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alt title(s): Cosmic Horror; Ultra Horrific Monster
See those tiny figures in the circle? Those are people.
Oozing and surging up out of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic — tentacled — proboscidian — octopus-eyed — semi-amorphous — plastic — partly squamous and partly rugose — ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had regained. — HP Lovecraft, "Out of the Aeons"
How to describe these unclean mockeries of natural law? There are no words that can encompass such foulness, not in English or any other human tongue. They are other, alien beyond comprehension, their very existence an affront to all rationality. I could speak of ichor-dripping tentacles and yonic voids, painfully dissonant cries and colours of no earthly hue, but those are mere superficialities. Monstrous though these stigmata are, they do not define the abominations; they are merely among the more common symptoms of their underlying wrongness.
What all Eldritch Abominations have in common is their defiance of natural law, as humans understand it. They are the things that should not be, the ultimate aliens. It is this that makes them abominable, and it this that reduces to gibbering madness all but the strongest of those who encounter them.
However, people can get used to anything in time, if they don't die first. If Eldritch Abominations were on every street corner, people's conceptions of natural law would stretch to accommodate them. A lone mile-high soul-consuming monstrosity would be cause for worldwide pandemonium. If there were ten thousand such, descending from the cold stars on umbral wings every new moon to ravage the Earth, then that would just be a fact of life. People wouldn't like the oversized locusts, but they would not be driven to madness by the sight of them.
For this reason, only creatures which people rarely meet, and survive to tell the tale, can qualify as Eldritch Abominations. The creatures may actually outnumber humanity — trillions may dwell in the Stygian abysses far below the ocean waves, trillions may drift between the stars — but they prefer wild and lonely places, where people seldom tread. What qualifies can also depend on who is looking. Some things are so strange that even lesser Eldritch Abominations find them abominable.
Physically, Eldritch Abominations range from almost human, through big ugly monsters, to the unimaginably bizarre. Generally, the weirder they look the more powerful they are, but this isn't a universal rule. Y' golonac (you fool! you doomed us all!) looks approximately human, but just reading its name condemns you to Mind Rape (assuming that your puny human tongue can even pronounce it). If you see it in the flesh, it's too late to run. And while we're at it, never, ever, EVER say Hastur.
The most eldritch of the abominations come from Beyond. Whether they are from beyond the stars, before the dawn of time, or a place incomprehensible to humans, they are alien to this universe and its laws. Other than that, they have nothing in common. The mildest Eldritch Abominations are typically the descendants of greater abominations, or the work of mad wizards (not mad scientists, who have trouble mastering the eldritch, certain AIs notwithstanding). These include some of the rarer varieties of undead, so long as they are rare, and the product of ill-advised breeding programs.
The best known abominations are the big ugly monsters that fit in between these two extremes. Here, the "ugly" in "big, ugly monster" doesn't just mean that it's horrible to look at — it means that there's something about it, about the way it looks, or the spaces it moves through, that violates every law of reality as you know it. "Big" doesn't just mean that it could use the Empire State Building as a toothpick — it means that the... thing doing just that is only the barest fraction of the monster's true form, the tiny piece of it that actually exists in a set of dimensions that our brains were built to handle.
This trope has some overlap with Starfish Aliens. However, Starfish Aliens aren't necessarily horrific or unnatural; they're alien only because they evolved in a different environment than humanity, and can be helpful or neutral, whereas Eldritch Abominations have a deep wrongness to them, no matter where you find them. For example, while Starfish Aliens usually care enough to take on a A Form You Are Comfortable With to avoid breaking your mind, an Eldritch Abomination won't even acknowledge/realize you have one to break. They can still be helpful or neutral, though most of them are way beyond the whole alignment system and are merely uncaring, treating Earth as at best a colourful plaything, and at worst...
Eldritch Abominations are native to the genre Cosmic Horror Story, but they are not confined to it. Mild examples can be found throughout the horror and fantasy genres. Greater abominations can occur in almost any type of fiction, so long as enough Cosmic Horror Story tropes are used. Usually they derive, at least in inspiration, from Lovecraft's work; folkloric origins are rare.
Cold be considered a subtrope of Our Monsters Are Weird, in that the monsters are so weird that looking at them breaks your brain.
Occasionally they lust after our women (and men), resulting in Naughty Tentacles.
For instances where the abomination's reputation is a bit more solid than the actual monster itself, see Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, both Pride and Envy are this, when they show their ugly sides, anyways.
- Much more Pride: the other homunculi call him a monster.
- Since the Homunculi all come from Father, this would make him one as well.
- Father originally looked like Pride... well, except for the "human boy" part. He was just a black blob with eyes in a flask labeled "Homunculus". Then he got a copy of Hohenheim's body. He fits the rest of the bill for being an abomination.
- As of Chapter 97, Father is now revealed to be a full-blown abomination.
- The Gate of Truth, which is basically a giant floating necronomicon with a giant eye inside, that spews black tentacles that gives eldritch lore in return for sacrificing your limbs or other's souls.
- Digimon Tamers, where the final enemy was the D-Reaper, a data-disposal program that got plugged into cosmic power. To fulfill its objective, a null-state for everything, it mutated into more and more alien forms, all inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos (mixed correspondingly with designs of the Angels from Evangelion). Unique in that it got worse when it became aware of humans as entities; it tapped into the agony and pain of one little girl, amplifying and becoming The Heartless and quite, quite insane by anyone's standard. Also noteworthy in that it is both man-made and technological in origin, which as noted before is extremely rare.
- Apocalymon from Digimon Adventure probably also counts, being a twisted mutant whose body is attached to an enormous geometric planetoid, and is composed of the data of Digimon who died failing to digivolve. He also seems to reside outside the Digital World proper (coming from beyond the "Wall of Fire") and his very presence in the Digital World warped it, causing its time to flow at a different rate to the Real World and also causing the creation of powerful evil Digimon.
- Both the Orechalcos stones in the Doma arc of Yu-Gi-Oh and the Light of Ruin that the Society of Light in Yu-Gi-Oh GX's second season is built around are Eldritch Abominations that were born from spatial phenomena, and having no purpose but to doom the universe under their whims. Even Judai's Neospacians reminded him that the Light of Ruin was a literal danger to all the cosmos.
- And then there are the Earthbound Gods (or Jibakushin) from Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds, the evil entities sealed into the Nazca Lines, and a serious threat to the protagonists (frequently yielding Oh Crap reactions from those about to get creamed).
- Although a couple look a bit silly (eg googly-eyed lizard Ccarayhua — though those eyes would probably give small children nightmares — that and the fact it can eat you if you push its owner too far).
- Raphaello from Bt X is a homebrew version of this: Amorphous, constantly growing, Nigh Invulnerable and assimilating everything in its path.
- The various Vampire Princess Miyu continuities use Eldritch Abominations as the Monster Of The Week... and the leading Dark Magical Girl.
- The Kishin from Soul Eater. Perhaps one of the only examples where a human can become an Eldritch Abomination with a little effort.
- In Berserk, the Godhand, many, many Apostles and some Qliphoth creatures count as Eldritch Abominations, being thoroughly unnatural creatures who are all extremely powerful. However, the more powerful Apostles (Zodd, Grunbeld, Locus, and later Irvine) are not Eldritch Abominations, interestingly. Shiva, the Eldritch Abomination form that Emperor Ganishka took during his final battle with Midland.
- The Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Leliel most of all. The last, Lilin or humanity, not included. Rei, Kaworu, and the Evas themselves may or may not be, depending on whom you ask.
- Urotsukidoji, in the Naughty Tentacles sense.
- Also the titular demon beast from Demon Beast Invasion by the same creator, though its nature and origin is constantly being RetConned (as well as a lot of other important plot points).
- A common Epileptic Tree is that Guu is one of these. She's rather cute and seemingly benign (if mischievous), but the shadowy, formless thing which may or may not be her true form bears a rather Lovecraftian air.
- The Big Bads of the first three seasons of Sailor Moon: Queen Metallia, Death Phantom and Pharoah 90. The Dragon of the fourth season, Zirconia, as well.
- The Big Bad from the last arc in the manga would count, wouldn't it? It's Chaos itself. It's also stated that the previous entities are extensions of it.
- Bleach's Aaroniero Arruruerie's relased form anyone?
- And let's not forget Szayel Aporro Granz. He doesn't just look horrific, he acts it too.
- And then there's Mayuri...
- The Nightwalker in Princess Mononoke may be enormous and scary to humans, but it isn't an Eldritch Abomination. Until its head is removed, that is.
- The titular character in Suzumiya Haruhi could be considered one of these, at least at the very beginning of the series. Just sit back and contemplate the idea of a bored, self-centered Jerkass of a teenager who both considers humanity dull and has the power to literally destroy and recreate the Universe at will and in any shape she desires — but who has no idea that she even has such power. And then imagine what would happen if she became aware of her power...
- That concept may even rival H.P. Lovecraft.
- Haruhi is actually suprisingly similar to Azatoth on some level. Both are incomprehensibly powerful beings who created the universe without being aware they did so, altho Azatoth is unaware of it because he is a primal force of chaos, mindless and senselesss, while Haruhi created an universe where she's thinks she's a normal (for a given value of normal) human and is thus unaweare of her true nature. In eighter case, if they'd gain awareness the universe would be doomed (or atleast be remade into something completely different than it used to be).
- The Data Entity would also fit, being incomprehensible to humans, not possessing language and having no relation to space or time. Luckily, it is True Neutral and mostly does not bother with this plane of existance.
- Not really. Starfish aliens, maybe. They're somewhat capable of conversation without appearing to have much experience. The real cosmic horror being here is the Sky Canopy domain, who are so bizarre that even the IDE is almost entirely incapable of communicating with them and probably never will be able to. Their interface unit's most notable line was 'You.......... Have......... Pretty........... Eyes.... That was her idea of fitting in. Maybe. Maybe she also loves Kyon or something.
- The Hiruken Emperor from Xamd Lost Memories certainly qualifies. Not only does it have an unsettling and unnatural appearance, blots out the sun when it awakens, and causes a rain that turns every living thing it touches to stone, we later find out that it's the product of artificially bringing a stillborn baby back from the dead using the Hiruko.
- Tetsuo from Akira ends up becoming something similar to this at the end of the film/manga. Hell, Akira himself could probably count.
- The berserk form of the Book of Darkness's defense system in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.
- Rave Master's Endless is a clock roach created by the world's memories, whose purpose is to destroy the world which had been altered by Time Travel.
- Shounen Bat (and to a lesser extent Maromi) in Paranoia Agent. Subverted because Shounen Bat (and Maromi) became a cosmic horror because people believed in its existence.
- The underground ruins in Uzumaki, from which the curse of the spirals emanates.
- And then there's the "lost chapter," which details an evil, sentient galaxy that gives the townspeople the ability to communicate via radio waves and drives them to homicidal jealousy over the right to claim first discovery.
- Though the galaxy was not visible outside the town, likely it simply a trick of the ruins.
- Majin Buu from Dragon Ball Z is a pretty good example of an eldritch abomination, considering he is very justifiably feared by the gods of the universe. Gods and galaxies alike are nothing to him.
- Janemba is probably the best example from Dragon Ball Z. He's likely the weirdest villain in the whole series, and is made up of a congealed mass of evil from Hell.
- Omega Shenron from Dragon Ball GT could be considered one, considering he is essentially an eternal manifestation of pure evil, brushing off the most powerful forces in the universe as if they were nothing.
- Naruto: Recently, Madara Uchiha has revealed that there was once a Ten-Tailed Beast. It was a being so powerful that the Sage of the Six Paths had to divide its chakra and send its body into the moon. The chakra would then become the other nine Tailed Beasts.
- Not to mention the recently-revealed true form of Kisame's special sword Samehada, complete with gibbering tooth-filled mouth. It's basically an Eldritch Abomination
on a stick onna steek.
Comics
- The Justice League Of America sometimes faces these.
- Starro, the very first foe they dealt with, has slowly moved in this direction over the years, being a literal Starfish Alien that latches onto you and takes away your free will.
- Subverted in a recent appearance when "Starro" was revealed to be a humanoid alien controlling the giant starfish "Starro" that the Justice League faced in the past. Double subverted when it's shown that the the humanoid alien is also being controlled by a smaller starfish that is attached to its chest.
- The Silver Age homage Justice League New Frontier had "The Centre", an ancient and unstoppable monstrosity. It also happens to be a giant island.
- Grant Morrison especially enjoys these.
- Grant Morrison used another member of Starro's species simply called the Star Conqueror during his run of JLA. It had a different color scheme and was much bigger — like Hudson Bay bigger. In it's second and so far final appearance it invaded the dreams of the American populace, putting to sleep and taking control of nearly everyone in the entire country. It took a two front assault on the creature — some of the remaining JLA members attacked its physical self while the Lord of the Dreaming aided the other JLA members in attacking it's mental self — to stop it. It was finally driven off into deep space while it's mental self was imprisoned in the Dream Lord's chest.
- Mageddon, the Big Bad of his JLA run, is a cosmic doomsday weapon that survived the death of the universe of the god-like beings who built it. Its purpose is to initiate universal suicide by psychically prompting all living beings to war with each other to the death. Even when disabled (by the combined forces of the angelic hosts of Heaven, every single human being on Earth endowed with super powers, and a secret weapon that was basically its Kryptonite), it was still in danger of detonating and vaporizing half the galaxy.
- Hexus, the Living Corporation, from Marvel Boy, a sort of Cosmically Corrupt Executive.
- The Archons of The Outer Church in The Invisibles are typical Eldritch Abominations — slimy, chitinous and decidedly non-human. In an interesting inversion of Lovecraft's themes, the Archons aren't entities of entropic chaos, but absolute order. When the universe reorients itself in their presence, it's not because it's breaking down, but because it's coming more in line with the Archons' specifications.
- Zenith in 2000AD features a number of five-dimensional beings, who owe more than just their names to HP Lovecraft.
- And then, of course, there is Mandrakk the Dark Monitor from Final Crisis, perhaps the ultimate Eldritch Abomination in the entire DC Multiverse.
- Nah, that would be the Anti-Monitor, the Big Bad of Crisis in the Infinite Earths. A energy being composed of pure anti-matter on the inside, covered by a giant armored shell that serves as a energy collector to gather positive matter from the universes he wiped out. At his weakest, Pre-Crisis Supergirl destroyed his first armor before dying, forcing him to retreat to his iconic armor. At his strongest point (when he travelled to the beginning of time), a coalition of heroes from many universes and time periods didn't even scratch his armor. It took the Spectre, God's Spirit of Vengeance, boosted by earth's magicians, to stop his plans by then. The Spectre was sent into a coma after that, the Anti-Monitor was just angry that his plans had been foiled. The Anti-Monitor destroyed numberless universes and killed a incalculable number of living beings with his anti-matter waves so that the Anti-Matter universe would grow and feed him with power. He had a immense army of powerful shadow monsters and Qwardian Thunderers. He was killed by being magically poisoned, being attacked with the power of a star, attacked by two parallel universe Kryptonians, hit by Darkseid's full power and finally thrown into a star. He returned after Infinite Crisis, as the Guardian of the Sinestro Corps. It took a duel with all the Guardians of the Universe and a galaxy-wiping explosion to take him out.
- Mandrakk, on the other hand, is a gigantic vampiric Monitor that feeds on reality itself. To quote Zillo Valla: "Carriers, Destroyers, Tankers and Explorers...vast in scale from your perspective, these machines are mere Monitor nanotechnology! The eyes of Mandrakk." Or, to quote Mandrakk himself: "Let me feed and feed until nothing remains but Mandrakk! Bloated and alone beneath a skyful of murdered stars!" To stop him, the Question and Captain Marvel (of Earth-5) have to bring forth the Supermen of the Multiverse, an entire army of alternate universe Supermen, and Nix Uotan has to summon Captain Carrot And His Amazing Zoo Crew, the Angels of the Pax Dei, the Forever People of the 5th World, and finally, the Green Lantern Corps has to stake it with a giant energy stake. This, of course, all takes up about the space of three or four pages, but it is an awesome sight to behold.
- What makes it even worse is that the subtext that implies that Mandrakk is the original Monitor or his reincarnation, who has been corrupted and made into all of creation's greatest threat.
- Darkseid also becomes this during Final Crisis; after his reincarnation into Dan Turpin, his presence actually starts to decay time and space. Mandrakk is using Darkseid's attack to hide his own plans (but is stopped before getting too far). How does Darkseid break reality (one parallel universe actually is destroyed by this)? He sits on his throne, waiting for reality to die merely because he exists. Awe. Some.
- Hellboy is pretty much built on this. Especially the Ogdru Jahad, neither male nor female, sleeping until they bring the downfall of man. They have an army of frog men that have long, clinging tongues capable of sapping the prodigious strength of Hellboy, let alone a human, can take on the appearance of a normal human being, possess Genetic Memory, and have the knowledge of great spells of power not heard on the Earth for millions of years. Also, every single frog man is a human infected by the Ogdru Jahad.
- The Conqueror Worm, a servant of the Ogdru Jahad summoned by Von Klempt would also qualify.
- In the Marvel Universe, there are various 'Elder Gods' that count as Eldritch Abominations. The most notable of these is Chthon.
- Don't forget Shuma-Gorath, who is oddly adowable.
- The serpent-god Set is another Elder God that plays a major role in the Marvel Universe, thanks in large part to its past continuity links with the Hyborian Age.
- Arguably Galactus qualifies as well: Older than the universe itself. Eats planets for a purpose unfathomable by men. (When he is put on trial he summons the sentient will of the universe who basically tells them to Take Our Word For It) and is incomprehensible by mortals. (It is canon that his hat-wearing humanoid form is simply an image our puny minds superimposes over a reality we cannot truly comprehend, for instance, Beta-Ray Bill sees him as a big starfish.)
- Although he's a mechanical example, I'd say Ultimate Gah Lak Tus definitely qualifies. Aside from driving everyone who sees it insane and spreading a flesh eating virus across the planets it consumes, much of the devastation it causes stems from its own gravitational pull... So Yeah.
- The DCU 52 miniseries introduced the Four Horsemen of Apokolips: ancient, primal entities that hail from Apokolips and predate the New Gods. They are limited only by their inability to physically manifest in the universe without assistance. In their debut, using flawed bodies that could only channel a fraction of their true power, they devastated Khandaq, murdered Black Adam's new family, and nearly killed Black Adam himself. Thankfully, they are now Sealed Evil In A Can... inside Veronica Cale.
- Furthermore, 52 featured the evolution of the villain Mr. Mind, who became a cosmically huge insect abomination. He's responsible for the differences between the 52 realities of the DC multiverse, having literally eaten key moments in time from all but one of them.
- The 5th Dimensional Imps, of which Superman villain Mr. Mxyzptlk is the most famous, have become an example of this. They can more or less wear the laws of physics like a funny paper hat, and while they tend to appear as cartoonish characters, those aren't their true forms. Luckily, most of them aren't interested enough in meddling with our universe, and those that do are permitted only to cause mischief. Of course, sometimes hiccups occur, like the time Mxyzptlk made the well-intentioned mistake of giving his reality-reshaping powers to the Joker.
- One of Alan Moore's early works is Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?. It's set in an alternate possible future where Superman is getting ready to retire - up until something moving at super-speed kills everyone he loves! It turns out: it's Myxy himself, who, as a superdimensional imp older than time, is now bored with being mischevious and wants to "try being evil for a while; maybe after 2000 years or so of that, I'll get to be guilty". When he drops the Goth version of his usual little-guy-in-hat image, he appears as a jagged-edged humanoid tear in space with malevolent eyes and maw, and Lois points out for the benefit of us readers that it hurts her eyes just to try and look at it, like all the angles are wrong. Now THAT begins to approach the idea of a being from the Fifth Dimension.
- In one issue, Superman teleports to the Edge of the Universe. Way out there, space becomes white, and after that, there is a MASSIVE, INFINITE WALL of Eldrich Abomination/Body Horror marking the final boundary between our universe and the next one over.
- JLA: Another Nail has the Limbo Cell, a primordial creature that eats existence.
- One Donald Duck issue revealed that a giant octopus called Ar-Finn sleeps beneath the depths in a sunken city. Our reality (or at least Donald's) exists only because Ar-Finn dreams about it. But if he wakes up, the world will start to adapt to his image, with the architecture becoming more and more alien and the people more octopoid in appearance. Also interesting to note is that Ar-Finn's subconscious mind manifests as humans in our world; a good guy who wants the dream to continue and a evil guy who wants the dream to end. It was awfully cynical for a Disney story, especially the ending, where Donald is horrified to find out that our whole existence is just a dream. Probably as close to Lovecraftian standards as Disney will come for the foreseeable future.
- In Watchmen, Ozymandias has one custom made.
- Hack/Slash has the Neflords, giant masses of tentacles (that double as wing wongs that can make things explode) which possibly lived in the void that existed before God created the universe. Being unable to create life themselves the Neflords need virgins taken from Earth to impregnate to create minions. Also, their main servant was Elvis. Yes, really.
- An Eldritch Abomination played a major role in Cyborg's origin in the comics. While visiting his parents at S.T.A.R. Labs, Victor's mother Elinor accidentally activated the experimental dimensional portal device his parents were working on at the time. The...thing that came through it immediately devoured his mother and mutilated Victor before his father Silas forced it back into its own dimension but not before the creature gave him a terminal case of radiation sickness. Silas barely managed to save his son using cyborg prosthetics of his own design, but Victor resented him for turning him into a "cyborg freak" for years believing that his father wanted to experiment on him until Silas revealed that he was dying thanks to the radiation. This led to Cyborg getting over his bitterness towards his father, and they spent one last day together as father and son before Silas died.
- Looks like the DCU just got a new one: Nekron, the Guardian of the Black Lantern Corps. Must be something in the cosmic water...
- The fun part? The Black Lanterns are powered by the imprisoned Anti-Monitor.
- Lucky for Nekron that the guy who punched it out last time, Captain Atom, is too busy with his own problems.
Films
- Cast A Deadly Spell climaxes with a cultist trying to awaken a Lovecraftian beastie. Luckily the needed Virgin Power turns out to have already been, um, depowered. Yes, yes, Incredibly Lame Pun and all that...
- Speculation about J. J. Abrams' movie Cloverfield included the possibility that it involved an Eldritch Abomination wreaking havoc on New York City. Abrams later definitively stated that it wasn't. It was just really big...
- "Mr. Shadow" from the The Fifth Element. Never really explained other than being pure death-bringing evil from deep space.
- The Monster from the Id in Forbidden Planet, a manifestation of Dr. Morphius' subconscious. While analyzing a footprint cast, the science officer comments that whatever made the print goes counter to all known evolutionary theory, and would be a nightmare in any world.
- Gozer and Zuul from Ghostbusters.
- Also Mr. Stay Puft: He's really only the manifestation of the greater Eldritch Abomination, based on the image Ray thought of.
- The first Hellboy film featured the Ogdru Jahad, depicted as a group of ginormous be-tentacled crustaceans inhabiting The Void outside the universe, as well as a tentacled monstrosity (referred to as Behemoth in the supplemental materials, though it was obviously based on the Ogdru Hem from the comicbook) that burst out of Rasputin's body and grew from man-sized to warehouse-sized in minutes.
- The true form of the Tall Man from the Phantasm movies is implicated as being some kind of Cosmic Horror that is anchored in another dimension.
- Although none directly appear in the Japanese version of The Ring, it's hinted that Sadako's mother had contact with such beings due to her psychic powers... and that one may have been Sadako's father, rather than the man who was believed to be.
- Well, Mr. Towel says he's from the ocean, in any case.
- The Hallmark channel version of Alice in Wonderland featured "The Crow", which scared Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.
- Galactus from the Fantastic Four sequel.
- Stretching the definition of the trope a bit, a number is treated like one in Pi. It's a 216 digit number that essentially defines all creation. It even has some religious signficance since it's related to the Torah. As the protagonist gets closer and closer to uncovering the number's existence and meaning, his own grip on reality begins to weaken and he starts getting these awful headaches... It's heavily implied that his friend Sol suffered a stroke when he got too close to figuring out the number. In the end, Sol figured it out — and suffered a second stroke which killed him. An all powerful entity that drives those who seek it to insanity and death? Definitely an Abomination.
Gamebooks
- One of the creepier recurring enemies in the Lone Wolf series is the Crypt Spawn. These are essentially swarms of human brains with batwings that, ironically enough, mindlessly attack anything in their path. To make matters worse, they always appear in the presence of even greater evils, such as a timeless and bodiless...thing in the Graveyard of the Ancients, two of the Darklords themselves, and the King of the Darkness Naar himself.
Literature
- The Shrike from the Cantos. Also the sole cause of the series' vast quantities of High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- The Great Old Ones (most famously Cthulhu) in the writings of HP Lovecraft (and the Mythos they spawned).
- Lovecraft's Eldritch Abominations are usually divided into three groups (the distinction is mostly created by later writers, but it is present in Lovecraft's own work to some degree):
- The Great Old Ones, which are immensely powerful beings made not wholly of flesh and blood but of something that can only be called matter in the most basic sense. They traveled from world to world when stars were right, but now sleep, waiting until the stars are right once more so they may rule again (incidentally, when they wake up, they plunge the world into madness and terror). Cthulhu is one of them.
- The Outer Gods (Lovecraft referred to them as the Other Gods), which exist outside our universe, and seem to be embodiments of various cosmic principles. They are far more powerful than even the Great Old Ones, and seem to be responsible for the creation of our universe (as well as other ones), albeit unwittingly. The most famous ones are the mindless leader Azathoth, the "Blind Idiot God" who resides in the center of all infinity, and Yog-Sothoth, who exists simultaneously in every point in space and time. Their soul and messenger is the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep.
- The Elder Gods. Lovecraft only used one of these deities (the rest are created by other authors, namely August Derleth, as is the term "Elder Gods"), namely Nodens, Lord of the Abyss. Nodens appeared in a humanoid form (whether this is his true form or one he took in order to not drive mortals insane is unknown) and was an enemy of Nyarlathotep (and thus somewhat beneficial to humans, who Nyarlathotep wants to wipe out). Derleth made Nodens the head of a pantheon called the Elder Gods, who were mortal enemies of the Great Old Ones (although some stories seem to place them at the same power level as the Outer Gods). In Derleth's works the Elder Gods were good and the Great Old Ones evil, which doesn't really fit with Lovecraft's cosmology. Most other writers who have used them make them somewhat benevolent to humans, but only because they want to keep the Great Old Ones asleep, which is also what most humans want to do (what with them destroying the world when they wake up and all).
- Lovecraft did use Hypnos, but its nature (or existence) is unclear thank to Unreliable Narrator.
- Towards the end, Herbert West had a vat of reanimated reptilian flesh, which he used to animate body parts, producing minor Eldritch Abominations.
- Lovecraft pretty much codified the language used to describe these things: show me a horror described as "eldritch", "gibbering", or "squamous" (and "rugose", don't forget that one)and I'll show you an author who's been influenced by Lovecraft.
- Proto-example: Robert W. Chambers' book The King in Yellow, which was an influence on Lovecraft himself, and he made references to it that are now better known than the original source. Filled with Mind Screw and Take Our Word For It.
- Another proto-example: William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land", as well as "The House On The Borderland", have quite a few of these, and his descriptions of the places and times where such things would exist helped shape the Cosmic Horror Story.
- Arthur Machen, who along with Chambers and Hodgson, was a major influence on Lovecraft, is best-known today for The Great God Pan, where a group of intellectuals manage to create a Half Human Hybrid by impregnating a woman with the seed of the eponymous greek god. Unfortunately for them, the cosmos is quite different from what they believe, and "Pan" is also the greek word for "all"... Making this an obvious influence over Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror.
- Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files has the Outsiders, beings that exist beyond 'The Outer Gates', or basically the limits of known reality. They can only be summoned by mortal magic, and are considered so dangerous that not only is summoning them forbidden under the Laws of Magic, but a member of the Senior Council (The Gatekeeper) has the full time duty of monitoring any possible incursions.
- Also, Outsiders eat magic and destroy reality just by being present. It takes wizards hundreds of years to learn even how to hold their own against them in battle.
- And there's the skinwalker from Turn Coat, which reduces Harry to a gibbering mess when he sees it with his Sight. It's pretty much a demigod, and is a walking source of very, very nasty dark power.
- Arthur C Clarke gives us the Mad Mind, an artificially created disembodied intelligence with near-godlike powers, whose creation goes very wrong. So terrifying is it that humans create another one (and do a better job this time) in order to (hopefully) stop it. Humanity is trapped between Scylla and Charybdis on a grand scale: the conflict between the two might destroy the entirety of creation, but implicit in the decision to create the second being is that what the Mad Mind will do if it makes its way back to inhabited space, or remains unchecked for a sufficient length of time, is worse.
- Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series has its own Ultimate Evil: a galaxy-sized region of total nothingness, where all light and matter are absorbed. Moreover, this nothingness possesses sentience, and is capable of movement. Naturally, our galaxy is in its path and only The Chosen One has any chance of stopping it.
- The same series also gives us the Vom, which while more on the world-devouring scale than the galaxy, fits several of the requisite criteria: inscrutability (it's a huge black... mass), exponential power growth, alien thought process (it lives only to devour all life on the worlds it comes across), strange origin (possibly extragalactic), immunity to conventional weapons, and Mind Control / Mind Rape abilities.
- Peter F. Hamilton's Nights Dawn Trilogy incorporates a positive slew of eldritch abominations: an incident involving a satanic ritual and a passing energy being creates a cross-dimensional link that allows the souls of the dead to come back and possess the living, before secreting entire planets away to their own pocket dimensions. Even worse, the trans-dimensional powers of the possessed, as well as the fact that they have absolutely no idea what they're doing, open the door to a range of other, semi-scientific eldritch horrors, by far the worst being a dimension of almost infinite entropy, which, if linked to our dimension, would suck it dry like a vampire. Things get so hopeless that it pretty much takes a literal Deus Ex Machina to sort the whole mess out.
- Stephen King is, as we all know, particularly fond of creepy-ass creatures.
- In IT, the eponymous monster is perceived as a Giant Spider by the protagonists, because this was the closest analogue that their rational minds could find for Its appearance. Attempting to fight IT can result in one's mind being flung beyond the edge of the universe, then being driven mad by the Deadlights (which IT is merely an appendage of). After the protagonists succeed in killing IT, they magically forget about the entire incident; apparently, this was the only way they could have lived a normal life afterward.
- Stephen King and Peter Straub got together to write The Talisman, a horror fantasy novel which is chock full of horrific creatures and mutants, the most disturbing amongst them is probably a mewling tentacle creature that bleeds ichor filled with biting white worms.
- The Mist describes what happens when ordinary folk are confronted with what may be an encroaching alternate reality that enshrouds their small town in an unnatural fog filled with predatory Eldritch Abominations. (Although the story's narrator explicitly notes the creatures aren't really perfect examples of this trope: they are not terribly bright, and when shot, they bleed.)
- One colossus encountered later in the story probably fits this trope better. The narator describes it as being "so large that it would make a blue whale look like a trout", and says that words fail him in describing how big and horrifying it really is. Its footsteps are so deep that his car could easily fall into them.
- The short story "I Am The Doorway" is about a former astronaut who becomes the conduit for an Eldritch Abomination, manifesting in the form of golden eyes on his hands. In an unusual spin on the trope, though, said Abomination isn't malevolent — it's terrified and disgusted by our world, which is as alien to it as it is alien to us, lashing out violently at the horrors it's forced to witness.
- In From a Buick 8, the titular car... isn't a car.
- And of course "He Who Walks Behind The Rows" from Children of the Corn.
- Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel is an arguable example, as it's specifically stated in-story that there is NOT A SINGLE GHOST involved. They never quite explain why it's so evil, or how at some point a random hotel room became sentient and evil. It just is.
- As well as another short story, "N", told through the journals of a psychiatrist analysing a patient who believes that by keeping objects "in order" obsessive-compulsive style, he is keeping cosmic horrors at bay (which doesn't seem so strange at first, since that's a pretty common reason why obsessive-compulsives do the things they do). The psychiatrist eventually, following the patient's suicide, takes over his "duty" of keeping things in order, and ends up killing himself as well, due to the stress involved in keeping the cosmic horror CTHUN and the rest of its reality out of ours. It's implied that even if more people continue the duty, the barrier keeping CTHUN at bay will stop working anyway.
- In The Dark Tower Book Three, Illustrated Edition, a print shown during their trip aboard Blaine shows the part of Roland's world that has yet to even begin to recover from the wars that made it what it is. The bird-things may not reach cosmic-level, but what they indicate about the greater cosmos could snap those old neurons pretty damn fast.
- King gives a direct shoutout to Lovecraft in "Crouch End", where a newlywed American couple honeymooning in London wander into the Cthulhu mythos.
- Lest we forget, there's also the Langoliers.
- Nasu Kinoko's early work, Notes, has "The Ultimate Ones", aliens who come to destroy the future humanity and reclaim the planet after Gaia dies.
- Also, Fate/Zero has a Caster hero who's basically a guy with the Necronomicon summoning different Eldritch Abominations.
- ORT, the Ultimate Being of planet Mercury, is mentioned in Tsukihime. Its raw power is considered far greater than that of any Dead Apostle.
- ORT's a funny thing. Infamous in the fandom for being the Strongest Being by Word Of God, ORT is only here because it responded to the dying message of Gaia before Gaia died and decided to wait it out here. ORT changes the laws of the universe around it, which isn't all that impressive on its own since mages can learn spells with the same effect, except when mages do it the effect only lasts for a few seconds because reality fights back. In ORT's case, reality is losing. It also technically holds a position as a Dead Apostle vampire, but only because it instantly obliterated the previous holder who wanted to study it (and supposedly has "vampire-like qualities"). Yeah... that's probably a lifetime membership right there.
- The Nasu Verse is almost a Cosmic Horror Story if you delve into the backstory. Gaia herself is almost exactly the same type of being as ORT. The main difference is that the reality she creates happens to be one where humans evolved and can survive in. She has also not yet created her Ultimate Being, Type Earth, and it is not clear that she can, especially considering that her Blue Marble is the only planet to bear life which tries to exerts its own reality against her own. (It would be interesting to see what Type Earth's reality would be like; probably similar to what Arcueid can do on Earth.)
- The father of all vampires, Type Moon, was the same type of being as ORT, and could reject reality and substitute his own like ORT, but doesn't exactly fit as an Eldritch Abomination since he was quite humanoid and pretty. Also, Zelretch killed him. Apparently by dropping him into a reality where his home (the fucking Moon) fell on his head.
- Oddly enough, the "angels" from CS Lewis' The Space Trilogy show some of these traits. They exist on a profoundly different level than us, have strange geometries and dealing with them can be terribly unsettling. One of the characters even notes that the fact that they're benevolent makes it worse; no matter how terrible the evil you're facing, there's always the hope that good will swoop in to save you... but what do you do when facing good turns your brain-inside out?
- The Oyeresu themselves, on occasion. In explaining what they mean by "manifesting to humans", they use the analogy of the ways a stone can manifest in human perception. The glorious statue is one possible perception, but so is the sensation you have after it's fallen on your head.
- It's also worth noting that the Oyeresu, who are just as good as the Unman is evil, have to try a few times before they figure out acceptable, vaguely humanoid, manifestations; their first try is a bad acid trip — eyes, talons, hurtling shapes in a void full of vertigo. This is, presumably, near the hit-in-the-head end of the manifestation spectrum.
- The Un-man in ''Perelandra'' is a zombie-like human whose evil is so pure and different from that of any other human that it made the protagonist pass out when he first saw the expression on its face. It is controlled by a being who is invisible to us and whose true form is literally indescribable to humans, not fitting into any of our mental categories. It is strong enough to destroy worlds and yet subtle enough to pass through matter and manipulate human minds.
- In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (especially the early ones), a constant danger of the use of magic is that of accidentally opening a rift into the "Dungeon Dimensions", regions with "very little reality", inhabited by nightmarish Lovecraftian monstrosities that crave the reality that those in more solid universes take for granted. They tend to try and invade the Discworld's universe in the vain hope of becoming more real themselves, "with the same effect as the ocean trying to warm itself around a candle."
- It should be added that the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions don't actually have form; the reason that they look like an incomprehensible mass of tentacled horrors is because when they do acquire some substance by coming close to the real world, they're terrible at it. This does not make them any less terrifying.
- It should also be added that for some reason, on Discworld, eldritch has the additional meaning of "oblong".
- The Things have not appeared for a long time due to the themes of the Series moving on. However, in Thief of Time we see statues of them in the History Monks' gardens — and the Auditors of Reality are said to be the deadliest of all, indicating that despite their unassuming appearance they are of a similar nature to the Things.
- The old dark god Bel-Shamharoth is sometimes presumed to be one of the very few aforementioned creatures that found a way to suvive, sort-of, in the real world.
- Let's not forget the Cosmic Horror in Reaper Man that is not from the Dungeon Dimensions for once, but a result from the Auditors canning the too-amiable Death. They start off as objects that people would collect and forget about, specifically as snowglobes. These snowglobes would "hatch" into useful, travelling objects (shopping carts), that then collect people into the enormous monster-queen-THING that turns out to be a SHOPPING MALL. It's funny, yeah, but also terrifying. Just think of all the shopping malls you've ever been in where you could be anywhere in the world for all the difference it makes, absorbing your time without you realizing it, being herded about like cows. Brr. This troper HATES malls.
- The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross and its sequels take place in a world where divisions that MI6 and the CIA don't even know they have, battle Eldritch Abominations (and their own bureaucracy) attracted to reality after Alan Turing discovered a theory that allowed the user to warp reality with computers and the Nazis attempted to summon the Great Old Ones using the souls of those slaughtered in the Holocaust to win World War II.
- Surprisingly, JRR Tolkien had read some of Lovecraft's stories, and took a few stabs at this.
- The Lord of the Rings
Gandalf: Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.
- Now when even Sauron, the guy who makes you crazy just by looking at him, doesn't know what these things are, that's some serious shit there.
- Ungoliant from The Silmarillion.
Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the Trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound... and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch, and leaf; and they died. And still she thirsted, and going to the Wells of Varda she drank them dry; but Ungoliant belched forth black vapours as she drank, and swelled to a shape so vast and hideous that Melkor was afraid.
- She later attempts to eat Melkor. She would have succeeded, too, if the Balrogs hadn't pulled a Big Damn Heroes... Yes, really.
- Please note, we are talking about Melkor, Boss of Sauron, Strongest of the Valar (Powers of the world/god-like beings), and only subservient to Eru (the creator/High-god) himself. Ungoliant was one big bad mama.
- This would have been a real problem if Melkor hadn't already spent a considerable amount of the strength native to him in making and animating evil things. When he was finally defeated, he was so weak (relatively) that he was thrown on his face by one of the Maiar. A similar thing could be said to have happened here, especially after Ungoliant had consumed so much of the power present in the light of the Two Trees and in the jewels made by Feanor that she and Melkor had just stolen.
- Thereby proving that not all Eldritch Abominations HAVE to be Lovecraftian. Tolkien based many of his concepts in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian mythology, and Nidhogg and Jormungandr (of Norse myth) are rather close to the trope all on their own.
- Hell, Morgoth HIMSELF applies to this:
...greater than a mountain with its head above the clouds, crowned with smoke and fire, and the light of his eyes drove the lesser Ainur to madness.
- Tolkien's earliest memory was of being bitten by a spider (and the doctor who treated him was the inspiration for Gandalf).
- The Minotaur in House of Leaves, if it exists.
- Given that the first reference we have to the abovementioned is a long footnote detailing precisely why its existence should not be possible, I think the idea that it doesn't exist can be safely thrown out the window.
- The House itself. While looking at it isn't immediately maddening, all attempts to understand it or classify it fail, and it moves, reshapes, and exists in manners that should not be possible.
- The Blight, from Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep.
- The Ancient Enemy from Dean Koontz's Phantoms is massive, lake-size mass of black sludge, older than the dinosaurs, and consumes other life forms as sustenance, and is able to perfectly mimic any creature it consumes. It can create small "probes" or "phantoms," imitating consumed life forms, to go forth and hunt more prey, obeying the orders of its "hive mind." In addition, the creature absorbs the mental capacity and memories of those it consumes, so its mind grows more powerful, intelligent and self-aware over time. Besides being able to mimic real animals and people, the creature can also form phantoms based on mental images from its victims; it takes sadistic delight in creating phantoms in the shape of religious demons and monsters to terrorize its victims before killing. The creature also apparently likes to think of itself as the Devil.
- Inverted in the Blind God
of The Acts of Caine. It is as impersonal, awful, powerful, and horrifying as anything from the Lovecraft mythos. The inversion is that it's not really alien. Played straight with the Outer Powers worshipped by the Black Knives in Caine Black Knife.
- Skulduggery Pleasant has the Faceless Ones, so named because they cannot be looked upon in their true forms without driving the observer mad, and can only manifest by possessing humans, melting all features from their faces in the process. They are the former rulers of this reality, before their slaves, the Ancients (the first mages) managed to find a weapon capable of driving them into another reality. They are described as having been so evil and sadistic that even their own shadows were afraid of them. A creature cobbled together from several monster parts including the torso of a Faceless One's host took a small army of mages to kill. When they finally appear, Valkyrie gets only a passing glance at one, and is temporarily driven into a catatonic state by its impossible geometry and biology. Skulduggery explains that if they successfully return, they will wipe out half of humanity, and then work the other half to death, before destroying the Earth.
- In Anthony Horowitz's book Raven's Gate (and its sequels) The main antagonists are the Old Ones, godlike creatures clearly inspired by Lovecraft that used to rule Earth before the humans defeated them ten thousand years ago and sealed them in another universe. The Nazca Lines were created as the seal, and the animal shapes drawn into the Earth were actually representative of each of the Old Ones, the familiar animals being the closest approximation the human mind could come to the Old Ones' horrifying appearance.
- Part of the Doctor Who Expanded Whoniverse declared Lovecraft's creatures canonical, and had their names originally bestowed by Rassilon. As if Cthulhu, Hastur, and the Fendahl weren't enough, a number of characters (most notably the creators of the Land of Fiction, and Compassion, an EU companion who became a TARDIS) have been upgraded to this kind of thing.
- There's an arguable case in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Waru
. "Hethrir's scientists breached the walls between dimensions and brought into existence a massive slab of meat covered with shining golden scales. Though this entity, Waru, lacked discernible sensory organs, it was highly intelligent and could communicate in a deep resonating voice." The scales were variable in size and a syrupy ichor oozed from between them. The ichor could be breathed by humans, and it was Bigger On The Inside. It was promised a way home by the man who summoned it, and it worked with him and healed the sick, was worshipped, and ate people to replenish its healing energy. It was always lonely and ended up eating the guy who summoned it before collapsing in on itself.
- In the Expanded Star Wars universe... The Sarlaac. Seriously. Star Wars scientists can't decide if it's an animal or a plant. Its physiology is textbook Lovecraft. It colonizes alien planets with spores launched into outer space. The Tatooine one is a titanic sessile predator that manages to survive the sparse ecosystem of a desert environment by digesting prey unbelievably slowly. And while we're on the topic of eating, it keeps its swallowed prey on messy biological life-support while it digests them, so it can literally feed upon their pyschic and physical torment and pick out the choicest neurological morsels to absorb into its consciousness, which it generates from the collective minds of its captive nourishment. Essentially, the Sarlaac has a Nightmare digestive system that rather neatly encapsulates the concept of Hell as a living organism.
- While in the Star Wars EU, the newly-introduced Abeloth from the Fate of the Jedi series most definitely qualifies.
- In Barbara Hambly's The Ladies of Mandrigyn... Altiokis's power source. It gets him in the end.
- The passageway between the worlds in Coraline. At first seeming to be a relatively normal, if strangely unsettling hallway, by the end it's a furry... thing that's very much alive, and incomprehensibly vast and ancient. It makes The Other Mother look trivial, and she's a particularly nasty fairy.
- The never-seen—and only very obliquely described—Todal in James Thurber's The 13 Clocks.
- China Mieville's Perdido Street Station has the slake-moths - monstrous, insectoid creatures that devour minds. Not literally, what the creatures feed on is the very sentience of their prey itself, leaving their victims utterly mindless shells. How terrible are these abominations? At one point, the government of New Crobuzon attempts to strike a deal with Hell to get them to intervene and stop the threat, and the demons are too frightened to get involved.
- And then you have the Weaver, who the New Crobuzon government turns to when the demons turn them down. It's a gigantic spider that exists between dimensions and is capable of traversing them as easily as we could walk down the street. It is also batshit crazy, speaking in the "flight of ideas" style most often seen in unmedicated schizophrenics and capable of doing anything to anyone, friend or foe, merely because it seems "fitting". During the brief time that the heroes are in its presence, the Weaver cuts off one of the character's ears, simply because it's more aestheticly pleasing this way.
- And then there is the Torque, described by one character as a tumour that aborted itself from the womb that produced the forces of Birth and Death. Whilst not evil per-se, it is a natural force that is almost totally uncontrollable which warps and mutates matter and biology into horrifying things. Merely trying to research it can turn you into an Eldritch Abomination. It was once used as a weapon; the results of the Torque Bomb were so awful even after a generous application of Magitek versions of nuclear weapons there's a country sized region of the world which isn't going to be inhabitable by anything but abominations ever again.
- Oh, and in the middle of a city there are The Ribs, the partially exposed skeleton of some enormous creature that has been dead for a very, very long time. Attempts to build over it resulted in seemingly structurally sound houses that just fell apart and tools that break long before they should, and attempts to excavate the whole skeleton tended to result in the workers suffering horrifying nightmares, or disappearing suspiciously. It was decided that whatever it is is best left buried and uninvestigated.
- Simon R Green's Forest Kingdom books contain several types of Eldritch Abominations in addition to the regular evil demons. In Blue Moon Rising there is a giant worm thing that devoured and entire mining town, in Down Among The Dead Men the Big Bad is explicitly named as an evil from beyond the dawn of time, Blood and Honour has an entire castle slowly turning into one (an entire room digests it's occupants at one stage, and a person is turned into a living doorway to a dimension full of eldritch abominations). Amongst several others.
- In Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea series, the "Nameless" are entities that the wizards refer to as the dark powers of the Earth, which are the focus of the oldest religion of the Kargad lands in The Tombs of Atuan. And in a later book, the main antagonist turns out to be some crazy wizard who tried to achieve immortality — by creating a hole which nearly sucked the entire world inside it.
- The Final Destination spin-off book Dead Reckoning has the main character Jess enter what appears to be Death's realm in a dream. There she encounters what is presumably Death's true form - vaguely humanoid Death is gigantic, composed of constantly shifting, crumbling and regenerating bones from seemingly "every creature that ever lived" and is covered in what could be loosely described as robes made from what appears to be still living flesh that twitches and squirms. From afar it just looks like a dark mass and its constantly emitting a noise that sounds like static and "thousands of birds all taking flight at the same time" while its eyes are completely blank, dark voids. Also, anything in proximity of it ages rapidly.
- Arguably the "rough beast" from Yeats' "The Second Coming,"
although it's hard to say for sure. The vision the narrator relates doesn't sound that bad compared to some of the other things described on this page, but the effects of its coming suggest otherwise.
Live Action TV
- In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the tentacled monstrosity underneath the Hellmouth. The Old Ones that used to inhabit the Buffyverse aren't seen, with the exception of Olivikan and a picture of Illyria.
- In Doctor Who, everyone who saw the Fendahl died of fright, and that was only a crippled ghost of its true self, 12 million years dead. In the Expanded Universe, the Time Lords deliberately created the Fendahl-eater, a malign void which could reach across time and space to feed on the stuff of thought and hungered to devour all eternity, from the Big Bang to the end of time.
- The Beast from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" certainly qualifies as well.
- so much so that the Doctor refuses to understand it. It's very much implied to be the literal Devil
- In Torchwood, we meet its son, Abaddon, who also counts.
- The titular Big Bad in "The Curse of Fenric" could definitely count as an Eldritch Abomination, albeit one without a body of its own, instead possessing others' bodies.
- Indeed, one of the spinoff novels actually identifies Fenric as Hastur the Unspeakable from the Cthulhu mythos.
- How about the creature from Midnight? We don't see much of it, so its nothing definite. But it Mind Rapes the Doctor. I think that alone qualifies it for something.
- Several in Power Rangers, such as Onimi from Power Rangers SPD and The Master from Power Rangers Mystic Force. They tend to be more defeatable than most, of course.
- Admittedly, this may be special pleading, but the original Star Trek may have had one, in the form of the Doomsday Machine, of the episode of the same name. Think about it: a bizarre ship appears from outside the known Galaxy that is irregularly shaped, looking something like a giant cone irregularly carved out of granite, with an abominable eye at its center looking suspiciously like a gateway to hell. It's virtually indestructible and is capable of destroying and consuming whole worlds. Consider also Commodore Decker's response to it: after it destroys his ship and kills his crew, this man, previously an atheist, describes it as the devil and coming straight out of hell, and suffers a complete Heroic BSOD. Later, recovering only slightly, his only response is to mindlessly try to attack and destroy it no matter the cost. Failing utterly at this, he surrenders himself to its power, and steals a shuttle specially to fly into it and kill himself. brr, man.
- A stronger case can be made for Redjack from "Wolf In The Fold", a formless creature that feeds off pain and suffering. When it possesses the ships computer, the viewscreens show a bizaare multicolered, constantly shifting chaos that Kirk speculates is where it comes from.
- Babylon 5 featured a race of ancient aliens that were a kind of Eldritch Abomination in the TV-movie 'Thirdspace', inhabiting a different type of space (neither normal, nor hyperspace) and waiting for a very, very long time until someone finds the Artifact Of Doom and activates it, allowing them to be released. Oh, and they have tentacles and extremely strong telepathy, and they cause insanity.
- Already touched upon in the Literature section, by the made-for-TV film adaptation of The Langoliers is pretty traumatizing if you had the misfortune of seeing it as a child as this troper did. Pure Nightmare Fuel.
- Charmed had "The Nothing", a creature imprisoned inside another dimension (located in an ice cream truck). It's been put to good use by devouring demon children.
Music
- "The Width of a Circle" features David Bowie "encountering" an Eldritch Abomination. Consensually, no less. (The Seventies were a weird time.)
- "The Thing That Should Not Be" by Metallica is about such a creature, and, quite obviously, is directly inspired by Lovecraft.
- Also "The Call Of Ktulu".
- In Guitar Hero: Metallica's "Metallifacts" video for "The Thing That Should Not Be," it also lists "All Nightmare Long" and "Ride The Lightning" as being inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's stories, specifically, "Shadow Over Innsmouth."
- Anything by The Darkest Of The Hillside Thickets, who were inspired by most of Lovecraft's work.
- Much of Current 93's and David Tibet's work is has heavy eldritch-apocalypse overtones. Blask Ships Ate The Sky & The Innmost Light Trilogy in particular.
religion and mythology
- Khaos, the Ancient Greek God of the Air (and one of the Progenoi, who aren't just older than the Olympians, they are older than even the Titans!) is described by Ovid as "rather a crude and indigested mass, a lifeless lump, unfashioned and unframed, of jarring seeds and justly Chaos named." A lumpy, crude, unframed mass? Throw some tentacles on it and call it Azathoth!
- Typhon, the youngest and most powerful of Gaia's offspring. Lower half consisting of serpent coils, a human upper half that reaches the stars, arms that spanned the East and the West covered with live dragon heads, a body covered in mighty wings, and eyes that shot forth flames. When it first appeared, all of the Greek gods except Zeus ran like hell. And even Zeus, the most powerful god of them all wielding his mighty thunderbolts in battle, lost the first round against Typhon (by Typhon STEALING ZEUS'S SINEWS and HIDING THEM), and barely managed to seal it away under Mount Aetna in round two. Before it was sealed away, Typhon also fathered most of the monsters present in Greek Mythology, such as Cerberus, the Sphinx, Orthus, the Nemean Lion, the Hydra, Ladon, and the Chimera (their mother Echidna might also fit the bill). And how did Gaia give birth to this beast? By sleeping with Tartarus, a.k.a. the Greek Underworld. The Earth slept with ancient Greek hell to give birth to a monster that frightened the gods themselves.
- The Earth produced another one when she slept with her own grandson Poseidon. Charybdis
was apparently once a beautiful naiad but was transformed by Zeus into a horrible and utterly inhuman monster. According to The Other Wiki, in some versions she is a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers that belches out whirlpools while in others she is a giant whirlpool. When forced to choose between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus quickly chose Scylla for good reason.
- Nidhoggr. Sweet
Jesus Baldur, Nidhoggr. It chews the roots of Yggdrasil and has human corpses as snacks... It is said to even be able to survive Ragnarok.
- As mentioned above, Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent might qualify as well. One of the monstrous offspring of Loki and a giantess (his siblings being the queen of the underworld Hel Half-rotted and the gigantic wolf Fenrir who are also pretty Eldritch themselves), he started out big and grew so large that he encircles the world. He sleeps at the bottom of the ocean depths and waits for Ragnarok — not unlike Cthulhu.
- The Bible: Angels, oddly enough, would likely count as such. For instance, cherubs are described as 4-faced, 4-winged, eye covered beings that can move without turning their bodies. The very first thing any angel says to any human they appear to is "Fear not!" Think about it.
- It gets worse. The Book of Revelation implies that there are angels so powerful and evil, that God locked them up in a bottomless pit because He didn't want to bother with them. A bottomless pit; that means a pit with a definable end would not be enough to contain these monstrosities. And they're going to be let out one day.
- All angels? Or just the fallen angels? Or do they all fall? If so, Light Is Not Good indeed...
- Depending on what you believe, they could have been aliens.
- Just like Cthulhu is an alien; it's not mutually exclusive...
- It's good that angels are mostly appear as good.
- With (depending on the interpretation) one very unfortunate exception.
- There are also some schools of thought that portray them more as golems.
- Behemoth and Leviathan are also worthy of mention. It is to the world's great benefit that these two great beasts are mortal enemies, since it is said that their offspring would be the end of the world.
- Primus forgive me for thinking about it, but there is such a thing as rape...
- Sorry to burst any bubbles, but Behemoth and Leviathan have been recognized as being referring to the hippo and crocodile respectively, not some monstrous abomination.
- "Recognized" here having the meaning of "we don't actually know what they were referring to, so here are the closest biological equivalents we know of." (To cite the most obvious problems, most crocodiles don't breath fire, and the tail of hippo - and both ends of an elephant, the other common explanation - compares unfavorably to the trunk of a Cedar of Lebanon.)
- This doesn't necessarily disqualify them. Plenty of the abominations on this list are based on the squid. Behemoth and Leviathan were probably based on the hippo and crocodile because those animals are incredibly dangerous to humans.
- The hebrew texts also mention the Ziz, which probably qualifies better because it is a monstrous bird, without a real base on a specific RL creature.
- Except in addition to sharing a universal flood myth in many of their religions and histories, the Middle East also has the Roc, a titanic bird that hunted elephants as standard prey. So, y'know...
- Hell, the middle east is teaming with giant bird-like monsters. In the persian mythology there's the Simurgh, a deity like beast with the body of a peacock, the head of a dog and the paws of a lion
- Thomist philosophy's angels aren't weird-looking—because they have no appearance, being pure ideas. But they definitely fit the "weird psychology" part, even the good ones. They have no need to reason or learn, because they know everything that they even can know, simply as a function of their self-awareness. They're not bound by time, and have no feelings; though they have enormous power to influence the world, it isn't by "action", as humans understand it, except in the way the concept of blue-ness "acts" on a blue object. Also, the most powerful of all angels, the supreme created entity, second only to God Himself? Satan.
- Japanese Mythology mention Amatsu-Mikaboshi
August Star of Heaven. It's rarely mention, but those little description claim it's a dark Force that existed before the universe, reigning alone in absolute darkness. Unlike other deities, Amatsu-Mikaboshi does not appear as physical being but a formless force (it does has humanoid avatar though). It was destroyed when the primordial darkness shatterred and become chaos — life and time. Yet the Mikaboshi still remain and corrupt everything such as turning love to obsession and jealousy, as well as give birth to demonic beings. On top of this, Japanese scholars note that the name Mika might be a distortion of Iga — squid. It never look good when you have referrence to both tentacle and star in name.
- Mikaboshi, for very good reason, is the Big Bad of the sample chronicles included with the first two Scion books. He is the primary avatar of Sobe-no-Kumi, the Titan of Darkness.
- Tiamat and (possibly) Apsu from Sumerian myth, especially the Enuma Elish, seem to fit the bill pretty well (the multi-headed dragon shtick is probably an invention of Gygax and Arneson).
- Apep, or Apophis, from Egyptian Mythology was a gigantic serpent-demon that embodied chaos and darkness. Every night it tried to eat Ra as he passed through the underworld, and every night Ra killed it- but it always came back. Sometimes it was strong enough during the day to temporarily consume Ra before his attendants cut him free again (this was the Egyptian explanation for solar eclipses). Prior to the demonization of Set, Apep was the canonical ulitmate evil of Egyptain Mythology, and there's no solid evidence that it was ever worshipped as a positive force.
- Ananta Shesha, lord of all nagas from Hindu Mythology, is gigantic serpent with thousand heads. So huge that it can hold all the planets on the hoods. Not only it can spew venom but also breathing fire. It's also one of few beings that will remain after the destruction of universe. It's good thing that Shesha prefer to sing and praise the glories of Vishnu, who sleep on its back, rather than play this trope straight.
- Legends from Islam and Arabia have fun beings like Kujata, an immense bull with all sorts of reduplicative organs, especially eyes, that carries the world on its back. It stands on the back of Bahamut, an even larger fish with many of the same properties.
Close religion and mythology
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons has whole races of Eldritch Abominations; from 3rd edition onwards, they have been increasingly linked with the Far Realm, an impossibly vast, incomprehensible place far beyond the cosmology of most D&D settings. A 3.5 sourcebook, Lords of Madness, gave greater detail to the "aberration" creature type, which is mainly used for such creatures.
- The subterranean illithids (also known as mind flayers) are inhumanly dispassionate, squid-headed alien creatures with vast psychic powers who raise human cattle to feed on their brains. They prefer "wild" game, though, as unlike muscles, brains apparently taste better when they've been getting proper exercise. They, at least, are more humanly understandable than most Eldritch Abominations, though their physical form is definitely inspired by Cthulhu.
- Several kinds of demons in the game invite comparisons to Lovecraftian beasties as well, especially the various Obyrith subspecies: they've existed since before the dawn of time, often have incomprehensible biologies, and just glancing at one is enough to induce new phobias or temporary insanity. One of the oldest horrifies reality itself and can kill if you get a glance at its true form.
- The Epic Level handbook for 3rd edition brought us the Abominations; malformed offspring of deities which desired to destroy all reality. Among the most horrific of them are the Atropal, which are the undead remains of stillborn godlings, as well as the Dream Larvae, who transform into something so scary that it can kill you with fear instantly the first time you look at it.
- Also in the Epic Level handbook are the pseudonatural creatures. Horrifying, tentacled, soul draining creatures from the far realms the lesser of which can take on greater demons such as balors. Did I mention they're immune to spells? If you come across a paragon (paragon creatures are the perfect forms of such creatures) pseudonatural creature suicide is your best bet.
- Perhaps closest to the Lovecraftian mold are the aboleths, giant psychic fishlike aberrations that dwell in the deepest, darkest parts of the world in unspeakable aquatic cities and have racial memories stretching back to before the births of many gods. They can enslave people by sliming them; the slime turns skin transparent. Ironically, these monsters are terrified of the illithids, who they, despite their long memories, have no recollection of.
- That's because illithids are from the future, refugees from the destruction of their vast empire.
- Another subterranean race culled from Lovecraft are the kuo-toa, amphibian humanoids consciously modeled on the Deep Ones.
- Don't forget the Daelkyr. Extradimensional invaders who mess with the fabric of reality for shits and giggles. They also like to mess with mortal biology like a kid plays with Play-Doh.
- Speaking of Eberron, there's also the Quori, horrifying monstrosities from the plane of dreams with very strong Psychic Powers (usually of the Mind Control or Mind Rape varieties) and the ability to possess mortals; they've already conquered/subverted almost an entire continent, and would really like to take over the rest...
- Don't forget the Daelkyr's unique minions and mutants. As well as the 'standard' Dolgrim, Dolgaunt and Dolgarr, Dragon Magazine also gives them Akleu, Dolgrue, Kyra, Opabinia, Xenostelid and Xorbeast, each of which is its own flavor of ghastly.
- Recently, Wizards has released a book called "Elder Evils", which features a guide of how to create your own Cosmic Horror, as well as several examples of Big Bad Eldritch Abominations, including Ragnorra, the Mook Maker Space Whale with an Evilutionary Biologist streak; Pandorym, the living Forgotten Superweapon with a personality you don't want anywhere near a Forgotten Superweapon; Atropus the undead planetoid; Kyuss, The Worm That Walks (that's his actual title); and of course, the Hulks of Zoretha.
- Since most of said world-threatening Elder Evils described in the book are acually beatable (in some cases killable) by non-epic (i.e. non-godlike) characters, quite a few cases of Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu can result. On the flipside, many of these cases are either fighting the monster before they've fully awoken/recovered from crash impacts, facing down a cult that was about to flood reality with beings like the one that just almost killed the party, or taking down an alien weapon designed to soften us up for invasion.
- 3.5 Edition also included the Alienist class. The class features made all your Summoning spells summon creatures from the aforementioned Far Realm, which took the forms of creatures you could normally summon, but took on a template that gave them more hit points, resistances, tentacles or other deformities, and the ability to shift into their "true(r) form" which scared everything like crazy. Further, your familiar became one of these creatures. Basically, you're calling tiny C'thuloid monsters. In addition to that, the caster who takes the class eventually starts becoming like one of these creatures, goes more then a little insane, and (with the timeless body feat) and is taken to the Far Realms by the unspeakable Eldritch Horrors when they would normally die of old age, specifically never seen again by people on the prime material plane. If you manage to reach the maximum level, you can cheat dying of age altogether, gain the "Outsider" trait and become an Eldritch Abomination. Your character grows a tentacle or two at this point.
- 4th Edition introduces an Origin classification for Eldritch Abominations called "aberrants". Naturally, any aberrant creature is almost guaranteed to have numerous tentacles or mind and reality-warping abilities — usually both.
- 4E also has the Primordials — a primeval race of elementals who created the universe, and are powerful enough to destroy gods. They would like nothing more then to destroy said creation, since as their nature as elementals dictate, they wish to continue an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Most mortals are perfectly fine with the world as it is now, especically since said death and rebirth would include them.
- Also 4E gives Warlocks the Star Pact power source, which basically involves beseeching strange otherworldly creatures that lurk behind specific stars for power. A lot of fluff text suggests that they become a little unhinged. Furthermore, a Dragon Magazine supplement includes an Epic Destiny where you become one of these strange otherworldly entities. It also describes the aforementioned stars, and notes their "unnatural" qualities, particularly one that you're better off not looking at for long.
- The stars themselves are Eldritch Abominations in 4th edition. And some of them have the ability to create avatars of their powers.
- Why has no one mentioned the Beholder Ultimate Tyrant? It has somethimg like ten eyes, one of which can easily stun you, and it floats. Oh, and the eyes shoot lasers. Which can burn you, freeze you, disentegrate you, and turn you to stone, among other things.
- While it mostly deals with Gothic horror, the Ravenloft campaign setting features an eldritch abomination in the form of Gwydion the Shadow-Fiend, Darklord of the Shadow Rift. He became trapped between realities when a planar gate collapsed on him, and really, really wants out. His full appearance is unknown, but what has been seen causes even The Fair Folk to go mad.
- The Dark Powers, the force(s) that created Ravenloft itself, could also apply, since both their methods and motives are entirely unfathomable. As well, the Nightmare Court could qualify.
- Regular old fiends (demons, etc.) were described pretty much in cosmic horror or eldritch abomination terms in Van Richten's Guide to Fiends for this setting. It didn't seem inappropriate. Horrifying creatures of great power and alien minds from other realities...
- Aboleths are too arrogant to worship anything, but they respect beings they call the Five Elder Evils. These are thematically based on HP Lovecraft horrors, and include flames surrounding a body that will drive you mad if you see it (if it does not kill you outright), a ball of sentient goo the size of a planet, and a drilling subterranean squid / centerpede thing that appears to be eating its way very, very slowly through the crust of the planet. Whose feces will make your head go wonky if you get too close to it.
- Cthulhu himself has an entry in the 1st edition Deities & Demigods supplement — and the way 1st edition rules worked, a high enough leveled player character could, in fact, punch him to death.
- Also the Gibbering Mouther (and its 4E relatives, the Gibbering Abomination and the Gibbering Orb). The name alone is obviously inspired by Lovecraft.
- Naturally, Chaosium's The Call of Cthulhu game is just full of them. One of the basic stats of P Cs, along with the normal STR, DEX, WIS, INT and CHR is SAN. That's Sanity. It's arguably the most important single stat unless you want to keep rolling up new characters.
- There's also a board game based on Call of Cthulhu called Arkham Horror which has tokens for hit points, knowledge of other worlds, and (you guessed it) sanity. Every turn, there's a high chance of a gate opening to another universe, and as more gates open, more monsters come flooding through ... and as the game progresses, the Doom Count slowly rises. If it gets high enough, the Old One (Cthulhu or one of his cousins) appears and the players have to battle it. (Each Eldritch Abomination has special powers — Azathoth's power is "if summoned, the game is over. Azathoth destroys the world.")
- In the world of Earth Dawn, the cyclical ebb and flow of magic periodically allows Horrors to slip from their own dimension into the world and devour anything that moves. If you're lucky, they will devour your body before they start on the good stuff.
- Shadowrun is more or less on the opposite end of the scale from Earth Dawn, with Shadowrun a world where magic is on the increase and the Horrors not terribly far behind. While there's at least one group working to speed the process, there's also others working to delay things, with the hope that this new-fangled technology thing can prevent The End Of The World As We Know It.
- In White Wolf's original World of Darkness, Cosmic Horror is not the central part of the game, but the authors love to incorporate Eldritch Abominations from beyond time and space into the setting, whose presence corrupts souls, drives people insane or warps reality. Included in this list are the Wyrm and its servants from Werewolf: the Apocalypse, the Nephandi and their patrons from Mage: the Ascension, the Fomorians from Changeling: the Dreaming, the Onceborn and Neverborn from Wraith: the Oblivion (and Grandmother from Orpheus), and the Earthbound from Demon: the Fallen. Vampire: The Masquerade had a lot less of this... except when the Tzimisce and Gangrel antediluvians were mentioned. One was pure Lovecraftian fleshy horror; the other had merged with the planet, sinking to the core to be rocked back and forth in slumber as though it were a child in its cradle.
- Abyssal entities from Mage: the Awakening come from what could best be described as an "anti-universe," a world that lives by rules wholly antithetical to those of Earth. An Abyssal entity that's been known to sell a lot of prospective players on the setting is the Prince of 100,000 Leaves, a demon made of living anti-history whose first summoning rewrote history and spawned a cannibal cult that literally eats its victims out of history in an attempt to bring the world in line with the Prince's native timeline.
- Truly, however, the most horrifying thing about Abyssal entities is that the idea that beings of the Abyss always take such predictable - horrifying and maddening, but predictable - forms as "monstrous, unclean abomination" is actually a comfortable lie that Mages tell themselves to hide from the fact that the Abyss is, in fact, in no way as banal and quantifiable as that.
- There's also the Nemesis Continuum. It's the scientific Cosmic Horror to the Prince's perversion of the humanities. It's an altered set of the laws of physics. Bits of the material world it contaminates are twisted; what if anything green was suddenly boiling hot, and the speed of light was slower than the speed of sound? It gets worse. The Nemesis Continuum is summoned by intelligent scientists "accidentally" (the book says that most proofs are found through indirect interference by acamoth) finding a proof for it, which then becomes true. And they become obsessed with finding more proofs.
- The Sourcebook Summoners includes some other examples, such as the chthonians of the Underworld (known as the "neverborn" since they exist in the realm of the dead, but cannot be reliably said to have ever been alive) and certain Supernal beings.
- In White Wolf's Exalted, there are several vast armies of insane, unreal things positively itching to roll up reality like a carpet and devour the souls of the living. Since this is Exalted, it's the player characters' job to punch every last one of them in the face with the power of their undiluted, shiny awesomeness.
- Not only are the above creatures the setting's elves, the Primordials made the universe, and all its gods to take care of it, so that they had time to smoke crack.
- In addition to the Wyrm, the Weaver and Wyld deserve mention. All three are incomprehensibly vast primal forces, arguably the prime movers of creation, and their conflicts with each other are all that stop any of them from bringing about The End Of The World As We Know It. If each were given its way, the Wyrm would destroy everything, the Weaver would freeze everything in eternal stasis, and the Wyld would dissolve everything into perpetual chaos.
- In addition to mentioning the above Cthonians, Geist The Sin Eaters features Kerberoi — wholly alien in mindset, bizarre in appearance, and nearly unstoppable, they exist solely to enforce the Old Laws of the Dead Domains. Geists can also border on this — although some are only slightly less human than a normal ghost, others are twisted monsters with mindsets all but completely incomprehensible to humans.
- In the Tabletop Games Monsters and Other Childish Things, one of the types of monsters used in its dark and twisted take on Mons are Eldritch Abominations. The non-statted sample monster Dewdrop is an Eldritch Abomination take on a unicorn, while one of the statted sample monsters is a Lovecraftian monstrosity merged with a teddy bear named Yog-So`Soft. Both these and the more "normal" monsters tend to cause bouts of panic and madness in people who see them as well, further adding to it.
- In The Whispering Vault, the player characters are all minor Eldritch Abominations who act as a "police force" that apprehends and retrieves other abominations who have illicitly made their way to Earth.
- Warhammer 40000:
- A small list: The four Chaos Gods (obviously) representing Rage, Lust, Change and Decay, and their assorted nightmarish hordes of daemons, the C'tan and their nightmarish hordes of awakening Necrons and the nightmarish hordes of Tyranids implied to have devoured entire galaxies. Oh, and the Emperor himself possibly qualifies.
- Depending on which side of the fluff you stand by, the Emperor is either a corpse on a throne or the most powerful being in existence waiting to be reborn.
- Magic The Gathering has the "Horror" and "Nightmare" creature types. Not all of them fall under this trope, but a fair number do. For example, the Nemesis of Reason
◊. As well, there's Marit Lage, an ancient, betentacled Sealed Evil In A Can. The card Dark Depths allows you to unseal her.
- For those who don't play Mt G, a brief explanation: The deck, generally consisting of 60 cards, represents the player's spell reserve and memory remaining. So, effectively, everytime the Nemesis of Reason even looks at you funny, you lose one sixth of your mind. No questions. And Marit Lage? She is 20 times as strong and resistant as one of the heroes who defeated the Empress of Fae in one of the more recent sets, gameplay wise.
- Of course, there was the original Cosmic Horror
if you go WAAAAAY back to the Legends expansion. The art says it all.
- The Lords of Cthul from Monsterpocalypse are the Cthulhu-esque, Godzilla-sized avatars of powerful extradimensional monsters.
- The Greater Titans of Scion are beyond mortal ken. They're beyond divine ken. They are so divorced from reality that they had to divide their power among Avatars just to have a clue what they were doing. Each one is its own internal world.
- Worst of the lot, though, is Hundan, the Titan of Chaos. It alone of the Titans couldn't be bound, for doing so requires definition - and Hundan cannot be defined. An easy way to enter Hundan is to have a God become the Void, the living embodiment of all things chaotic... and then jump in.
- The Unspeakable One from the Freedom City Mutants And Masterminds setting. (It also provides Golden Age stats for an eldritch entity, although that barely qualifies - it may look like Cthulhu, but it doesn't drive you mad simply from looking at it.)
- GURPS: Fantasy treats Tiamut as this, giving stats for a minor avatar of hers that while not particularly odd looking (it's an enormous dragon with four eyes) can still cause terror from just looking at it. Said avatar also happens to be invincible. To kill it permanently you'd have to track down the real Tiamut... who is half the size of the universe so good luck with that. There's even a Lovecraft quote after the stat block.
Toys
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
- In Tales of MU, the goblinoid girls, after seeing a human goddess on television, mention that their gods are "lumpier" and have "lots more eyes, or sometimes none" and that they "don't pray to them so much as pray they don't wake up." Goblin Oru later names two of them as "The Bleak Black Voice Beneath The Stones" and "The Burrower Under The Bog".
- In the Whateley Universe, Lovecraft is CANON. As in, he was right. Sara Waite, a main character, has the misfortune to be one of these. She's pretty nice though. She just EATS SOULS. (Of hamsters.)
- And dogs. And one of her cultists tried to sacrifice a kitten for her once. She got it back only to have the owner think she was going to eat the poor kitten's soul.
- Zalgo
. Possibly.
- H̝̠̺̭͕̝̆ͩ̆̾̄͊ͦ̕E̥̲̥̺̳̗ͫ͂͆̈̈́͢ ̯̯͔̬͈̳̦̈́̋ͧ̓̓̀C͕͓̣͕̫̪ͣOͥ͏̦͙̥M͚ͤ̍ͣ͆̌́ͯ͘E̦ͭͅSͭ̋͌͗ͫ
- Ruby Quest. Let's see: hearing voices in dreams led Red to find a room buried under the sea floor. Said room contains: a red biological growth that cures anything (even death) at the cost of insanity and horrible mutation, a Cthulhu-like idol, and a dummy. With glowing red eyes. And that's just the start...
- The Shape of the Nightmare to Come
. This fan-created postulate of what might happen ten-thousand years after regular Warhammer 40k features all the usual suspects (the Four Chaos Gods, the C'tan, etc) and adds a few. Most notable; the Ophilim Kiasoz, the New Devourer, the Star Father and his Angyls, Valchocht the Maker, and possibly the Nex.
- Humorously addressed in an advertisement for Elder Sign
.
- The SCP Foundation deals with these things on a regular basis.
- In the Creepypasta Candle Cove
, The titular show itself is implied to maybe be one.
- In The Salvation War setting, according to Word Of God, whatever lives on the opposite side of the Minos Portal in Hell (the portal through which the human dead arrive in Hell) exists in a reality so different and alien that nothing from either "Universe-One" (Earth) or any of the "Universe-Twos" (Heaven, Hell, and other assorted "higher-level" realities) can exist on it. Nothing either living or mechanical from either set of universes that passes through the portal has ever returned.
- The Deepspawn. Especially this passage "eventually undergo a radical mutation, growing and hardening into a vaguely serpentine, coiling behemoth best described as a horrific combination of squid and serpent. Mottled exo-skeletal plates and supple, strong muscle extend along a long, ridged, coiling body, ending in a fierce head with an expanding four-pronged beak or maw. Several clusters of ferocious barbed tentacles serve as limbs, each glowing with fell energies, and especially ancient specimens’ fins expand to the size of vast wings. The many eyes of the abhorrent head are portals into a soulless — but dreadfully aware — abyss."
Western Animation
- Recent Retcons to the Transformers backstory have turned the planet-eating Unicron into an Eldritch Abomination, not only giving him the power to move between dimensions, but also insinuating that a piece of his dark soul inhabits all of the Transformers since the beginning, meaning that any one of them could turn into a servant to his apocalyptic hunger.
- The Swarm in Transformers: Generation 2 could also be considered an Eldritch Abomination, being born from a long-lost ritual of Transformer reproduction that their god Primus never intended them to retain, and obsessed with destroying all mechanical life in the known universe.
- In a two part Justice League episode "The Terror Beyond", Superman and Co. go fight
Cthulhu Ichthultu. A giant alien monstrosity not bound by time or space going up against a group of superheroes in a work that sits firmly on the Idealistic side of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism? The beatdown was the source of much Awesomeness.
- Note that, while Cthulhu is in the public domain, the creators of this episode stated that they were under the false impression he was under copyright when they made the episode.
- In the pilot episode, something called "Imperium" appeared. A big night loving blob with tentacles.
- One of these bought the galaxy in an eBay auction during a Futurama episode.
- Another one attempts to date and have sex with the entire universe in the second movie.
- "So, Elzar, what are you preparing for Morbo to devour with his mighty jaws?" "Morbo, I'm whipping up a nice unnameable horror from beyond. With mango chutney!" It's not made clear how good it will actually taste, but it appears to emit truly terrifying amounts of some sort of radiation. Probably very hygienic.
- The dish sounds mind-breakingly horrible...mango chutney? No Just No.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) featured one of these in the episode "The Darkness Within", who arrived centuries ago in the form of a meteor and sucks the life energy of its victims as they visualize their worst nightmares. However, its most henious feat may have been its subconscious influence on the greedy, which caused them to gravitate to Manhattan, and was therefore indirectly responsible for the existence of Wall Street.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy had a cameo by Yog-Sothoth in one episode, Cthulhu in another, and a brain-eating one-eyed abomination from space who has a very catchy theme song.
- That last one is actually a parody of Audrey II of the Little Shop of Horrors.
- The Nergals also have obvious traits of this.
- The prime antagonist of Shadow Raiders (also known as War Planets) is the Beast Planet- a Planet Eater the size of a star that never stops, tires or negotiates, produces an unlimited supply of scary-looking Mooks and is completely Nigh Invulnerable. They only defeat it by teleporting it away, and it then just starts eating other planets, and may well have absorbed the teleporter technology...
- Superman the Animated Series had as a one-shot threat the Hive Mind Nightmare Fuel alien blob thing that called itself "Unity". Using a creepy preacher as its primary avatar it turned Smallville into a Town With A Dark Secret that nearly absorbed all the townsfolk into itself.
- In Chaotic, the M'arrillian Tribe is hostile sea food at the lower-rungs, but at higher rungs, like Chieftains and Aa'une himself, are mostly eyes and slimy tentacles that don't look like anything. Aa'une's One Winged Angel form with multiple mouths and a dozen tentacles now makes him by far the ugliest creature in the entire series.
- Samurai Jack has Aku. At first, he seems like little more than an Evil Overlord with shapeshifting and limited reality warping powers, but the episode The Birth of Evil, which explains his existence, makes him out to be much more of an abomination. He was a part of a planet-sized formless evil that was split from the rest of the evil when the gods fought and destroyed the giant evil. The portion of the giant evil fell to earth (and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs), where it became a giant pit of bubbling black liquid that grew and spread (or perhaps moved) across the Earth, seemingly with the intent to kill as many things as possible. In an attempt to destroy it with a magic arrow, Jack's father gave the evil sentience and a more specific and much more powerful form.
Real Life
- Common problem in advanced mathematics. Ever heard of the death of an expert in non-euclidean geometry? Never. They disappear.
- Non-euclidean geometry is nothing. Modern set theory messes a lot with infinite objects and hierarchies of progressively more unfathomable degrees of infinity, and has driven more researchers mad than any other discipline. One of the main reference books on this topic is even nicknamed "The King in Yellow", at least in This Troper's department...
- While not a Eldritch Abomination by virtue of a person (probably) not going insane after seeing it (although so few have seen it alive and in person we can't be completely sure), we would not be doing our job without mentioning The Giant Motherfrakking Squid
and the Colossal Motherfrakking Squid , which many believe were the inspiration for the Kraken of lore. Guess what poem by Tennyson was a major inspiration for Lovecraft? Hint: It wasn't "Charge of the Light Brigade".
- The Bloop
still manages to conjure lovecraftian Nightmare Fuel in those with active imaginations. Considering its extremely remote location (some of the remotest Pacific Ocean at a deep depth) and its great size (larger than any living thing ever known to have existed), it's made even more scary if you listen to the audio clip at its original speed or even twice its speed ("smaller"). It scared this troper shitless.
- It does not help that the Bloop's coordinates are frighteningly similar to those of R'lyeh in the original "Call of Cthulhu" short story.
- There's also the "Slow Down"
from an area north-ish of the Bloop.
- Ah, you guys should relax. It's probably just a kraken.
- Black holes.
- It's theorized that we don't see any aliens because they all become this after the singularity.
- This troper humbly submits that the laws of physics themselves qualify. The more we learn about quantum mechanics and the specifics of how our universe actually works, the less sense it makes. It's just that nobody's yet uncovered enough to actually go insane.
- You sure about that? Take a closer look at some of the more well-known eggheads. Hawking is confined to a wheelchair, Einstein was... Einstein, and some of the modern ones are... not quite right in the head.
- Hey, This Troper takes offense. There is no correlation between physics and insanity; just because Einstein was a little quirky, an entire profession gets debased constantly. Furthermore, the laws of physics are not a good example of this trope; the more you try to understand them, the less threatening they are. As time goes on, our understanding of physics only gets better. They are neither complicated (at least, not conceptually; mathematically they can get pretty hairy in some respects) nor are they frightening, no more than a brick is complicated because you can build complicated structures out of it, no more than a brick is frightening because someone could hit you over the head with it.
- Nighttime, when you think about it. When you are camping, if you have enough imagination EVERYTHING outside the border of your campsite can feel like an Eldritch Abomination. Sometimes it's fun to imagine that, just a little bit. Of course if you have to much imagination it's no longer any fun...
- Peasants must have felt that way about the space outside their villiages. How do you think the stories got started?
- This Troper gets the impression that some of the Russians almost thought Finns to be an Eldritch Abomination the way they stalked around their campsites.
- This all just proves that the human mind is a good example of this trope. When left to its own devices, it comes up with some crazy shit.
- Cavemen didn't have to imagine it. Huddling around their primitve fires for warmth and safety, they knew that the vast darkness surrounding them concealed baying horrors; dire beasts that cast flickering shadows in firelight, watching and waiting. Any of their number unlucky enough or foolish enough to be caught out in the open, alone, would never be seen again, save perhaps for a pile of bloody bones discovered with the morn. Is it any wonder that fear of the dark is such a common Primal Fear?
- Supposedly Lovecraft's own inspiration was contemporary discoveries in astronomy that there really are things out there so enormous and so powerful that our entire world is meaninglessly small in comparison. All told humanity ended up handling it pretty well, mainly by not thinking about it.
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