Living Shadow

Are you ready?

"I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow."

—Hans Christian Andersen, "The Shadow"

You're sitting by the fire one night, reading your book, when suddenly there's a gust of wind. The light flickers and you see your shadow move - except you're not moving. You get up and see that there's actually two shadows - one is yours and one, well, that one's moving independently of you. How (creepy) amazing!

This is the Living Shadow. Sometimes it's evil, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's merely mischievous. It may be a person with the power to become a shadow, an Alien that only appears to be a shadow, or something much, much worse. Regularly, they're used as Nightmare Fuel.

Voluntarily separating yourself from your shadow is one of the more dangerous things you can do.

Not to be confused with a Shadow Archetype, which isn't usually a Living Shadow, or with Fighting a Shadow, or Loving a Shadow (which may happen with a Living Shadow, but is not necessary). Also not to be confused with Casting a Shadow, though it's not uncommon for the two to overlap.

Examples of Living Shadow include:

Anime and Manga

• Leliel, the 12th Angel in Neon Genesis Evangelion, proved to be a two-dimensional creature resembling a shadow that projected a three-dimensional, spherical shadow; everyone understandably assumed the sphere was the Angel. You attack the sphere, you get eaten by the "shadow".
• An episode of Ranma ½ had Ranma train against his shadow (literal "shadow boxing"). Inevitably, the shadow became evil and had to be put back to normal.
• In the Thriller Bark arc of One Piece, Gecko Moria's Shadow-Shadow Devil Fruit allows him to remove shadows from people as if they were living things. He can also stuff them into corpses, turning said corpses into zombies (which gain all the abilities and personality of the shadow's true owner). Shadows can also be stuffed into living people, with the same result, but after a certain period of time (depending on the willpower and concentration of the person), the shadows remove themselves forcibly.
  • The Shadow-Shadow Fruit also gives Moria's own shadow the ability to move (and, of course, fight) independently, as a straighter example of this trope.
• In Soul Eater, Tsubaki's brother Masamune, the Uncanny Sword, has the ability to twist his shadow into a stick-figure shadow monster, an ability she inherits after defeating him. Crona also talked to his/her own shadow in their Mental World, but that was more of a symbolic thing. Ragnorak, Chrona's partner/sapient blood, also resembles a shadow somewhat.
• In the 5th arc of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure the Stand wielded by Polpo, Black Sabbath, has the ability to jump from shadow to shadow. This means any shadow big enough to fit him not attached to a human and he attacks by pulling your shadow up from the ground and stabbing it with an arrow that comes out of his mouth. Really. However it's only a 50% change you'll die from it because if you can handle it the strain on your soul you can get a superpower of varying use.
  • Alessi from Part 3 also uses a shadowlike Stand, Sethan, who de-ages whomever it touches.
• Pride/Selim Bradley from Fullmetal Alchemist has the ability to transform any shadow in his area into an Eldritch Abomination covered with eyes and teeth. Those shadows are also quite 'physical'; they can touch people and objects (and rip them apart or consume them).
  • In a flashback, Father's original form was shown to be a tiny, shadowy ball in a flask that was able to manifest a single eye and mouth. In chapter ninety-seven, his true form is shown to be a nothing more than an mass of shadows covered in teeth and eyes formed to resemble a human.
• Shadow type magic in Mahou Sensei Negima uses this as a fighting style, and can create tangible objects out of the stuff. Word of warning- as tempting as it might be, don't make clothing out of it. Like any magical construct, it will vanish if the person generating it is incapacitated. It took Takane D. Goodman quite a... while to learn it.
• Some Pokémon (mostly ghost types) can turn into moving shadows to evade attack. In one of the movies, Darkrai did this a lot, much to Ash's frustration.
• The Illegals in Dennou Coil resemble living shadows, especially the humanoid Nulls.
• The Nara Clan of Naruto, which includes Shikamaru Nara, can utilize shadows as weapons for binding, controlling, impaling, strangling, or other manipulations. Jiraiya, who is unrelated to that clan but is the main character's mentor, has a similar skill that can cause him to merge with someone's shadow, controlling them.
• Madoka Magica: The witch Elsa Maria and her minion Sebastian.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has the monster "Wall Shadow", which is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A living creature hiding inside its shadow, only capable of moving along walls. In the actual card game, however, it is just a level 5 monster with 1600 ATK and 3000 DEF, capable of attacking just like any other monster.
• Seiichirou Tatsumi's power in Yami no Matsuei is manipulating shadows as a mean of transport and as a weapon.

Comic Books

• Sergio Aragones "The Shadow Knows" strips for Mad Magazine depict people's shadows acting out their secret fantasies.
• Shadow-powered Golden Age DC villain Ian Karkull; at one point, he was messing with Anti-Hero Obsidian, who can also become a Living Shadow. In Superman: The Animated Series, he was reimagined as a Cosmic Horror simply known as Karkull.
  • The Shadow Demons from the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover are two-dimensional silhouettes of the Monitor, and their merest touch can be deadly.
• The Sandman story "Season of Mists" makes a specific point of describing the odd behavior of each of the Endless' shadows as they are introduced. Desire has two of them, Despair's has its own odor, Delirium's is tangible and changes shape on its own, Destiny doesn't have one, and Dream only has one when he remembers. Death's is not mentioned (although she is consistently the most human-like of the Endless), and Destruction is not present at the time.
  • However, none of their shadows seem to be sentient, at least as far as we know (it would be entirely plausible, there's just no actual evidence for it).
  • There's also the shaman who hides himself by transforming himself into a bear, the bear bites off his shadow, and the shadow turns into a decoy shaman.
• Cloak of Marvel Comics' Cloak and Dagger can likewise take on shadow characteristics.
• As mentioned in the Western Animation examples below, the Shadow Thief is a Hawkman foe who can turn into a living shadow.
• In addition to the other Doctor Who examples on this page, there's also Shayde, from the Doctor Who Magazine comic, a mental construct who's nigh-indestructible, able to travel anywhere in space and time, and kills his enemies with psychic weaponry. Fortunately, he's on the Doctor's side.
• In the Judge Dredd / Batman crossover The Ultimate Riddle, they face a character actually called "The Living Shadow".
• The eponymous entity of Top Cow's The Darkness has elements of this. One notable example is when Jackie, paralyzed by holy light, summons tentacles out of the shadow cast by the person projecting said light.
• A member of the Female Furies named Malice Vundabar can summon a horrific shadow monster called Chessure to devour for victims.
• An old Marvel horror comic has "Joe the Invisible Goon", a creature which obeyed a guy's literal commands (To the point where it caused his girlfriend to have a heart attack when he yelled at her to drop dead), which took the form of his shadow most of the time.
• This is the power of the Shade, a foe of The Flash and a sometimes enemy/sometimes ally of Starman.

Film

• In The Artist, downtrodden hero George Valentin, in the depths of his despair, screams at his shadow from the light of a movie projector. The shadow turns and walks away.
• The plot of Wes Craven's They involved living shadows.
• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dracula had a shadow that could move independent of him.
  • Played for laughs in Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It - His shadow limps after Dracula falls down a flight of stairs, despite his claim that he was unhurt, does an... interesting dance with Mina's shadow, and ultimately runs away after Van Helsing, Jonathan, and Dr. Seward are trying to kill him.
  • Also spoofed in the "Bart Simpson's Dracula" segment of The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror IV", with vampire Mr. Burns' shadow shown playing with a yo-yo as he walks away.
• In Carl Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr, the main character sees shadows living independent of their owners. This wasn't due to their being vampires, however; the movie simply had a very, very dream-like quality.
• At the end of the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore film Ghost, living shadows drag the bad guy down to Hell.
• Done as a quick gag in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: While in Toontown, Eddie's shadow says "Gesundheit" after he sneezes.
• Played for laughs and awesome during the "Bojangles of Harlem" number in Swing Time. Fred Astaire dances before a large backdrop on which he seems to cast three shadows. The shadows begin moving independently of him, and eventually walk away. (The amazing thing, on a meta level, is realizing that until this point he had been dancing in perfect sync with the prerecorded back-projection, which he wasn't even looking at.)
• In Disney's The Princess and the Frog the Big Bad, a voodoo magician named Dr. Facilier, has a living shadow that can interact with the real world, and serves to both mirror and accentuate his evil, mysterious nature. Later in the film, Facilier bargains with his "Friends on the Other Side" for the ability to control a whole swarm of living shadows.
• In Freddy vs. Jason Freddy Krueger plays with this trope by projecting his shadow to attack a potential victim; however, because Freddy's still recovering from his time deprived of Springwood's fear and belief, the shadow passes clean through the teenager without harming him.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: one of the denizens of Halloweentown is a living shadow that likes to cross the moon. Although he looks like Oogie Boogie, there's no connection.
• In Nocturna, the Big Bad is a practically-unstoppable Living Shadow that devours light, seemingly growing more solid/substantial the more it 'eats'. It was also unintentionally created by Tim, but is destroyed when he faces up to it, overcoming his fear of the dark.
• In A Christmas Carol (2009), the Ghost of Christmas Future is Scrooge's shadow.

Literature

• Hans Christian Andersen's story The Shadow is about a writer whose shadow comes to life and eventually overcomes its owner. It has a Downer Ending, too. He wrote it in 1847, which makes this Older Than Radio.
  • Adapted into a play by the Russian playwright Eugeny Shwartz (and later into two movies). The concept of living shadow is deconstructed - when the Shadow becomes the king and orders its former master beheaded, it loses its own head. Its henchmen are forced to resurrect the writer but the Shadow is nevertheless exposed and dethroned.
• Peter Pan had a living shadow that escaped and he had to have Wendy sew it back on.
• In Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series, the main character sees these shadows and calls them "bodachs." It's implied that they might actually be visitors from the future.
• They are the main villains in John Dies at the End.
• In a book whose title I can't remember, a wizard gets rid of his shadow, thinking this makes him perfect. However, it turns out that the shadow has become a monster which, among other reverse-of-normal things, travels through solid ground instead of air, and eats people's bones instead of their flesh.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, there's an entire alien species called the Defel or Wraiths that appear as shadows.
• In The Dresden Files, Nicodemus has a mobile shadow he uses to strangle people and fly at high speeds.
  • A shadow which is actually a Fallen Angel.
  • It even paces round the walls of a room when bored, or as close as the avatar of an immortal, soulless fallen angel can get.
• The members (cousins) of Faction Paradox have independent shadows called sombras que corta (shadows that cut) that they graft weapons onto - a cousin's shadow could take a roomful of mooks apart while they themselves wouldn't have to budge an inch. Of course, this is just part of their shtick of Magic From Technology ... or is it?
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them describes Lethifolds, which look like shadows but are actually just very flat black creatures.
• A particularly frightening variant is introduced in the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire.
• Garth Nix's The Seventh Tower series has the Shadowguard and Spiritshadow partners to the Chosen.
  • In his Old Kingdom novels, there are particularly dangerous Mooks called Shadow Hands.
• The titular Cosmic Horror in "The Double Shadow" by Clark Ashton Smith.
• The titular Haunter in the Dark in a story by H.P. Lovecraft appears to be some type of a shadowy creature (with wings, tentacles and a three-lobed burning eye). It's weakness is light (little light hurts it, bright light will banish it).
• The Ghouls in Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee. Martinez are part-Living Shadow when in darkness. Also, Earl, being a vampire, has a shadow that is completely independent of him.
• In Graham McNeill 's Warhammer 40,000 Ultramarines novel Dead Sky Black Sun, they are attacked by shadows and escape only by Kill It with Fire. They are told they are only pollutants with life.
• The sleeping humans on Dorma Island in Welkin Weasels are guarded by their now-independent shadows. The weasels get past them by waiting till noon. Since it's near the equator and the shadows are still cast in the same way they would be if the humans were attached, the shadows are reduced to tiny blobs which the weasels can just step over.
• Shades from Karen Marie Moning's Fever Series are low-caste Unseelie which hunt at night and drain their victims until there's nothing left except clothing and the dehydrated remains of whatever they couldn't eat.
• In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, the Kencyr dead whose remains have not been given to the pyre may remain in this world, but can only be perceived through their shadows. One particular such ghost girl appears in book 2, Dark of the Moon, and again in book 4, To Ride a Rathorn.
• In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, the narrator of the "End of the World" sections has become seperated from his shadow, and must reunite with it if he wishes to escape the city.
• In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged accidentally summons up one of these, and spends the rest of the novel trying to either escape from or destroy it.
  • The author explained that this is an allegory of the Jungian concept of the Shadow.
• The first of Walter B. Gibson's hundreds of novels of The Shadow was titled, The Living Shadow.
• Played straight in Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum, when King Verence's (second) shadow has to be removed and "killed" by the Nac Mac Feegle (with a well-aimed crossbow bolt) because its presence allows the vampires to control him.
• George MacDonald was apparently fond of this trope. In Phantastes, a dark shadow attaches itself to the protagonist, causing him to suffer a severe depression. They play a more benevolent role in a short story entitled "The Shadows," in which they cast themselves on walls to comfort the bereaved, amuse children, inspire musicians, and confront guilty parties with their misdeeds.
• In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell it's revealed that Childermass can transform himself into a shadow, having learned something during his years of service to the magician Norrell.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Shadows in The Moonlight" this is one of the problems.

Far below her something moved. It was as if a black shadow detached itself from the gulf of shadows below her. It moved slowly up the sheer face of the cliff--a vague bulk, shapeless in the semi-darkness.

• • And the title—thing in "The Slithering Shadow"
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, the barghests combine this trope with Hell Hound.
• In Shadows of the Apt, Scyla is haunted by a shadow from the box.
• In Susan Dexter's The Wizard's Shadow, a murdered wizard turns himself into this; he then attaches himself to a passing peddler and more-or-less drags him off to finish the wizard's unfinished business.
• In The Ring of Solomon Khaba the Cruel has one of these. He avoids going out at noon to make it less obvious, but it's always behind him wherever the sun is, tends to be rather longer than it should be, and its limbs are sometimes threateningly outstretched when his are crossed. It's actually a marid called Ammet, who is extremely devoted to his master.
• In Nnedi Okorafor's The Shadow Speaker, the main character Ejii has the ability to talk to shadows like they are alive. However the ability is not common.
• In Septimus Heap, in Flyte, Marcia Overstrand is haunted by her own shadow, who turns out to be the Suspended Ellis Crackle that DomDaniel set upon her so that she would build a Shadow-fang that he corrupted for his own purposes.
• Matthew Swift has to deal with his old teacher, Mr. Bakkir's shadow, a shadow-creature that is the projection of Mr. Bakkir's will to live that will do anything to ensure its survival. Including tearing Matthew open to get at the Electric blue angels.
• In The Lost Years of Merlin series, Merlin eventually gets his shadow to come alive. His shadow ends up being headstrong and mischievous, and leaves after an disagreement with Merlin. Luckily, he comes back just in time for the final battle, having gone to recruit the swamp ghosts to aid their cause.

Live-Action TV

• There's an episode of The Twilight Zone called "The Shadow Man," about a living shadow that lives under a boy's bed and will harm anybody except the person whose bed he lives under. At the end of the episode, the Shadow Man starts choking the boy, saying that he is a Shadow Man from a different bed. Brrr.
• Doctor Who has had plenty of Paranoia Fuel over the years, but they ramped it up to eleven with the Vashta Nerada from "Silence in the Library." They are piranhas of the air, things that live in shadow that can literally melt flesh. They exist on billions of worlds, including Earth, where, though they mainly feed on roadkill, they still kill humans, and are the reason why every intelligent form of life is afraid of the dark. Plus, if they get inside a suit meant to keep them out, they can control your skeleton and use it to chase down your friends, all whilst your last words repeat endlessly and remind the Nerada's new victims just whose corpse is chasing them down.
  • Technically the last words part was a side effect of the communicators and happens for non-Nerada deaths too, but we all know it's really there to make the Nerada victims even more creepy.
  • Expanded Universe rivals Faction Paradox combine this with Nightmare Fuel and Hyperspace Arsenal. How? They use their weird technology to transform their shadows into living arsenals capable of directly manifesting in 3-D, allowing their priests to calmly sit down for a spot of tea as their shadows tear all enemies around to pieces.
  • Another episode, Love And Monsters, revealed that Elton's mother was killed by an "Elemental Shade". It's not clear or not if it was a Vashta Nerada.
• An episode of Supernatural dealt with creatures who were invisible except for their shadows.
• One Monster of the Week in Lois and Clark was a man like this. He was an invincible killer who could enter any place as a shadow and kill his target without being seen or leaving any trace of his presence... but unfortunately, he was facing a guy with laser eyeballs and light means to him just what it means to actual shadows.
• Not precisely "living," but on one episode of The X-Files, an experiment involving antimatter goes horribly wrong, causing the shadow of the scientist to consume the body of anyone it fell upon, leaving only a scorch mark on the wall/floor. Guaranteed to cause nightmares for days.
• In Charmed, the Woogyman appeared like this when giving instructions to the people it had possessed.
  • Apparently, Cole/Balthazar used his Living Shadow for surveillance.
• In an episode of Smallville, "Prey," one freak-of-the-week was a meteor freak partly based on Shadow Thief.
• In Bear in the Big Blue House there's a living shadow character. She falls under the friendly/mischievous category.
• The trope is flirted with in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Identity Crisis, in which an alien parasite is discovered by its shadow since the magic camouflage it inflicts its hosts with doesn't work against spotlights.
• The Friday the 13th: The Series episode "Shadow Boxer" revolves around a pair of cursed boxing gloves that allowed a washed up boxer to bring his shadow to life. While the boxer was in the ring, the shadow would murder someone while the gloves granted the boxer a surge of strength, allowing him to win any fight he entered.
• An extraterrestrial Monster of the Week from Fringe resembles a three-dimensional shadow.
• The Haven episode "Ain't No Sunshine" featured a man's shadow coming to life and killing people who angered him. The heroes destroy it with bright light, but it reappears on the man. They defeat it for good by keeping the man isolated in total darkness: no light equals no shadow. Fortunately for the man, he's blind.

Music

• This video by hip-hop violinist Lindsey Stirling, "Shadows", has Lindsey playing and dancing alongside her own shadow, similar to Fred Astaire's "Bojangles of Harlem" number listed above.

Oral Tradition, Myths and Legends

• There's the shadow people, whom various people have "witnessed" and speculated about.
• Wraiths and Shades sometimes.
• In Nigeria, the Yoruba people believe that a person has at least three spiritual beings. One of them, the Ojiji, is a shadow that follows its owner and awaits his return in heaven when he dies.
• In Roman mythology ghosts were usually jet-black, and resembled living shadows.
  • The souls in Hades are called umbrae, umbra means shadow in Latin. So everyone becomes a Living Shadow upon their death (unless you are deified).

Radio

• There was an episode of Hall Of Fantasy, an old time radio program in 1953, called "The Shadow People."

Tabletop Games

• A practitioner of Ebon Shadow Style, from Exalted, can temporarily transform into this.
  • Another example is Five Days Darkness, the shadow of the Unconquered Sun. He's a pretty nice guy, but he has a hard time helping people since he disappears in sunlight.
  • Ebon Dragon, the Shadow of All Things, used to be this before the Primordial War, but the wounds he suffered forced him to become an actual three-dimensional dragon instead of just the shadow of a dragon.
• The shadowdancer Prestige Class from 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons allows the character to summon a shadow as an obedient servant. There's also the shadowcaster base class that can do a whole series of interesting things with shadows, including summoning them. Most of these shadow creatures come from the plane of shadows or the Shadowfell (depending on which edition of D&D you're playing).
  • There's an undead creature called a shadow in D&D which drains the strength of whatever it encounters, if the creature it attacks dies, the creature will become a new shadow under the control of its creator.
  • Additionally, in 4th Edition, one of the Epic Tier Arcane Familiars is the Shadow Incarnate. It is implied to actually be the caster's shadow separated from them, and once per encounter it can be used to determine line of sight, effect, etc. for your arcane spells.
• The Lasombra of the Old World of Darkness had the Discipline of Obtenebration (shadow manipulation). Their Antediluvian [Lasombra] becomes a creature of pure shadow living in the Abyss, and comes to the world during Gehenna.
• The Shadow Form ability in GURPS. It's a powerful advantage if it can be controlled but a disadvantage if it's always on.

Video Games

• Five Living Shadow-Eldritch Abominations serve as the bosses for the five Nightmare Worlds in Nightmare Ned.
• In Blue Dragon, each character has a magical blue living shadow.
• Also in Mega Man Battle Network, there are shades that are incorporeal and can only be hurt by swords.
• Some versions of Dark Link in The Legend of Zelda.
  • While Fanon has more or less refuted this, turning the character into a Shadow Archetype, in Ocarina of Time the Water Temple's sub-boss is Link's Living Shadow.
  • Midna takes the form of Link's shadow whenever he's in his real form (not the wolf) in Twilight Princess.
    • During early wolf-outside-twilight sections of the game, you can see her shadow riding Link's shadow...but there's no physical Midna on Link's back to match.
  • The Hyrulean fascination with Link's shadow originated in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, in which Link's shadow was the surprise Final Boss.
• While none of the heartless in Kingdom Hearts are anybody's shadows, they are clearly designed with this in mind, being the darkness from people's hearts. Many of the pureblood heartless (Naturally forming heartless, like Shadows, Darkballs, and Invisibles) have the ability to temporarily become shadows to dodge attacks and move faster.
  • Sora also has to fight his own shadow in the Neverland level in the original Kingdom Hearts. This is based on the scene from the original story(and Disney movie) where Peter Pan has to chase his own shadow.
• The Shadow Sirens in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
• Living shadows in a variety of shapes and sizes are the main enemies in Ico.
  • They show up in Shadow of the Colossus, though they're harmless this time around. Dormin's true form is a colossal shadow as well.
• Okage Shadow King is the story of a boy and his shadow, which was possessed by the Evil King Stan in return for curing his sister of a Pig Latin curse.
• The original Prince of Persia game had a shadow that separates from the Prince after he jumps through a mysterious mirror.
• Mitsuki Konishi states that she would hide in one place in the six days Neku and Beat were alloted to find her. She was able to abide by her own rules and remain mobile, because her choice of location was Beat's shadow.
• Eddie in Guilty Gear is a living shadow that now fully controls his old hosts' corpse.
• The Prince of Persia-esque Heart of Darkness has a monstrous medley of these as the Kid Hero's enemies. They all try to kill and eat you, sometimes not even in that order.
• In the Pokemon games, Gengar are described as being able to take this form.
• Dante of Devil May Cry once had to fight one of these. It later became an ability of his.
• Being the Arcana of Shadow in Arcana Heart, Gier naturally takes this form, swimming around in the floor of the stage and jumping out when the Maiden commands him to attack.
• Bogmire in Luigis Mansion is a living shadow type creature apparently made by negative emotions. Then there's the fact that its own shadows are not only sentient, and attack in swarms of about five or ten at once, but are half transparent and created by lightning.
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia had Blackmore, a boss near the end of the game. His shadow is host to a powerful demon, which manifests as a wolf-monster, and he apparently feeds on the shadows of others if his introduction is any indication ("I will take your shadow!"). Appropriately, his area is lit with hundreds of floor-mounted candles.
• Persona 3 and Persona 4 refer to all enemies as Shadows. Their base forms are inky blobs.
  • Mind you, this is supposed to be a reference to the Jungian Shadow, not the physical absence of light.
• Silhouettes in Video Game/Metro2033, which are imprints of the past, appearing only as shadows linked to nothing material when you happen to shine your flashlight on them, constantly repeating a window of time shortly before the person's death. And they can hurt the living by contact.
• In Planescape: Torment, the Transcendent One's main servants are these. Oh, and they're not just a horde of mooks it raised/found one day, they're the vengeful souls of the thousands of innocent people killed to fuel your immortality spell.
• Your Shadow, a Boss Monster from Kingdom of Loathing.
• In the sequel of Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance the fortress of Mordoc is filled with tons of living shadows. Since he has no longer one (being a vampire and all) he likes to manipulate them.
• Ecco the Dolphin : Defender of the Future has a level where you run across dolphin shadows that have no dolphins.
• Lost in Shadow : You play as a boy's shadow which has been ripped from its owner and thrown off a tower. The aim of the game is to get back to him.
• The Fairly Oddparents video game Shadow Showdown has as its main villian the Chamberlain's Shadow.
• Noob Saibot in Mortal Kombat 9. There, he gains a shadow clone that appears to be made of an ink-like substance that Noob can send out to attack enemies from afar or to bolster his close-range combos. If you look closely, Noob's real shadow doesn't return until his clone disappears. This might overlap with Literal Split Personality, as developer notes and drawings designate this entity as "Saibot", with "Noob" as the playable character (previous games gave his full name in this form as Noob Saibot—usually just Noob for the sake of brevity; there was no implication of a second person beforehand).
• Kind of turns up in Heaven's Feel route of Fate/stay night. The shadow Dark Sakura kills people and can corrupt all Servants other than Gilgamesh. Including your love interest from the previous two routes (well, certainly from Fate, and possibly from UBW).
• In Diablo 2 the Assasin can summon a shadowy clone to fight on her side.

Web Comics

• Shadow2 and the other "glass-eyed men" from Gunnerkrigg Court.
• The Shadowchild from Ursula Vernon's Digger, who was supposedly 'hatched' from a dead bird and has absolutely no idea what he is. In addition to being a shadow, he can also eat the shadows of other things, which apparently kills them on the spot.
  • And Sweetgrass Voice, who is far more malevolent than the innocent but powerful Shadowchild.
• Misfile has the Big Bad of Book 8, a shadowy entity dubbed the Wraith by fans. Apparently, it was the manifestation of Bronwyn's confused inner desires towards her boyfriend. Finaly stopped when Rumisiel stuffed it back where it came from.
• For a long while in Sluggy Freelance, Bun-Bun's shadow was replaced with a living one (the same one that tries to scare the groundhog every February 2). For a while all it could do was talk and shift its shape, but after Bun-Bun started acquiring the powers of various holiday figures, it was able to take on a physical form as well.
• Jack and the Denizens from Sequential Art.
• Lord Greed from Parallel Dementia.
• Blip's resident vampire, Liz, has the ability to become this, and merge with people's shadows. This is so she can go outdoors during daylight. If she happens to catch a glimpse of someone's panties, she counts that a perk.
• Sarah of Cat Legend is a shadowmancer, and her shadow occasionally separates from her and acts of its own accord. She names it Sunny.
• Shadow Magic in A Modest Destiny allows one to use his shadow as a third arm. Usually only available to Theives, but Maxim trades the warrior-exclusive "Decoy Mannequin" for getting taught how to do this.

Web Original

• The Auditor from the Madness Combat animation series is a living shadow who can become intangible at will, among other things.
• Of The Shadows of Miir, only Despair really fits this trope. The other Shadows are more like The Fair Folk.
• An Easter Egg in a SBEmail features Homestar being pitted against his shadow self, fighting game style. He begins to mock to old "dip the main character in ink and make him fight himself" trope when he gets his bwathom whomped almost before the fight even really starts.
• A good variety of these in Neopets; Perhaps the oldest example is the mysterious Shadow Usul.
• From The Fear Mythos: the Nightlanders. The Choir also sometimes manifest within people's shadows.
• In Dragon Cave, the 2011 Halloween dragon were the Shadow Walkers, dragons which can move among the shadow realm.

Western Animation

• Ebon from Static Shock could turn into a living shadow and teleport people.
• In the Men in Black cartoon series, there were some shadow aliens.
• There's an episode of DuckTales (1987) called "Magica's Shadow War," where Magica deSpell harasses Scrooge McDuck with lots of living shadows.
• One of the villains in Justice League Unlimited was a living shadow named the Shadow Thief.
  • Who has traditionally been an enemy of Hawkman, and also appeared in The Batman.
• In the cartoon The Art of Self Defense, Goofy tries his hand at shadow boxing - and basically has his butt handed to him by his own shadow.
• In Disney's Aladdin: The Series an evil sorcerer steals the main cast's shadows and turns them all evil. There was a world where shadows went while people slept, ruled by a being called Farabu who looked like a living shadow but made of starry night sky.
• Johnny 13's Shadow in Danny Phantom.
  • Interesting in that this is not an additional thing: it is the actual lack of light caused by his presence in said light's path, and while it's moving around being alive, he doesn't cast a shadow. Doesn't that mean that Johnny should be invisible while it's doing its thing?
  • No, Shadow seems to be a separate entity from Johnny. He gives it orders, the shadow follows them. Likely, Shadow just acts like Johnny's real shadow until called upon, since few other ghosts in the show cast shadows either. It's been theorized that Shadow is the embodiment of bad luck that followed Johnny 13 around in life, and now does so in death...
• In one "U.S. Acres" segment of Garfield and Friends, Wade's shadow, brought to life briefly through the Rule of Funny by way of Tempting Fate, gives him good reason to reassess his realization that shadows cannot hurt him.
• Piglet of Winnie the Pooh befriends his shadow when his friends are too busy to play with him in an episode. The shadow feels neglected and leaves when Piglet returns to his normal friends. Piglet's friends try to fill up his lack of a shadow by offering to give him their own shadows, but he's happily reunited with his shadow at the end.
• In Jackie Chan Adventures, the Shadow Khan were ninjas that could turn into shadow and move around in that fashion, perfect for ambushing.
• In one Aesop and Son segment from Rocky and Bullwinkle the story of the dog who dropped his bone because he was trying to steal the one his reflection had was changed to the story of a dog who attacked his shadow for the same reason. He ends up knocking himself out and his shadow simply steals both bones and walks off. When he realizes that he no longer has a shadow he has to buy one off the black market. His new shadow once belonged to a man named Charlie who, it's implied, met a rather sticky end. Charlie's shadow refuses to mimic his new owners actions and the two of them don't get along very well. After they both learn to work together, it's reveled that "Charlie's shadow" was really the dog's old shadow all along.
  • Bullwinkle also had to deal with fighting his own shadow(and losing) while reading "My Shadow" (from Robert Lewis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verse").
• Courage the Cowardly Dog once encountered a sentient shadow that gained consciousness after it former master - a meager, callous and grumbling old man - died. Still retaining some of his master's cruelty, the shadow spent some time terrorizing Courage but eventually they reconciled and Courage even devised a plan for a shadow to find its happiness - it becomes a shadow of a star.
• Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic. In Limbo, the first circle of Hell, great men such as Plato, Caesar, Aristotle, Socrates, and King Latinus, are depicted as whispering shadows, unaware of their fate. Unlike the other circles of hell, their torment is the least hellish.
• In The Mask, one recurring villain was Skillet, an immortal Enfant Terrible intended as an evil Expy of Peter Pan. One of his powers was to release his shadow to consume those of others, causing them to rapidly age while keeping him immortal.
• In an episode of the German/Italian cartoon School For Vampires, the vampire kids learn how to control their shadows, causing them to do everything from backflips, to picking up and holding physical objects. But the main character Oskar's shadow goes wild and becomes fairly menacing until he learns to control it.
• The main cast of ReBoot and Mike the T.V. once fought a shadow monster towards the end of a Dungeons and Dragons inspired game.
• Judging from her appearance and Word of God on her origins Nightmare Moon may very well be one of these.
• In The Smurfs, Jokey's shadow comes to life when he accidentally sprinkles Mother Nature's magic powder for bringing trees to life onto it.

Real Life

• A phenomenon known as Shadow People entails humanoid shadows appearing in the periphery of some peoples' vision, only to disappear when confronted. There are many explanations, both scientific and pseudoscientific, for this phenomenon, but little agreement over the true causes.
  • More recent studies have suggested that this and similar/related phenomenon such as dopplegangers and out of body experiences are a result of, more or less, a part of the brain misfiring. Essentially, the part of the brain that's responsible for spacial self-awareness (ie how the brain knows where your hands are and how you're positioned so it can do basic things like walk and put your finger on your nose) can, if stimulated, result in the brain being fooled that you are, in effect, somewhere else such as three feet behind and to your left. Consequentially, the rest of the brain tries to reconcile the fact by freaking out even more.
  • Of course, the setup for that experiment was an attempt to trick the mind into thinking it had control of another body that it could actually see, so YMMV.
  • A researcher working in the CIA has seen this phenomenon, and found it to be from the ventilation fan which made his eyeballs resonate, giving false images.