Non-Human Undead

aka: Undead God

An undead demon. Great.

When most people think of The Undead, they tend to think of the formerly human rising up from their graves or something similar.

This trope, on the other hand, is about those whose life started out "fantastic" even before they joined the ranks of the dead. Whether they were an Elf, a Dragon, a Demon, or even something completely divorced from reality, the one thing common among them is that they're all dead (or at least resemble some combination of some sort of traditional undead and its own base species) and still kicking. You may even see an Undead God. In that case, you should run, run as fast as you can.

See Raising the Steaks and Ghostly Animals for undead animals (where examples of such should go there instead of here). See Hybrid Monster, when two living fantasy species are combined. Contrast Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance. Also, compare Mechanical Monster and Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot. The Grim Reaper and other Psychopomps can be one, depending on their origin. Dracolich is a specific subtrope when the creature turns out to have been a dragon.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Asto in Nora. Knell likes making familiars from dead demons.
• Inuyasha has had undead demons. They tend to get fleshier the more strength they recover.
• One chapter of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service had the gang dealing with the ghost of an alien.
• The Thriller Bark story arc of One Piece had the Wild Zombies which were stitched together from assorted animals, and the Surprise Zombies, who disguised themselves as paintings, decorations and other objects.
• Orc Eroica shows orc zombies, an army of which are the main villains of Volume 2.
• Overlord (2012): Ainz spares the Lizardmen from extermination and zombification because Cocytus asked him to... and because reanimated Lizardmen corpses aren't particularly better than human corpses.
• An early chapter of Pokémon Adventures had Red having to battle against undead Pokemon.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering has an immense number of these, mostly various types of zombie. Zombie goblins, centaurs, plants and fungi have all been seen as base cards. Undeath is the domain of Black Mana, and Black is at its core pragmatic and unconcerned with arbitrary rules. If a centaur, griffon, mermaid or dragon would make a useful undead servant, why not raise them?
  • Outside of specific cards, numerous cards exist that resurrect creatures and give them the zombie subtype. Thus, any kind of creature in the game can theoretically be raised as zombies, from skeletons and ghosts to elementals and artifacts. It's probably best not to think too hard about it.
  • Accursed Centaur and Returned Centaur are Zombie Centaurs, while Karador, Ghost Chieftain, is a Centaur Spirit.
  • Other mixed undead are common, like skeletal griffins, zombie dwarves and goblins, vampiric dragons, zombie elves and merfolk...
  • The zombie centaur aven (bird person) Grotesque Hybrid from the Scourge block is a particularly extreme version of this crossed with Hybrid Monster.
  • The War of the Spark set saw Nicol Bolas invading Ravnica with an army of undead made of the champions of Amonkhet. These included Minotaurs, (humanoid) Jackals, and four of Amonkhet's gods.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: There are quite a few non-human undeads, including the variants of legacy cards (i. e. Summoned Skull -> Archfiend Zombie Skull, Red Eyes Black Dragon -> Red Eyes Zombie Dragon, etc.). Early non-human cards classed as zombies included dragons, boats, and clowns.

Comic Books

• One of the many characters turned zombie in Marvel Zombies is Morbius the living vampire.
  Morbius: "I am a VAMPIRE! I am a ZOMBIE! I am a VAMBIE! I cannot be stopped!"
• Age of the Wolf: The heroine is at one point attacked by zombie werewolves at a wolf burial site that have been brought to life by the female werewolf alpha that she was pursuing.
• The French comic Zombillénium has the main protagonist bitten by a werewolf then a vampire to keep him alive. However, they keep biting him to fully convert him (as they were each a werewolf/vampire short). A vampire werewolf apparently gets the best of both worlds, appearing as a Big Red Devil.
• In The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, our heroes eventually encounter the Dead Universe, home to what amount to undead Transformers. One of the Lost Light's crew, Brainstorm, was turned into a similar creature due to a lab accident. Thankfully, they retain self-awareness.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla MonsterVerse fanfiction, the Many turn not only humans into undead monstrosities, but also Skullcrawlers and the carcass of one of Manda's species, and they attempt to do the same to Manda before he's hatched from his egg.
• In Bungle in the Jungle: A Harry Potter Adventure, only most of the Inferi in the lost city are humans. There's also a number of pegasi and a Dracolich. This gets a nod in the sequel where Harry mentions that most undead can't fly so getting above them is extremely useful when fighting them.
• Infinity Train: Boiling Point has them in Wights, which in this setting are undead witches. Boscha becomes one such Wight in Act 2.

Films — Live-Action

• Throughout the Ghostbusters franchise, the guys have encountered spirits of various non-human entities or even demons.

Literature

• In Blood of the Zombies, the zombie-infested Goraya Castle, besides having conventional human zombies, also contains zombified Rodents of Unusual Size in the sewers, zombie hounds in the courtyard, and a humongous zombie monster called "Zombie Kong" who is a human zombie mixed with parts of a gorilla.
• The Dresden Files
  • In Grave Peril Harry encounters an extremely strong ghost he calls the Nightmare, and suspects it's one of these. Specifically the ghost of the demon serving the sorcerer Leonid Kravos, an old enemy of his that he'd defeated offscreen at some point. He later learns that the ghost is Kravos himself, whose death had been concealed from him.
  • In general, while necromancy on humans is banned by the Laws of Magic for violating nature, raising non-human undead, like birds or animals, is a legal loophole but still frowned at. One reason necromancers avoid using them is they are weaker than human corpses of the same age. However, like any undead, the older the corpse the stronger the resulting zombie can be. So, when facing off against a coven of evil necromancers on Halloween Harry Dresden raises 65 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex as a zombie and rides her into battle.
• Xanth has featured zombie versions of just about everything, at one time or another.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • In the second book, Words of Radiance, it is revealed that Shardblades are essentially zombie spren. They were bound to the old Knights Radiant, and when the Knights broke their oaths, the spren were trapped in Blade form. A normal person can bond a Shardblade and give the spren the ability to mimic life enough to be summoned or dismissed at will, but nothing more. When a Knight who still holds their oaths touches a Shardblade, the spren is revived for a moment, and immediately begins screaming in agony (though only the Knight and the person bonded to the Blade can hear it).
  • In the third book, Oathbringer, we get to see the manifestation of the spren that is Adolin's Shardblade in Shadesmar, the home Realm of the spren, when Adolin, Kaladin, and Shallan are transported there. She looks like she's made of dead vines (a "dead" version of the normal form of her kind of spren) and has eyes that appear to be scratched out like a damaged painting. She mindlessly follows Adolin around unless prevented from doing so and otherwise does nothing. Other spren refer to these spren as "deadeyes".
• The main character in Eden Green quickly determines that the alien needle 'monsters' invading her city are in fact alien 'animals' that have unfortunately been infected with a symbiote (which, even more unfortunately, can spread to humans). The creatures are dealt with further in the sequel, New Night.
• Mary from Trash of the Count's Family utilizes these as well as normal animals, usually using Dem Bones to create Mix-and-Match Critters.
• Nettle & Bone: Marra wires together a dog skeleton in a cursed charnel pit and animates it with pure force of will, despite her lack of magic, as an Impossible Task. It acts as a friendly Canine Companion and immediately tries to lick her.
• In The Locked Tomb the Resurrection Beasts are the ghosts of planets that died suddenly. They consume the life of other worlds and scavenge parts of them to create titanic shells for themselves, something a character comments is happily not a habit shared by human revenants. While the Empire kills planets frequently, the Resurrection Beasts that exist are all ancient and stem from the same event; after learning what can happen they're careful to always destroy the ghost of a freshly killed planet while it's still weak.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones has the Night King change Viserion into a zombie dragon after killing the creature in battle.

Mythology & Religion

• Egyptian Mythology: The Egyptian gods were mostly immortal through recovery and resurrection but Apep, usually depicted as a really big snake, was functionally unable to be killed at all because of him being from the darkness before the universe, which now happens make up the underworld the dead pass through on their way to the afterlife. He hates the fact that there is life at all and wants to destroy the sun to bring about the end of the universe as ancients knew it, to put things back the way they used to be.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The Dracolich (Lich dragon), which originated in the Forgotten Realms (it can now be found in most settings). There are also vampire, ghost, zombie, and skeleton dragons.
  • The groaning spirit (banshee) is the "spirit of an evil female elf".
  • Ravenloft introduced vampires created from non-human creatures such as elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and even Dragonlance's kender. Although to be exact, it's more that they gave them variant powers and weaknesses, as most of these races already could be turned into vampires.
  • The death tyrant is an undead beholder.
  • The adventure I2 Tomb of the Lizard King had a lizard king who was changed into a vampire by a Wish spell.
  • Orcus, the demon lord of the undead/occasional undead god. Although as of late he's mostly alive. And PISSED.
  • Atropals are the undead fetuses of unborn gods (colloquially referred to as Undead Aborted God Fetuses).
    • Their originator is actually even worse. Atropus, The World Born Dead may be the undead head of a primordial, or the remnants of the creator deity, or something else entirely. Bottom line, it's an undead mass the size of a small moon that causes zombie apocalypses on planets it encounters.
  • Vampire Mind Flayers suck blood with their tentacles. Fortunately (maybe), vampirism destroys most of their intelligence and turns them into animalistic predators. Also, alhoon are mind flayer liches. They keep all their mental faculties; they need them for spells and psionics. On the upside, they suffer from tissue desiccation, so they have to take frequent baths, or drink a bowl of soup. So cute!
  • And zombies and skeletons can be made from just about anything that leaves a corpse. In fact, many types of undead in 3rd Edition are created though applying a template to an existing creature, so you can wind up with medusa vampires, giant mummies, beholder ghosts, gnoll death knights, and many, many other combinations.
  • Necromentals are undead elementals.
  • Visages are undead, raised from outsiders (this is a type of creature, including, but not limited to, angels, demons, devils and most servants of gods).
  • Bloodfiends are vampire demons.
  • Kyuss, The Worm That Walks, created many types of those (in addition to his better-known worm-infested zombies), usually in the form of gigantic vermin like scorpions or, well, worms.
  • Eberron: The Elves of Aerenal have their own versions of undead called the Deathless. These act as their rulers through the Undying Court, and are animated by positive energy rather than the usual Negative energy used by regular undead. Similarly, Forgotten Realms has baelnorns, a type of good-aligned elf liches.
  • And many, many monsters that are considered as undead but were not living creatures at all (like nightshades), are composed from many creatures, or are specifically created from nonhumans.
• Godforsaken: Since humans are immigrants to Flevame and mostly found on its borderlands, most of of skeletons in Crumellia Encomium's army used to be animals, nonhuman humanoids, or beasts that are difficult to recognise and which in many cases seem to have been created by mixing together bits of different creatures.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Eldar are an alien race who have to wear exotic crystals called "spirit stones" which would store their souls after death, so that they can avoid a horrible afterlife. Occupied spirit stones are integrated into the "Infinity Circuit", a structure integrated into their ships as a surrogate afterlife, and used by the living Eldar to seek advice from their ancestors, particularly in times of need. So their ships are part technological, part dead aliens. In times of need, they will also have the souls of the dead integrated into an essentially robot body to be used as heavy infantry or as walker vehicles, the largest of which are on the scale of a Gundam.
  • Necrons are another alien race — well, former aliens. They transferred their consciousnesses into robot bodies about 60 million years ago in a bid to gain immortality and power, but their masters, the C'tan had manipulated them into doing it to gain access to their souls (for eatin') without losing access to standing forces. Their flavor is very much that of an ancient Empire, once lost and now resurgent. They're essentially undead robot aliens.
• Warhammer:
  • There's a Regiment of Renown (a mercenary unit with unique rules) made of a cursed undead warrior and the enemies he had killed. The miniatures include, in addition to human skeletons, figures recognizable as having once been dwarfs, orcs, and lizardmen.
  • Dreadfleet: One of the pirates within the titular Dreadfleet, Skretch Half-Dead, is the leader of a crew of Rat Men whose ship was swallowed by a sea monster, after which both rats and monster died as they tried to eat their ways free. They all eventually rose as undead, and the undead rat men simply incorporated the creature's body into their own ship.
  • Gotrek & Felix: In one of the novels, the duo hears the tale of a Tomb King who is implied to have been a Dwarf.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: One adventure features Koros-Dar Nael, one the only known elven liches.
• Shadowrun has a number of metahumans affected by HMHVV (Human Meta-Human Vampiric Virus), its equivalent of undead. They include the banshee (former elf), goblin (former dwarf), wendigo (former ork) and dzoo-noo-qua (former troll). It should be pointed out that HMHVV infectees are not actually undead. They are mutants, yes, but not undead. As one of the fundamental laws of magic in Shadowrun is that you cannot raise the dead, "True" undead do not exist. Most undead are either dead bodies animated by magic (Think fleshy, magical robots), or possessed by something. The Sheddim (Corpses possessed by spirits from the far planes) are one such examples. As are Zombies (Corpses animated by mages). Cyberzombies are people kept artificially alive through cybernetics, magic, drugs and spirits. Their body is technically "dead", all that mojo is needed to keep it going. Note that all the above can be metahuman, or not.
• GURPS has the Zombie Vehicle spell which is designed with spaceships in mind.
• Exalted gives us the Neverborn, who are what happens when the architects of all Creation are killed. As they never foresaw themselves as dying, the cycle of reincarnation can't possibly fit them, so they're stuck fettered to Creation and suffering from eternal gangrene of the soul. Which would explain why they want everything else to die, as that would free them to die as well.
• New World of Darkness: Geist: The Sin-Eaters describes the Chthonians, mysterious, powerful things that live in the depths of the Underworld. No one actually knows what they are, but speculation paints them as the ghosts of entities that lived long before humanity walked the earth.
• d20 Modern: The Bodak are undead Grays.

Video Games

• DragonFable and AdventureQuest have tons of these. Undead elves, undead kittens. undead demons, even the odd Dracolich here and there. The general rule is: If it was alive, it can be undead.
• Moric the Necromancer's undead Dracelon from MARDEK 2. Comes from Moric and Rohoph's homeworld of Anshar; it's basically a dragon with three legs plus a Wave-Motion Tuning Fork claw. Moric's droma servants are probably undead too.
  • He even added cybernetic parts to the dracelon, making it an alien dragon zombie cyborg.
  • The MARDEK series so far has also featured zombie versions of normal dragons, monsters (which are a specific species in this Verse), and fumerats.
• The Valkyrie Profile series features zombie dragons as bosses and subbosses.
• The roguelike game NetHack has zombie and mummy giants, elves, dwarves, orcs and gnomes along with the regular ol' human variant. You can also zap most corpses with wands of undead turning to bring monsters and animals back to life.
• Kingdom of Loathing, likely due to its creator's (in)famous obsession with humanoid skeletons, has quite a few of these.
  • The boss of the (intentionally misspelled) "Cyrpt," the Bonerdagon. It's an undead dragon made of bones, but it might also be an undead dagon made of boners.
  • There was a special event that led players to visit a Zombie Apocalypse future which features the main town with various enemies turned zombies, including the usual clowns, half-orcish hobos, lizardmen and gnolls, to some of the more bizarre enemies like yeast beasts, n00bs, asparagus cans and... zmobies from the aforementioned Misspelled Cemetary.
  This is a zmobie who got sick and died again, then came back to life again as a zombie. That makes sense, right?
  • Another special event involved an archaeological dig, where players could dig up ancient artifacts and fossils. The archaeologist behind the discovery turned out to be a necromancer, and next thing you know, everyone's fighting off reanimated skeletons of ancient snakes, bats, baboons, spiders, wyrms, and demons. Because the bones are fossilized, the skeletons are also much more resistant to damage than modern skeletons.
  • In the cemetery behind Spookyraven Manor, you can fight the skeletons of cats, hamsters, and monkeys. After collecting an ungodly number of assorted bones from them, you can construct a "Misshapen Animal Skeleton" familiar, the reanimated skeleton of... some sort of mutant abomination, possibly created by your character's poor knowledge of anatomy.
• In the Super Mario Bros. series, there are various Non-Human Undead creatures. A staple of the series is the Dry Bones, a reanimated Koopa skeleton, and Bony Beetles (skeletal Buzzy Beetles) occasionally show up as well. The Paper Mario series adds variations of Dry Bones, along with other Non-Human Undead (e.g. Bonetail from The Thousand Year Door and Bonechill of Super Paper Mario)
• Warcraft:
  • The Undead faction in Warcraft III is mostly made of non-human undead. Aside from ghouls and human cultists, they have undead Spider People called Crypt Fiends, undead elves called banshees, undead gargoyles, undead flying centauroid stone Cat People called Obsidian Destroyers, and Dracoliches with ice breath called Frost Wyrms. Plus, generic skeletons can be made with the corpses of any species. Frozen Throne later has Skeleton Orc creeps.
  • The Death Knight's Animate Dead skill raises dead units of any allegiance or species as undead to fight for him. The catch is that they only last a short time.
  • Inverted with the original Death Knights from Warcraft II, who were made by taking the corpses of human knights and forcing the spirit of an orc necrolyte (the first game's spellcaster) into it. These were then remade as the floating skeletal Liches (spellcaster hero) in the third game, with the new Death Knights being human aristocrats who sold out to the Scourge for immortality.
  • The Lich King himself was once an orc shaman before being reduced to a set of armor inside a block of ice, before being worn by the human Arthas.
  • Later on in World of Warcraft, when Death Knights became playable it meant that you could have an undead version of every race: dwarves, gnomes, worgen, goblins, elves... You could even have an Undead Death Knight, meaning a human who died, was raised from the dead, then was killed and THEN risen from the dead again.
  • In a later expansion, as Bolvar became the new Lich King, some warriors chose to join the Knights of the Ebon Blade as a sacrifice done to mantain a neccesary evil, meaning that races that previously never joined the fight against the scourge, are now able to be Death Knights, including things like Pandaren and Mechagnomes. The only race that cannot be one are the dracthyr.
  • With the worgen, the only thing that could rise them as undead is The Lich King himself, otherwise, their curse prevents them from being risen again. Some people from Gilneas deliberately let themselves be bitten for this very reason.
• Any kind of living creature in Dwarf Fortress can have a zombie or skeletal version, including monsters like dragons, giants, and imps.
  • The undead have no need for sustenance (such as water, in case of fish). Some of the worst undead you can encounter are thus giant sponges and whales as killing them was hard but avoiding them was easy before; avoiding them now isn't as simple as staying away from the water, because they can now pursue you even on land. The sponges are even worse as they lack any limbs to cripple so the only way to beat them is to have your army dwarfs use hammers to literally beat Spongebob to a pulp (in version 0.40 onward) before it pushes too many of your worker dwarfs to death. Or just use magma like a "smart" (read: average) player would do.
• Final Fantasy
  • In Final Fantasy, there was the boss of the Castle of Ordeals, a Zombie Dragon, as well as a few other monster undead.
  • Final Fantasy IX had a Flying Seafood Special Zombie whale, and a zombie tree as a boss.
  • Pretty much every enemy in Final Fantasy X is undead (technically Unsent), made up of souls that weren't sent to the afterlife by a Summoner until they coalesce into fiends. And even two of your party members, although one wasn't so much "dead" as "never existed".
  • Final Fantasy XII loves undead monsters, even if they're not human. Many of the monster types have an undead version. Examples include undead wolves, undead war horses, undead vampire bats, undead slimes, and undead bombs. There's also the requisite undead boss who is a Conjoined Twins demon with visible skull.
• Cave Story featured the Undead Core, which was possessed by the evil Doctor. Also, Ballos.
• Diablo
  • In Diablo II necromancers can get the ability to animate the corpses of their enemies as they were in life instead of somehow ending up with humanoid skeletons, as happens before this.
    • Then there's also the enemies like Undead scavenger, or the undead Flayer demons.
  • Diablo III gives us the Witch Doctor class, who can raise zombie dogs and the "Gargantua", who is made from an undead bear.
• In Battle for Wesnoth the sprite and characteristics of a living corpse depend on who it was before death: mounted corpses move faster, gnome corpses have better defence in mountains, and so on.
• Minecraft:
  • One of the five inhabitants of the Nether are Zombie Piglins, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Notably, unlike typical undead in this game, as well as unlike their live equivalents if you do not have a gold armor, Zombie Piglins are not naturally aggressive toward the player, although if you attack one, their entire tribe will swarm after you.
  • If a player on the overworld hasn't slept for three nights, they'll be assaulted by Phantoms, which are undead flying manta rays that are attracted to insomnia.
• Though it is hard to classify the objects in question as "undead", as they were never really "alive", the bacteria in Extermination (2001) has the ability to infect quite literally anything. This includes water, security turrets and at one point a train.
• The Necropolis faction in Heroes of Might and Magic often deploys bone dragons and ghost dragons, but in Might and Magic: Heroes VI they deploy lamusu, undead sphinxes and namtarus, undead Spider People instead. According to each unit's description, the namtarus are servants of the necromancer's goddess, Asha, while the lamusu were the result of a bizarre experiment which magically crossbred humans with manticores. The experiment was deemed a failure because most lamusu were susceptible to their own venom and died soon after birth, but the necromancers discovered they became powerful undead when resurrected.
• Vagrant Story includes zombie variants of several of the games enemies as optional superbosses: zombie minotaur, zombie ogre, and zombie dragon.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In terms of humanoid undead, this is largely downplayed throughout the series. Nearly every skeleton, zombie, draugr, and variations thereof are human. And we mean human: no Mer (Elves), Orcs, Khajiit, or Argonians among them (unless they're made from the recently-dead with Reanimate spells). Naturally, several Game Mods are available for each game which rectify this.
  • That said, there are plenty of undead animals and other creatures. Bonewolves, "Skinned Hounds", and vampiric Death Hounds are various forms of undead canine. Skyrim has a skeletal dragon as one of the guardians of Labyrinthian, while the Dawnguard DLC adds Arvak, an undead Hellish Horse, and Durnehviir, a Dracolich.
• In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, two of Carmilla's servants are demons she turned.
• The Expansion Pack for Black & White 2 pits you against an undead god. It sucks just as much as it sounds.
• Stalfos in The Legend of Zelda games were initially depicted as human skeletons, and still often are in 2D and handheld titles. However, the 3D games have fairly consistently depicted them as clearly monstrous, though still humanoid, undead of unclear origin. They're usually significantly bigger than an ordinary human; possess unusual teeth, be they jagged, rodent-like, or sharp spikes; or have some other unusual characteristics, like an elongated skull or extra bony plates.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess features canine versions of the familiar Stalfos called Stalhounds.
  • Breath of the Wild doesn't have Stalfos. It does, however, have Stal Bokoblins, Moblins, Lizalfos, Hinox, and even horses.
• Sacred has multiple examples, including undead horses, undead cattle, undead goblins, undead trolls, and a Dracolich.
• In Mass Effect, Husks are essentially Cyborg Zombies created by the Reapers. In the first game, you only ever see Human Husks. In the second game, we learn that the Collectors are actually modified Protheans from the previous cycle and in the third game, due to the Reapers arriving, we see Husks of the other races - Cannibals are amalgamations of Batarians and Humans, Banshees are Asari Ardat-Yakshi, Marauders are Turians, Ravagers are Rachni, and Brutes are amalgamations of Turians and Krogan.
• Epyx's Temple of Apshai has several, such as vampire bats, zombies, and wraiths.
• The Binding of Isaac has plenty of monstrosities as bosses in the first levels. Later on in the game, you may find undead versions of those same bosses, who have similar attacks but pumped up. Examples include Monstro II to Monstro, The Bloat to Peep, Blighted Ovum to Gemini and Teratoma to Fistula.
• Arcanum has a dungeon full of zombified dwarves.
• RuneScape has many kinds of nonhuman undead.
  • Zogres and skogres are undead ogres.
  • Skoblins are undead goblins.
  • A zyclops is an undead cyclops.
  • Lucien's camp is guarded by undead trolls.
  • Spiritual monsters in the Temple of Lost Ancients are either humans, orks, or aviansies, depending on which god they are aligned with.
  • Skeletal wyverns are found in the Asgarnia ice dungeon. They actually nowhere near as dangerous as living wyverns. Fossil Island in Old School has four unique variants of undead wyverns, though three of them share the same drop table and are almost identical.
  • Zogoth is an undead version of Agoroth, an eldritch sea monster.
  • The skeletal horror is the undead skull of an unknown eldritch creature that mind controls a man into collecting bones from many different monsters so it can construct a body for itself.
  • Death has a skelletal hellhound named Muncher that he keeps as a pet, and the player fights a skelletal hellhound as a boss in one quest. Another hellhound named Bouncer is killed by the player in a quest, but continues to serve its master, General Khazard, as a ghost. A miniquest has you kill Bouncer again.
  • Mahjarrat turn into skeletons when they are low on energy. One Mahjarrat was imprisoned in the form of a bone guard for years before the player sets them free.
  • Most of the many kinds of revenants are non human. They include cyclopes, dark beasts, demons, dragons, goblins, hellhounds, hobgoblins, icefiends, imps, orks, pyrefiends, vampyres (note: vampires are not a form of undead in RuneScape), and werewolves. Only revenant knights are human.
• Warframe: The Eidolons that haunt the Plains of Eidolon are essentially the undead remnants of a massive Sentient warship that was defeated on the Plains long ago. Now they wander the Plains at night, mindlessly trying to recombine. Note that this is odd behavior for a Sentient because normally they retain their full intelligence no matter how many pieces they are reduced to. It's implied the odd behavior of the Eidolons has something to do with the warframe named Revenant, possibly combined with the warframe named Gara and the intelligence called the Unum working together.
• Explicitly averted in the Visual Novel I Walk Among Zombies. The virus that caused the whole incident to begin is mentioned to not affect animals, and zombies avoid interacting with animals at all. Even intelligent zombies seem to not care.
• In Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the Big Bad, Shriek, is a giant owl similar to the first game's Kuro, but zombified.
• Minty Fresh Adventure!: Since the dominant lifeform is ponies, the animated skeletons of them that appear are this trope.
• Revenants in Doom II resemble bloodied, 10-foot-tall human skeletons, but are officially described as undead demons put together from the body parts of dead demons.
• In the third week of Martian Mixtape, Xigmund the alien comes back from the dead.
• In Guild Wars 2, Elder Dragon Zhaitan's Risen army includes many of the races of Tyria, though it's mostly humans by simple virtue of the dragon having overrun a human kingdom. One NPC even comments that Zhaitan isn't picky with its minions upon seeing a Risen quaggan.
• Destiny 2: The Scorn are a faction of undead Eliksni, created by infusing their gaseous Alien Blood with pure Darkness. It seems to be some specific property of their (admittedly pretty weird) blood that makes this possible, as the Eliksni are the only species that faces such a threat.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: Bone Fish appear to be animate skeletons of fish.
• Dragon Quest: The game is filled with this, ranging from undead wolves, Dragon Zombies, the undead version of one of the demon lord, skeleton snakes, skeleton drackies and more.

Web Animation

• The series Xombie gives us zombified versions of a dog, a dinosaur, a tiger, and even some glimpses of zombie sharks and octopus.

Webcomics

• Non-human undead are common in The Order of the Stick, usually as the soldiers of Xykon and Redcloak, both of whom have the ability to create undead, usually from the corpses of their dead, non-human servants. Between them they have created zombie goblins, zombie hobgoblins, zombie trolls, zombie dragons and even a zombie angel.
  • Minister Malack is a vampire lizardfolk, and Durkon was a vampire dwarf for a time.
• Homestuck:
  • The alien trolls have vampires known as "rainbow drinkers" due to their species' Alien Blood. Since trolls are nocturnal, they are associated with not bats, but moths, come out in the day and glow brightly.
  • Trolls can also naturally turn into zombies, but these are never shown.
  • Due to several problems with the session's formation, the underlings in the Alpha version of Sburb — normally living fantasy monsters such as imps, ogres, basilisks and cyclopes — are all walking skeletons. Later, another character resurrects a large number of the long-deceased populations of humanoid salamanders, turtles, crocodiles and iguanas as skeletal undead.
• Wilde Life features a ghost boy whose powers include resurrecting dogs that he finds dead by the road. They seem to be perfectly friendly, just occasionally creepy.
• Sluggy Freelance: A weird sort of (possible) example comes up in chapter 52: "Aylee". (The following contains spoilers, but the example can't be explained at all without showing them.) Aylee, an alien that occasionally changes forms to adapt to the current environment, has been cocooned for a long time, and her friends even fear she might be dying. Then it turns out that she's been growing a huge body under the ground. It further turns out that this body is adapted to the fact that her life force has run out and she should have died; this time, she's absorbed the power of the spirit-trapping runes from the haunted magician's house (long story) she was growing under, and her body is largely made up of dirt, so basically she's adapted against death by trapping her own soul within a not-so-living body and becoming undead. She did show detectable "life" signs before emerging, though, whatever that means exactly. Anyway, she's able to go back to being normally alive when she gets a fresh boost of life force from a suitable source.
• In xkcd strip #1504 "Opportunity", the Opportunity Rover evolves into this.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time:
  • The Lich appears to be the undead of some sort of giant with horns. Assuming it was just a mutant human, he definitely becomes one when he takes over Billy's body, since Billy's a giant.
  • Marceline, the Vampire Queen, is only half-human - her other half is demonic.
  • "Slumber Party Panic" and "From Bad to Worse" feature the Candy People (sentient candy, pastries, and other sugary snacks), Jake the Dog (a talking, shapeshifting dog), Lady Rainicorn (a talking cross between a unicorn and a rainbow), and Lumpy Space Princess (a talking purple cloud) turning into zombies.
• The very first Monster of the Week from Courage the Cowardly Dog was the titular villain of the pilot short "The Chicken from Outer Space". At first, he was simply an evil, chicken-like alien creature who ends up getting killed by Courage. He eventually returns in the episode "Revenge of the Chicken from Outer Space", in which he has somehow returned from death as a "living" roasted chicken without a head (which would make him a Headless Zombie Alien Chicken).
• D'Compose of Inhumanoids is a giant undead dinosaur-looking Eldritch Abomination whose merest touch can transform others into giant, undead abominations until revived by sunlight.
• Shendu from Jackie Chan Adventures is a demonic dragon with magical powers, who was killed by Jade at the end of Season 1. He spends most of his screentime in Seasons 2 and 3 as an incorporeal spirit with the ability to possess humans (which would make him a Ghostly Dragon Demon Sorcerer).
• Primal (2019): "Plague of Madness" gives us Technically-Living Zombie dinosaurs, starting with a duck-billed hadrosaur which bites an Argentinosaurus, one of the biggest dinosaurs known to science. Gentle Giant Sauropod is then averted and Nightmare Fuel ensues.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: In "Spooky Space Kook", the gang deals with an abandoned airfield that is evidently haunted by both a ghost alien and his haunted spaceship. Of course, this being Scooby-Doo, it turns out to be a criminal in a disguise.
• The Spliced episode "Bite, Shuffle, and Moan" had all the mutants on Keepaway Island getting turned into zombies.
• The Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Legacy of Terror" features undead Geonosians that are controlled by parasitic brain worms. Although closer to human than the Geonosians, Massacre features undead Nightsisters (female Dathomirians) reanimated through magic.
• The Terrorcons of Transformers: Prime are Zombie Mechanical Lifeforms, reanimated by Dark Energon as horriffic, mindless, savage berserkers that look like they bashed their way out of Hell's junkyard and straight into your nightmares. That Megatron is proud of creating them speaks volumes about both the Terrorcons and Megatron.
• One Uncle Grandpa episode has the RV crew get attacked by zombie pets, including an undead rock.

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