powers of the Great Old Ones.
    • Also in the Expanded Universe, humanoid TARDISes... it's mentioned as being especially creepy when they open to take on passengers.
    • Weeping Angels. At first they look like normal statues of winged humans with their eyes covered. You would be very wrong to assume that. They can move inhumanly fast, snap necks with a twitch, and when observed, become immobile, indestructible stone. And observing a picture of an Angel turns it into one.
    • And in The Sarah Jane Adventures The Nightmare Man easily qualifies.
  • BOB from Twin Peaks is this—Humanoid on the outside, Abomination within.
  • The Kelvans from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "By Any Other name" are aliens that have assumed human-like "shells". When Spock's attempt to use the Vulcan mind meld, he experiences terrible pain simply from a glimpse of their true forms, which he later describes as very Cthulhu-like.
  • Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might count, as he's one of a race of shapeshifters. His usual form resembles a Bajoran, as he was raised by members of that species, but his true form is living liquid.

Music

  • The Boogieman (Sun Moon Stars) of the Gorillaz videos. Apparently a demon, but is somewhat more eldritch than that.
  • In Luca Turilli's Prophet of the Last Eclipse this seems to be the case with those touched by the Black Portal. They appear perfectly human, but demons (which can literally never die and may very well be true abominations in their own right) are instinctively terrified of them. And spilling the blood of one can result in The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Almost every clip by Marilyn Manson. Or rather almost every role he ever played. The best known of his abominable masks is probably Omega.
  • Highly favored by Visual Kei artists. See Malice Mizer, for instance.
  • Aphex Twin's videos feature this on several occasions. Come To Daddy and Rubber Johnny come to mind; just don't watch right before your bedtime.
  • Mother Maiden, who features in Within Temptation 's album The Unforgiving probably qualifies given that she's implied to be incredibly old, can raise the dead and command them to do her bidding, and can apparently vanish into thin air. Her servants may also count.


Mythology and Religion

  • If you look at urban Myth, The Grinning Man, the Moth Man, Springheeled Jack the Cornish Owlman La Llorona... heck, quite a lot of urban myths or cryptid sighting run on this trope.
  • Nyx, personification of Night from Classical Mythology. Usually represented as a beautiful female human, yet a quick look at her children - most of which she gave birth to by herself alone - should tell you what kind of being she really is. If that doesn't convince you yet, the fact that even Zeus fears her should.
  • Essentially, every deity that isn't just a superpowered human is this. From Greek Mythology itself Gaia and her ex-consort Ouranos count as well (although neither take preferably humanoid forms, Ouranos being a giant dome or sphere and Gaia the Earth itself, they were capable of manifesting themselves as such, specially to have sex), and even more explicit examples come from Egyptian Mythology and Aztec Mythology.
  • Jasy Jaterei from Guarani Mythology resembles a child or a young man, but a quick look at his siblings shows he's really not what he looks like.
  • Loki looks like a normal Aesir despite technically being a Giant, but seeing as how three of his children are respectively a snake so big he encircles the world, a wolf whose top jaw touches the sky when he opens his mouth and is destined to devour Odin at Ragnarok, and the Anthropomorphic Personification of Death, there's more to him than he looks.
    • Although those are only the kids he had with Angrboda. Who spends her spare time birthing more giant wolves. Maybe we should be looking at her...
  • Cú Chulainn, the young hero of the Ulster Cycle of Celtic Mythology, particularly of the Tain Bo Cuailnge. Though he is portrayed as being as Bishonen as a teenaged Irish ginger can be, he is descendant from the Fomorians, a monstrous race from the mythic per-history era of Ireland. Though he is heroic and stalwart, and generally perceived as a good guy, his defining mystical characteristic is his ability to to transform into various disfigured superpowered abominations through the use of his warp-spasm. After he transforms, be becomes a berserker that slaughters anything his path, friend and foe alike.
  • Some of the angels in Abrahamic religions, such as Christianity and Judaism. It is clear that some angels like Gabriel can appear as humanoid, but their real forms are at best highly confusing and at worst mind-numbingly horrifying. And they're not even alive anyway, as their entry on Eldritch Abomination shows. Note that only some bother to appear as humanoid however, as many in The Bible and the Qu'ran don't even bother to disguise their real forms.
    • Daniel saw an angel that was invisible to everyone else, carried with it an aura of fear, and had a glowing face (like lightning) and eyes of flame. Also a body carved from gemstones.
    • According to one interpretation, a lot of the angels mentioned early on in the Bible (especially in B'reshit/Genesis) are in essence the will of God made manifest in temporary human form. So while they're described as men in the text, they really really aren't.
    • Satan is described as "appearing in the guise of a young man".
    • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse in The Book of Revelations also count, if taken literally.


Tabletop Games

  • Atropals from Epic-level Dungeons & Dragons, the stillborn fetuses of Gods, also capable of shedding smaller Atropal Scions. Unsurprisingly, they are as terrifying, powerful and hideous as the description suggests.
    • The good ol' Mind Flayers, aka Illithids. So humanlike, that humans (and other humanoid races) are part of their reproductive cycle. And diet.
    • Elan look (and used to be) human, but their strange creation ceremony... changes them. In game mechanics terms they don't count as Humanoid (Human, elf, goblin etc.) or even Monstrous Humanoid (Minotaurs, medusas), but as Aberrations. In DnD, aberration are explicitly cthulhuoid horrors. And this can be done to you against your will. As a bonus, this grants them immunity to many common spells that only work on humanoids, such as the famous and powerful Hold Person.
    • Like the Elan, humanoid races can also become Aberrations via the Fleshwarper Prestige Class. They're capable of creating temporary implants for others, as well as permanent traits for themselves, until eventually they become a full Aberration themselves. Incidentally, the class's only restrictions relate to Law and not morality, and most are simply eccentric. The psion presige class that lets you become more and more like a Mind Flayer, on the other hand, tends to be for amoral assholes only.
    • There is also the alienist arcane Prestige Class, which makes you more and more in tune with the Far Realm; by the time you finish the progression the only thing humanoid about you is your body's shape, for the most part.
    • More options for making characters this also include several templates (Half-Illithid, Pseudonatural -in Epic and non-Epic versions-, Half-Farspawn) and specialized feat suites (Illithid Inheritor and Aberrant feats). Good luck convincing your DM if you want some of this for your PC, though.
    • Daelkyr from Eberron, high-level outsiders from the plane of madness. Notable in that they looked like this when they invaded the main continent ages prior, before humans had ever set foot there. When human explorers did arrive, later, they created a panic among the demihuman populace due to the resemblance. Keith Baker, creator of Eberron, was once asked why daelkyr looked so much like humans. His response was that the real question is why do humans look so much like daelkyr...
    • In the 3E Ravenloft products, an incubus known as the Gentleman Caller has fathered offspring on a number of Vistani women over the years. Word of God has it that the Beast of the Hills, the only one of his children too demonic-looking to pass for human, is also the only one who isn't evil.
    • Ygorl, the Lord of Entropy, is a Chaotic Neutral being who resembles a horned black skeleton with bat wings, wielding a scythe. His only goal is to perform random acts of destruction, unlike the evil Demon Lords and Archdevils, who are more knowingly malicious.
  • Mage: The Awakening has a few examples, such as the Ochemata, avatars of the Exarchs, or "the Other", the Astral Aeon of the Abyss, who is said to look simply like an unassuming, shrunken, slightly odd old man, who nevertheless has something indescribably off with everything about him.
    • Actually, all mages become this (albeit quite capable of being nice) if they turn archmaster. At that point, being a Physical God is the least of their potential power, and they can change reality simply by visiting the Supernal Realms...often unintentionally.
    • Similarly, each of the True Fae from Changeling: The Lost has a humanoid Mask that they can wear when they appear on Earth. These masks can be beautiful or hideous, but usually within the realm of human expectation... except for the one element that's just wrong.
    • Even Changelings can get in on the action; when their Wyrd stat (basic supernatural power) hits 6, they manifest a certain... oddity in their Mask, which humans rationalise away but are still capable of seeing. Of course, the latter may become the former, given enough Wyrd and not enough Clarity.
    • This is also what most mages think of geniuses - that they are bizarre cosmic intelligences of unknown motivation and origins who simply look human. In the case of the Illuminated, they may well be right. The "inverted Geniuses" known as Clockstoppers may also be examples - one of the most powerful is described as being more a force of nature than a man.
  • Old World of Darkness has the antediluvians from Vampire: The Masquerade. The founders of the thirteen clans, most of them are bastions of godly power and are feared to rise again during the final nights of Gehenna to consume their childer. And with a few notable exceptions (looking at you, Tzimisce), they all pretty much look human.
  • The Yozis of Exalted and their various souls can appear in any number of bizarre, logic-defying forms...or they can appear as inhumanly attractive humanoid beings with a few thematic characteristics here and there. They can also do both at the same time—all demons above the First Circle have the ability to manifest in multiple locations at once. The Fair Folk also qualify, being even more monstrous and alien in this setting than is standard for the trope—and yet, as far as appearance goes, many of the nobles are inhuman only in their extreme beauty.
    • According to Word of Sol, the Green Sun Princes qualify to a degree, and are gradually evolving into Yozi-like beings themselves.
    • Similarly, the Deathlords and their servants, the Abyssal Exalted, typically appear human, though Abyssals must make the choice between working towards unearthly beauty or falling into rot and decay as their Essence increases. The various Deathlords are pretty much the same way, except they have the ability to shapeshift, which comes with its own attendant quirks (if the Mask of Winters wants to turn around, he'll simply reverse every joint in his body so that he's now facing you without ever moving).
  • The Immortal God Emperor of Mankind of Warhammer 40,000 fame. Long ago, all of Earth's mages, psykers, and mystics decided that humanity needed a champion to lead them. They committed mass suicide and all of them were reincarnated as one being: the Emperor. Anyone who had the misfortune to make psychic contact with him and got a glimpse of what lay beneath the surface, such as John Grammaticus (a powerful psyker in his own right), would be left in a state of total awe and terror—mostly terror. The making of Astropaths even uses this deliberately, the aspiring Astropath making contact with the (severely weakened, maybe dead) Emperor for a brief instant, with the delightful effect of being able to transmit signals across the galaxy as well as having their eyes burned from their sockets.
    • A lot of the more powerful servants of Chaos are this trope (at least the ones that haven't already ascended to Daemonhood), still resembling the person they once were while being anything but. The most famous of these is Kharn the Betrayer, an unstoppable force of death easily capable of slaughtering entire armies with nothing but his trusty chainaxe.
    • Daemonifuge "the trice born" is a result of something like accidentally repeating the Emperor's "birth" on a smaller scale. A daemon who captured an entire monastery worth of Sororitas thought it will be more efficient to forcibly mind-link them together and torture one by one, after trapping their souls so that they couldn't get away by dying. But then, they were miracle workers and attracted its attention in the first place by collecting all and any knowledge on how to beat this sort of daemons. So when they chose one Seraphim[1] as their champion and resurrected her, this ended very much Not As Planned. She killed one daemonhost in power armour with bare hands before she regained her wits, much less figured out her abilities.
  • Aberrant-bloodline sorcerers in Pathfinder eventually become these.
  • The Excrucians in Nobilis generally manifest as creepily pretty humans. This does not make them nicer. To be fair, they do have one bit of Glamour Failure - their eyes appear as the night sky, and the stars are falling.

Video Games

  • The final stage of R-Type Delta features human fetuses floating around inside of crystalline structures, giant killer sperm, giant strands of DNA, and giant fertilized eggs, all floating around in a starry void populated with floating Earth buildings and other memories of mankind's achievements and all trying to murder you dead. The "true" final stage of R-Type Final seems to feature silhouettes of a male and female human in coitus in the background. R-Type is quite literally fucked up.
  • Pretty much every enemy in the Silent Hill series is one of these, although the particular degree of horrific twistedness varies from creature to creature.
    • Pyramid Head and Walter Sullivan get a special mention, as the former is actually an invincible foe who can be anywhere at any time and is said to be the manifestation of one's guilt and is known as "The Judgement". It is debatable for the latter, as he is a malicious ghost moreso than a living being.
  • Most Final Fantasy Big Bads pass through this at some stage of their life cycle. They almost all pass out of it later when powering up, advancing to more conventional abominations, of course, but the intermediate stages still qualify.
    • Garland qualifies in Dissidia Final Fantasy, being more or less a manifestation of Chaos' will, but looking like a knight. He doesn't qualify in his original game, though, because there he's very human when he looks such; his promotion to abomination goes straight to the monstrous variety.
      • Garland is probably still a nice guy, though. Minus the whole serving Chaos thing, but Chaos is as Chaos does.
    • Emperor Mateus becomes a beast capable of conquering hell, but still looks vaguely humanoid. Satan does tend to look humanoid in fiction anyway, so yeah.
    • The Cloud Of Darkness, despite being, well, a cloud of darkness, manifests as a sexy woman in Dissidia. And in the original, a Sexy Woman with Green Skin and a few tentacles. She's even hotter then the only other female Final Fantasy Big Bad!
    • Zemus was a Lunarian wizard who looked perfectly human, but whose soul was so literally warped and monstrous that he transformed into a more classically Eldritch Abomination-looking personification of hatred upon death.
    • Exdeath is actually an aggregate of evil souls trapped in a tree, but spends most of the game as a humanoid suit of armor. How he managed to fit a classic Eldritch Abomination appearance like his into a suit of armor small and human enough to deceive people isn't known, but he is a wizard.
    • Kefka is literally a god-killing abomination that absorbed the powers of the gods he killed, but the most inhuman appearance he got was angel wings and demon wings.
    • Sephiroth is in the same boat as Kefka, only instead of killing and eating gods, he's descended from a more conventionally abominable alien, and tried to eat the afterlife. Also, until driven into a corner and forced to power up to conventional abomination, only showed his nonhumanity via angel wings.
      • Also note that, for the majority of the game, every time you see "Sephiroth", what you're actually seeing is a mass of Jenova cells twisted into a clone that looks like Sephiroth's human body. Even when you find his original self, it's implied that he's no longer human, having fallen into the Lifestream and fused with Jenova cells after being killed.
      • Heck, Jenova would fit, too, since she/he/it first appeared to the Ancients disguised as their friends and relatives. The player's first glimpse of, uh, 'her' was as a headless, presumably female corpse with purple skin, eyes in places that eyes aren't supposed to be, and, uh, are those veins? It gets worse when you realize that it's still alive.
    • Ultimecia managed to destroy time itself but still exists quite comfortably and is a Sorceress, something not quite human but looking the same, until the final boss fight anyway; she loses the "humanoid" part when she shifts from "break the universe" mode into "break the skulls of the impudent mortals before me" mode.
    • Kuja was a genetically engineered human alien husk that accidentally got a soul, but approached Eldritch Abomination levels by devouring human souls and getting a Limit Break Super Mode that still looked human, albeit a human with red fur.
    • Yu Yevon, Yunalesca and Jecht were all once human, however...
      • Yu Yevon turned into a jellyfish-summon-disease-thing using the only powers available to him as a human and instead simply wears an actual Eldritch Abomination as a suit of armour. He counted back in the day when he made the first Sin, though, and might have counted longer depending. We don't really know the how or why of his current blobby appearance, so it might have been a gradual thing.
      • Yunalesca, meanwhile, became an Eldritch Abomination in her own right, but sticks to her old human shape unless pressed by the necessity of combat, mostly because otherwise summoners would kill first ask questions later instead of making the Sacred Deal with the Devil.
      • Jecht was made into Braska's Final Aeon by Yunalesca, so his true form at the time Tidus and the party confronts him actually is the 80 foot tall monster they have to fight- but it's shaped like an 80 foot person, thus technically qualifying as humanoid. Like Yunalesca, he spends most of his time as a more conventional almost-entirely-human-in-appearance abomination to make the pre-battle chat easier all 'round.
    • Blue Mages also become these after accepting a shady offer of power - it is implied they become even moreso as they devour monsters' magic, and those who don't control themselves can cross the line into a Soul Flayer.
    • Vayne Solidor started out as an ordinary Hume, albeit one who knew kung fu. Then the godlike Occuria Venat, out of gratitude for Vayne's help in fulfilling her Evil Plan, merged with him so that he would not face death alone. This fusion became The Undying, a humanoid monstrosity with pieces of Vayne's sky fortress attached to it that gave it the appearance of a mecha-angel.
    • Galenth Dysley looks like a harmless-but-evil-looking old man for most of the game. Then he turns into a giant Rape Face and you discover he's actually a Fal'Cie.
      • In a looser sense, the party themselves become Humanoid Abominations after they're made into l'Cie, or at least they're treated as such by society after it becomes public knowledge. They're not evil, however, just terminally stupid.
    • The Lucavi spend most of their time wearing the skins of the poor souls they've come to possess in a combined Grand Theft Me/A Form You Are Comfortable With situation. In their human forms they posses all their phenomenal demonic powers and are as inhumanly sociopathic as ever, but once they need to start kicking some serious ass they put their Game Faces on and let the Eldritch Abominations out for all to see.
    • In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the final boss is an inscrutable genie-thing that preys off of insecurities... and spends most of the game looking like the dead mother of one of the characters.
    • For an example of some of these that are (usually) allied with the player, we have the summoned creatures, at least the more human looking ones like Shiva, Ramuh, Titan, and the less beastly versions of Ifrit.
  • Organization XIII from Kingdom Hearts II. Like the rest of their Nobody brethren, their semi-existence is so unnatural, so deeply wrong that even the darkness rejects them. Unlike the others, however, they look exactly like humans with odd powers.
    • On that note, most Nobodies resemble humans in shape. All they are in reality are stretchy rag dolls who apparently have taken combat lessons from Voldo.
    • Special mention should go to Xion whose physical appearance changes to reflect the memories of those who observe her.
      • Special mention also goes to Xion for not actually being a Nobody. That's right, even the Nobodies rejected her.
    • Kingdom Hearts like these; the first game features Ansem, or rather, Xehanort's Heartless, who is a humanoid Heartless and the prequel has Vanitas, a being made from another character's Darkness and is the original Unversed and origin of every Unversed you fight in the game.
  • Xenogears's Woman Behind the Man Lt. Cmdr. Miang Hawwa. At first it looks like she's nothing more than the levelheaded assistant to the fiery towheaded Big Bad Wannabe Kahran Ramsus. The second half of the game reveals, however,that she's actually Human Interface for--and personification of--the game's Eldritch Abomination antagonist Deus. As you'd expect, she's a Complete Monster.
  • Xenosaga, Xenogears's Spiritual Successor, also has a few of these, primarily Abel, who is God—in the form of an autistic 12 year-old. Though in this case, "God" = "a swirling mass of red energy spaghetti".
  • This Fraxy boss.
  • More or less the main character in Prototype, who's basically a deadly virus that accidentally gained sentience after assimilating the corpse of a mad scientist involved in its creation.
    • As well as the Big Bad, Elizabeth Greene.
    • And James Heller. By the sequel, Alex has started creating "Evolved", individuals which he's personally infected to be moles in Blackwatch.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Ermac is a fusion of thousands of souls bound into one human-like form.
    • Mileena is a "clone" of Kitana created via the dark magic of Shao Kahn's Flesh Pits. She looks more-or-less human so long as she wears her veil, which hides her demonic features. Still, nothing can hide her unstable nature, her "father" being the only one who can truly control her.
    • Skarlet is another experiment from the same source. She looks fully human (maybe; she's never been seen without her veil) but is clearly even less sane than Mileena. Shao Kahn has to keep her shackled so she only attacks enemies.
    • Meat was - supposedly - another result of the Flesh Pits, but was obviously a failure. He looks like a human with no skin, his muscles and organs exposed.
  • Drakengard has the Grotesqueries, gigantic, sharp-toothed babies capable of taking on godlike dragons and who enjoy the taste of flesh, who fall down from the sky on wings of lightning when you kill the Big Bad. In the sequel, you learn that those are literally that world's GODS, the same ones who controlled said Big Bad. That kind of octane factor's for premium fuel only.
    • Which makes it rather hilarious when the main playable characters include a child killer, child eater and child molester. They are the perfect anti baby team.
    • In spinoff-sequel Nie R, we have the Shades. And the Replicants, which were designed to be bodies for the disembodied humans that became the Shades. And Kaine, a Replicant/Shade hybrid. And whatever Emil is...
      • Hell, let's just say the entire cast, minus the Twins. Who are robots.
  • This is justified with the "Malefactors" in The Suffering, since they represent the wrongs people to do each other—for instance, murder by fire manifests as eerie little girls in Puritan clothing. Interestingly, they may suffer retribution themselves—one character observes that the embodiments of slavery are too light-skinned to be slaves, but could very well be slave traders.
  • The Dragon Age series, true to its Dark Fantasy genre, is chock full with these:
    • "Abomination" is the exact technical term used to describe Flemeth, a product of a demon fusing with mortal human. She's a monstrosity that has created fearsome legends in all nations that have encountered her, yet on the surface she just seems like a snarky old lady.
      • In the final DAO DLC, Witch Hunt, Morrigan claims that Flemeth is not an "ordinary" Abomination, but something even worse.
    • "Uldred" from the "Broken Circle" Quest is also one. When you face him in the Harrowing Chamber "Uldred" had already been overwhelmed by the demons he summoned and possessed by a Pride Demon. It's unclear how much of the new Abomination is still Uldred. Unlike the other Abominations you face in the Tower, he also looks completely human, just like Flemeth. Until he goes One-Winged Angel, just like Flemeth.
    • Technically, Wynne is one of these as well. After exhausting herself in battle she was possessed by a benevolent Fade Spirit that wanted to protect her for whatever reason. Said spirit is the only thing keeping her alive and later gives her the "Vessel of Spirit" ability. It's doubtful that other people in the setting, especially the Templars, would see any difference between Wynne and other Abominations.
    • On a similar note, in Awakening the decaying corpse of Grey Warden Kristoff ends up getting possessed by The Spirit of Justice. Justice returns in Dragon Age II, now possessing fellow teammate Anders and now the Spirit of Vengeance due to Anders' hatred of the Circle of Magi.
  • Darth Nihilus from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2. Aside from having been rendered insane by his power, Visas speculates that he can destroy all life in the galaxy should he choose.
    • And by extension The Exile would be a minor one. Rumors state that the two were to be revealed as the same character, by some complicated method.
  • Persona villains love this:
    • Nyarlatothep from Persona 2 takes on the form of Jun's father in Innocent Sin, and of Tatsuya himself in Eternal Punishment.
    • Nyx Avatar does this twice in Persona 3, first as Creepy Child Pharos in the Protagonist's mind, and then as transfer student Ryoji Mochizuki once the Greater Shadows have fused with him.
    • Izanami in Persona 4 shows up as a gas station attendant and is in fact the first character, after his uncle and cousin, that the Protagonist meets in Inaba.
      • Persona 4 also has a rare heroic example: Teddie. He can become a human in the real world, but he's actually a Shadow that wants to befriend, rather than kill people.
  • Another game from Atlus, Catherine, has two of these: Boss, the bartender, who is actually a dream-haunting serial-killer that eventually takes the form of a giant floating head; and Catherine herself, a succubus whose true form is bat-winged demonic... but only if you're a very bad boy.
  • The Demi-Fiend from Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. It begins with a demon parasite/symbiote clawing its way into your skull when you are a human, causing you to mutate into a demon with only spiritual links to the human you used to be. And if you choose one certain ending, then your new patron gives you extra power, and even that tiny part is blown to hell.
    • Shin Megami Tensei in general has a lot of variations on this theme; in addition to the Demi-Fiend, the aforementioned Louis Cypher [2] qualifies, as do some non-fallen angels. On the much less powerful side, there are a fair number of humanoid demons, and a couple cases of human-demon fusions. One of the most notable is Alice, who was once human... and a random act of goodwill by a couple of demons transformed her into a Creepy Awesome undead sorceress... who's still as naive and innocent as she was as a normal girl.
  • ADOM probably has several. Certainly there's Nuurag-Vaarn, the Chaos Archmage, who is the penultimate Boss Fight for the normal ending. He appears as a withered old man whose eyes are holes radiating such unbearable light of power you can barely catch a glimpse of the tentacles writhing in them. (Well, actually he appears as a "@", but this is what the description says.)
  • Aside from the fact that we never see his face, there's absolutely nothing inhuman about D'Sparil's appearance, even though he's a demon that slipped in through a hole in the walls of the cosmos from the outside. He makes up for this by riding a humanoid serpent with an appropriately eldritch appearance.
    • Though it may be due to him being the youngest of the serpent riders, according to the game's manual. His older brothers from the sequels are fittingly more monstrous (though the eldest is still a partial example due to being a sterotypical humanoid demon, though still not as human-like as D'Sparil).
  • Lavos from Chrono Trigger. At its core, beyond all its protective layers, it resembles nothing more than a (comparatively) small humanoid alien astronaut. It is also its most hideously powerful form, whose mere presences distorts time and space. And it's not even Lavos's real body anyways.
  • Albert Wesker of Resident Evil. The shades are always on for a reason, if his immense strength, nigh-imperceptible speed, and virtual invincibility didn't clue you in. Kind of makes his One-Winged Angel transformation rather anticlimactic.
    • Tyrant, Nemesis, G, Nosferatu, Alexia Ashford, etc; Resident Evil has a lot of these.
      • The final form of G, however, is anything but humanoid, and ironically far less of a threat than its previous forms (of course, it helps that you may still have a rocket launcher by then. Open wide!)
  • Ganondorf from The Legend of Zelda used to be human (or very close to it), but after claiming the Triforce, he's become more or less an incarnation of magic and malice. And according to Skyward Sword, Ganondorf is the reincarnation of Demise's hatred. He was an Abomination even before he claimed the Triforce.
    • The Shadow Beasts are even better examples. Brutishly large black monsters with featureless shield-shaped masks instead of faces and tentacle-like hair, these creatures also make ghastly screams in order to revive other Shadow Beasts which you have killed. It turns out that they are actually Twili cursed by Zant to form part of his army. Then again, regular Twili may also count as friendly Humanoid Abominations to a certain extent.
    • When you think about it, the Happy Mask Man himself could qualify. We don't know how he knows all that he does or how he found you, but it's safe to say that he's more than he appears to be.
    • Darknuts. They look humanoid enough in most of the games they are seen—but considering almost none of the enemies in the series are human and that we never do get to see what's underneath their armor...Their bodies even vanish just like those of other defeated monsters. They also tend to be the most dangerous enemies Link has to face—a trio of Darknuts is tough enough to be the Bonus Boss of Twilight Princess.
      • The Wind Waker's Darknuts were shown to be jackal-headed humanoids beneath the armor.
  • Alma, as she grows in power, may be evolving from Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl to full-blown world-threatening abomination, yet so far seems to have kept her somewhat human looks.
    • There's also the Creep in the third game, though humanoid, it is far more monstrous and aggressive than Alma. It eventually turns out that it is an amalgam of the worst memories Fettel, the Point Man, and Alma have of Harlan Wade, given life by Alma's psychic powers.
  • The Tall Man from the Chzo Mythos, Prince and servant of the Cosmic Horror pain elemental Chzo. Very prominent in the midquel game Trilby's Notes, where he manifests in the shifted world as a bone white androgynous figure with unnaturally long limbs and a black longcoat.
    • Though this is probably because he used to be human until Chzo took over him.
  • "Battle horrors" and the like in the first Baldur's Gate look like humans, but have telltale flaming swords, and are quite tough to defeat.
  • League of Legends contains a few of these as playable characters. Swain is a tactical mastermind who is strongly suspected to be an undead husk used by a demonic raven, Ryze is a wandering mage who has essentially become an Energy Being, Shaco is an otherworldly being manifesting as a psychotic jester, and Mordekaiser is an armored brute with necromantic powers who spreads a plague wherever he walks.
  • The SA-X and Dark Samus from Metroid. Fanon likes to claim the player character Samus is one as well, though there is no proof of it beyond the space pirates describing her in those terms.
  • Medivh from the Warcraft franchise, the fallen Guardian of Tirisfal who summoned the Orcs to Azeroth. He was the Keeper of Secrets, wielder of Azeroth's most powerful magic, and was possessed (since birth) by the Fallen Titan Sargeras.
  • In Vagrant Story, anyone who bears the Blood-Sin Tattoo which grants its bearer access to the power and knowledge of the Gran Grimoire, the ultimate codex of magic that takes the form of an entire city, becomes a fearsome immortal magical being while still looking like a normal human. Though Romeo Guildenstern is somewhat mutated when he eventually acquires it and does eventually go One-Winged Angel.
  • The GMan of Half-Life... Maybe. To be certain, he's dead center in the unnerving category, has scarily thorough, though unknown amounts of knowledge of the protagonist and events, and has powers that are far beyond just about anything in the series. And he says he reports to a higher power.
    • Just like Nyarlathotep.
  • The Maker goes back and forth across the Bishounen Line in Aquaria as Naija beats him to a pulp.
  • Duran from StarCraft is revealed to be thousands of years old, to have had many names, and to be serving a mysterious "higher power". Though he looks like a human, no one is really sure what he is.
    • The sequel kinda spoils the mystery.
    • Also Kerrigan, after her Evil Makeover.
  • Vayne Aurelius, the main character of Mana Khemia. Mild-mannered to the point of being a doormat, Vayne always goes along with what other people want because he's the elemental embodiment of the world's desires, and also the power to make even the most outrageous of those desires come true, like reviving dead loved ones, killing the unkillable, creating evil fortresses with an army of monsters literally in his sleep... One of Isolde's motivations is that she's convinced that if the world finds out that this power exists, they'll go to war to control that power, and wage war with it and how could they not, when he's literally everything they ever wanted?
  • Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice has this when Mao uses his true form. We can safely say that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. His father is a gigantic monster. But, this being Disgaea...
    • True Zenon from Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories also qualifies, as does series Bonus Boss Baal. Both of them, while shaped like people usually, are utterly inhuman mentally even compared to other demons, are strong enough to slaughter overlords by the hundreds, and even go Body Surfing when the need arises, almost always to another deceptively human vessel. Almost being the key word, Baal, having had to surf more often, has worn a few low-level mooks in his time.
  • As of Sengoku Basara 3, Oichi is, if not one outright, at least on her way to becoming one. She's been robbed of the last shred of her sanity, seeing the world through a bizarre, alien dream logic, and is simultaneously the master and puppet of the dark powers she showed in the previous game. She gets better in some of her endings.
  • Deadly Premonition has Man Behind the Man Forrest Kaysen, who initially appears to be a wholesomely affable if not slightly suspicious fat guy who sells rare trees. Later he is revealed to be a dimension-warping abomination whose antics include: harvesting red seeds (Hallucinogenic murder catalysts) from the uteruses of women he has raped after their loved one has failed to euthanise them before the process is complete, violating the minds of children by trapping their personalities in his home dimension, and intentionally diffusing a Hate Plague into a sleepy rural town so that half the populace brutally murders each other then burying the event by taking advantage of Cold War paranoia, for seemingly no reason other than the fact that he can. He certainly isn't as indestructible as the average Humanoid Abomination though, as Francis Zach Morgan is able to dismissively murder the son of a bitch with a well placed bullet to the brain.
    • Also according to Word of God Willie is Kaysen's overseer, delivering his instructions from the Red World. Making him a canine abomination.
  • Shadow of the Colossus has almost no exposition and very little dialog, and as all characters already know why they have come to the place, they don't talk about it and leave the player almost completely in the dark as to what's really going on. Dormin is actually quite nice when they talk to Wander, but the fact that they have been sealed in the temple and the way the pursuers in the last quarter of the game react to the place make it quite apparent that they are regarded as a kind of eldritch abomination by the people.
  • In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, the final boss, Satan himself, appears simply as a tall man with long black hair and shining, amber eyes. He appears nude, but there's a veil of shadow clouding his waist.
    • The Lords of Shadow also qualify before going One-Winged Angel. The three Lords of Shadow are actually the bodies of the founders of the Order that are animated by the evil that they left behind when they ascended to Heaven instead of souls. Cornell and Carmilla have some inhuman characteristics but still look fairly human. Zobek on the other hand looks completely human before transforming.
    • From the main series, we have Dracula himself. Far more than just a vampire, he is revealed in Dawn of Sorrow to be a fundamental force of the universe necessary for maintaining the Balance Between Good and Evil, and his role is literally to be the opposite of God.
  • The Pokémon Deoxys, even though it also qualifies as a Starfish Alien, looks reasonably humanoid. It's bipedal and has two "arms" and legs, yet lacks facial features.
    • Ralts, Kirlia, Gardevoir and Gallade. While they look humanoid, their Pokedex entries and the fact that they are in the indeterminate egg group strongly suggest that they fit into this trope. That means that they can mate with various kinds of sentient sludge, rocks, gastropods, ghosts, and a windchime.
  • In Alan Wake there is Jagger, who appears to be human, but as the manuscript says is completely alien in all ways besides appearance. And even then, it's a full Eldritch Abomination using a human body as a disguise.
  • The Outer Space Beings from the Sin and Punishment series are from outside the universe as we know it, have strange and immense powers, have blood that can grant people special powers, are implied to be the source of many of the bizarre lifeforms found in the series... and look perfectly human.
    • Or rather... they can look perfectly human. The fluff reveals they can look like anything they want. And Achi, Big Bad of the first game, shapeshifts into a planet for the final boss fight.
  • Some of the Daedric Princes in The Elder Scrolls manifest themselves as humanoids, some more normal looking than others. Perhaps the most normal-looking is, bizarrely enough, Sheogorath, the Prince of Madness. At first glance he looks less like the physical avatar of insanity and more like a grandfatherly banker you'd trust right away. This is, of course, entirely the point.
  • At first glance it would be difficult to think of Trish from Devil May Cry as anything but an attractive human woman. At least until she starts shooting lightning from her hands. Trish is just as demonic as any of the bosses in the first game, and only looks human because Mundus created her in the image of Dante's mother just to screw with the poor guy.
  • Dead Space 2 has Nicole. While she is just a hallucination, she's still a monstrous personification of Issac's guilt over failing to save the real Nicole, and a projection of the gigantic Artifact of Doom Isaac inadvertently helped build.
  • Minecraft has the "Enderman" mob, which is based off of Slender Man. They're three-meter-tall, completely black humanoids with glowing eyes. They wander around at night, and unlike other monsters that actively search for you, endermen ignore you as long as you ignore them. However, if you look directly at them, they turn to stare at you, then attack as soon as you break your gaze. They can teleport to get closer to you, and to dodge arrows. They run quickly at you when you can't see them. When you look back at them, they stop moving and stare at you, with their mouths opening and shaking violently. They're the only mob able to pick up blocks. It was eventually revealed that they're aliens from another dimension called The End, and you need to travel to their homeworld to beat the game (insofar as you can ever "win" a Wide Open Sandbox with no plot).
    • Also "Herobrine". He looks just like the main character, except he has blank white eyes. He is said to watch the player from a distance and appear in different places, like a ghost. He doesn't actually exist, but rumors of his existence were so prevalent that they may have served as the inspiration for endermen.
  • Pyron from Darkstalkers is an ageless energy being who exists solely to drain planets like a vampire. Hideously powerful, he spared Earth millions of years ago solely because he wanted to wait until it got tastier. His preferred form is a flaming humanoid, though he demonstrates complete control over his form. The scary part? Pyron isn't a standalone monstrosity. He's just another member of his race. There's an entire planet of these things. He does get his ass kicked by the other Darkstalkers, many of whom could qualify for this trope in their own right.
  • X-COM: Terror From the Deep gives us the Deep Ones, which are humans that were transformed by a graft of Aquatoid DNA into Human/Aquatoid hybrids.
  • Baten Kaitos Origins gives us the horrifying Wiseman. Its wings look like helicopter blades, it talks in the Royal We all the time, it eats souls, and it's capable of giving humans magical powers through their hearts. In battle, it has attacks like 'Cast Off Your Carnal Robes', and this is its battle theme.
  • The eponymous monsters from Skullgirls. Any woman lacking a pure heart who tries to make a wish on the Skull Heart is transformed into one. One in the backstory was so horrifyingly powerful that she singlehandedly forced three countries at war into an uneasy Enemy Mine situation to stop her. The plot of the game is kicked off by rumors of a new Skullgirl...
  • Possibly Dimentio in Super Paper Mario. Humanoid, definitely (he's got arms, legs, head, and a torso, so he fits the profile), and seeing as his One-Winged Angel form meets the criteria of Eldritch Abomination, it seems likely.
  • Bebedora in Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits is a demonic marionette created to destroy the world, with the power to enslave living things and use them as puppets. She also has the appearance (and mind) of a 12 year old girl, wearing an oversized hat and carrying a rabbit cuddly toy.

Visual Novels

  • M and Baron in Shikkoku no Sharnoth. When seen from the perspective of Bram Stoker, his silhouette is that of a normal human, but only the silhouette.
  • There are quite a few of these in the Nasuverse:
    • Tsukihime has Nero Chaos, who has a body composed of hundreds of animals that can detach from him to attack and feed. Even his mind is a gestalt, and his original personality is slowly being subsumed into the collective consciousness.
    • Fate/stay night gives us Matou Zouken, who is somewhere between The Worm That Walks and this trope, and a number of the Servants as well. True Assassin has no face beneath his mask and is summoned by eating his way out of the false Assassin's chest.
    • The backstory also contains several, most notably Crimson Moon, who is the Anthropomorphic Personification of the moon, and by extension the True Ancestors as well, as they were created in his image.


Web Comics

  • Icky from Insta-Dinner!". For the most part, he's very humanoid, barring his teeth and eyes. He can also pull food ingredients from his body, and spawn tentacles whenever he needs to. He's also enthusiastically friendly towards humans.
  • Rithuly from Sluggy Freelance, a vaguely defined "dark god" with strong Eldritch Abomination vibes: his "true form is of a great flying Stygian dragon" but he "usually appears man-sized, either as a wispy tentacle-headed dark ghost or a charming handsome man in a white robe adorned with jewelry."
  • Zimmy of Gunnerkrigg Court seems to be one of these at first (and Reynardine calls her a demon and refuses to go near her) but she's apparently just a normal girl with an unnatural affinity for the ether. Which human minds are not designed for, giving her nightmarish visions which can spill over into reality, and making her incapable of sleep.
  • Dora of Questionable Content is getting in on the action in Ia! Ia!. Hannelore may have something to do with it.
  • Ow, My Sanity has tons of these, many of which are female. The kicker? They're the protagonist's Unwanted Harem, which has strange implications for just how much more of a Deconstruction the series is going to become.
  • Doc Scratch from Homestuck. While his master, Lord English, hasn't been seen, the fact that he can wear a coat establishes that he is (probably) also this.
    • As of the second intermission of Act 5, Lord English has been revealed, and he definitely fits. He is green and massive, with claws and a skull-like face.
    • Jack Noir has become this as well after he prototyped with Bec. Even Doc Scratch says he's stronger than him now.
    • And after learning the answer to a certain question, Rose at least partially turns into one too. She's got grey skin, is surrounded by black magic, and can only speak in Black Speech. She's also gone a little crazy. However, she still seems to have the same personality and care about her friends. She later returns to normal after she dies and is revived as her dreamself.


Web Original

  • The Slender Man, pictured above. You can just about mistake him for a human being at a distance (unless he's in full-on Combat Tentacles mode), but come any closer and you start to... notice things.
  • Another well-known creepypasta creation, The Rake, also counts. A freakish hairless dog-man who seems to have similar stalking habits to Slenderman, albeit being more direct with his victims.[3] Has even showed up in Everyman HYBRID, integrating it into the above mythos.
  • The Slender Man and the Rake are joined by a number of other Humanoid Abominations in The Fear Mythos, including the Cold Boy, the Wooden Girl, and the Blind Man. Don't be fooled by their names - they are horrifying.
  • The SCP Foundation has absolutely every type of abomination, and these are no exception. There's some creepy Reality Warpers hanging around there.
    • Dr. Clef claims to be one himself: he discovered what he was at an early age when an idle thought caused the Challenger disaster. He then devoted his life to putting the kibosh on those more selfishly inclined than he. This is still Clef, though, so take it with a mine of salt.
    • Creepy Child SCP-053 looks and acts like an ordinary three year old girl. She's not. Let's put it this way: SCP-682, an alien reptillian Omnicidal Maniac that hates everything in this universe on principle, likes SCP-053, and the feeling is mutual—once SCP-053 got past her initial fear of the giant terrifying reptiloid. (It's kind of adorable, actually.)
    • Along the lines of the Slender Man, SCP-582 appears and acts out his part in any stories written about him.
    • All humanoid SCPs are Abominations, no matter how harmless their abilities seem, since SCPs violate the laws of physics and/or biology as we know them just by existing.
  • Sara Waite, codename Carmilla, of the Whateley Universe. She looks like a goddess of lust. Her father's mother is actually Shub-Niggurath. Her mother's ancestry is even creepier.
  • One popular portrayal of Anonymous is this, a suited man with a blank green face.
  • The Blacktrons of Lego Quest are heavily implied to be this. Only one character in the quest has ever seen the face of a Blacktron, and he's not telling what he saw.
  • This is essentially how Mary Sues are portrayed in Protectors of the Plot Continuum: inhumanly beautiful and malevolent mind-controllers that degrade the story's reality simply by existing.
  • Several characters from Deucalion Chronicles probably qualify, but Asmodeus in particular fits this trope - despite being good-natured, his presence is frightening enough that normal humans refuse to even acknowledge him. And anyone with gifts that let them his true form probably stop thinking of them as gifts.
    • The Holders in The Holders Series seem to be this, as does the final item. Also, the Seekers are implied to become this over the course of their quest. Also, the final Item appears to literally be an Eldritch Abomination inhabiting the last Seeker to claim it.
  • Ace in Ruby Quest, a silent, masked Implacable Man who appears to be central to the mysteries surrounding the facility and may or may not be The Worm That Walks. Additionally, all of the normal people in the facility are either on their way here or past it and heading towards pure, concentrated Body Horror.
  • I am Painis Cupcake. I will eat you.
  • Atop the Fourth Wall: The Entity/Missingno can apparently only manifest itself in the physical realm by taking the form of another.
  • The Ginosaji from The Horribly Slow Murderer With the Extremely Inefficient Weapon series.
  • This video Creepypasta presents the Observe and Absolve man as one.


Western Animation

  • Van Kleiss from Generator Rex looks like a man with a mechanical hand, but in truth while he Was Once a Man the seat of his consciousness now is the nanites that fill his body - and the area around his stronghold, meaning that in a sense the entire country of Abysus is him, and answers to his commands.
    • No longer applies as of episode 15. Being cured of his nanites has turned him back into a normal, though still evil, human. He even loses the mechanical hand.
    • And as of episode 21, he is one again, but with different powers - instead of a Genius Loci, he can now induce Body Horror with a touch. Also, he got his mechanical hand replaced, though from where isn't specified.
    • For that matter, any and all characters who've manifested as EVOs but retain a largely human appearance might qualify (and are often treated as such) - this includes not only Van Kliess but Rex himself and his love interest Circe.
  • Miss Bitters from Invader Zim. Nobody is exactly sure what she is, but human is not on the list of options. She is implied to be older than the Skool (they couldn't make her move so they built it around her and made her a teacher) and has taught at least two generations worth of students. The official website mentions rumors state that she is the spawn of an English teacher and a really big snake. Her flashbacks in the series indicate she was once much happier...
  • Marceline's dad from Adventure Time is an Faux Affably Evil, deathless, soul-sucking creature who lives in the Nightosphere, wherever that is. When not making Nightmare Faces or going One-Winged Angel, he looks like a blue skinned man in a business suit with weird eyes and ears.
    • Marceline herself might be one of these. There's no way of telling whether her Cute Monster Girl appearance is her Shapeshifter Default Form or not, and given her lineage it's almost entirely certain the few abilities she's demonstrated are nowhere near the extent of her power.
  • Kenny McCormick on South Park was revealed to be an immortal being raised by moochers who liked to attend Cthulu cult meetings for the free beer.
  • Candle Jack from Freakazoid! actually has a lot in common with Slenderman—acknowledging his existence (in this case, by saying his name) means you aren't exactly supposed to escape him no matter how far or how fast you run...Fortunately he has a Weaksauce Weakness: fresh baked pie.
  • On Young Justice, Klarion the Witch Boy is upgraded from a magic user to a full-blown Lord of Chaos.
  • On Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Son is the Dark Side incarnate.
  • In The Owl House, the local Magical Academy offers classes on building these. Most of them seem more or less mindless and fully obedient to their creators, but not all-too durable or strong. Of course, thus far we've only seen student-created ones.

Real Life

  • Let me introduce to you, the new artificial intelligence, the Telenoid R1. This wriggling, limbless bleached monstrosity was designed by Hiroshi Ishiguro as something of the world's creepiest telephone. Two people in different locations can talk to each other through two Telenoids, with each Telenoid theoretically mimicking the tone and face and "presence" of the other speaker. As geek website, Topless Robot, plainly puts it, it's "A HORRIBLE LIMBLESS WHITE BLOB STRAIGHT OUT OF LOVECRAFT'S MEDULLA OBLONGATA.". This little guy hit the bottom of the Uncanny Valley, then started digging.
  • This would have you believe that Ronald McDonald is one.
  • Charles Manson, maybe. Or maybe not.
  • Clowns to kids who are afraid of them.
  1. ↑ experienced Battle Sister trained for flying gunslinger work
  2. ↑ Or, in one case, Louisa Ferre
  3. ↑ Slendy watches from a distance; the Rake likes to sit on your bed. While you're in it.
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