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I know we like our tropes to have wicks, but this is ridiculous.

"The rabbit is not just sitting there. The rabbit is part of the monster. So you're looking at an evil tree stump that has a cute bunny on the end of its tentacles so that it can lure people or other animals near it. While I understand the parallel to animals in the real world, I'm still stuck here looking at a googly-eyed tree stump with a rabbit glued to its head. Wow."
Head Injury Theater, on D&D's The Wolf-in-Sheep's-Clothing

These are the most unusual, insane and bizarre monsters around — but they're not necessarily Eldritch Abominations, nor are they generally "cryptids" in the usual sense, as even cryptozoology has its limits as to what might plausibly exist. No, these creatures are just "What the heck is that?" weird.

They don't have to be from an acid trip either in-universe or as a meta-example. They just have to be unconventional and too strange to fit in any of the other categories. In fact, these can be some of the most popular monsters. It can be a result of the work in question going for Attack of the Killer Whatever. They are often found in Surreal Horror... or at times, Surreal Humor.

See also Starfish Aliens and Starfish Robots. Eldritch Abomination can be considered a stronger version of this played for horror.

Compare Cartoon Creature, also unusual critters of unidentifiable species but usually played for cuteness.

Please put examples of Mix-and-Match Critters, Pun-Based Creature, Blob Monster, Tentacled Terror and Oculothorax in their own pages. This is for even stranger creatures than those.

Given that monsters are by definition fictional, No Real Life Examples, Please!


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • Freakies cereal has the title mascots themselves. They are small and lumpy brightly-colored monsters. Despite being the same species, none of them look alike, with odd additions such as tentacles, trunks, and gigantic feet exclusive to a specific one.

    Anime and Manga 
  • The monsters from 3Ă—3 Eyes are as variegated as they come, usually in the mold of Monstrous Humanoid with darker flesh and the signature Creepily Long Arms. Odd creatures include Yabaru, (a squid-like Cyclops with tusks on the sides of his mouth, a bunch of tentacles emerging from his shell-like shoulders and four axe blades embedded in his head that he can detach at will) and Quan Long (essentially a grotesque, hairless and eyeless wolf-like creatures with a humanoid nose and mouth).
  • Aratama Tribe: Most of the Oni (former human spirits who mutated into demons that eat negative emotions and produce even more malice) look like their mythological Japanese counterpart: horned heads, sharp teeth, muscled bodies, the usual. The Oni Otoshi, unlike the typical Oni, looks more human and is a pure blood oni that turns living humans into other Oni. One of those humans happened to be a pair of bullied high school students who, under the power of the Oni Otoshi, fused back-to-back into a bizarre two headed creature with two pairs of hands and legs.
  • The semester exam questions in Assassination Classroom are represented as monsters. Among these is the Social Studies exam, which in the first semester exam is represented as a metallic six-armed humanoid with a turret for a head. The "evolved" form in the second semester exam is a giant tank with arms instead of treads.
  • Berserk:
    • A lot of the Apostles' true forms are bizarre, especially Irvine's true form. Seriously, what centaur-shaped creature has their human torso on their monster's half's butt?
    • The ogres have bulbous torsos, spindly limbs, and a head that looks like a cross between a sperm whale and a vampire bat with creepily human eyes and a mouth that opens to the collarbones...
    • When the worlds start to merge with one-another, we see a plethora of fantastical creatures, including a small army of bizarre creatures akin to demons as portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch (see below under Mythology and Religion).
  • A lot of awakened beings in Claymore, especially the most powerful ones.
    • Among them Cassandra particularly stands out. She is a giant naked woman body without head. The human sized torso of Cassandra spawns between the boobs and there are tens of tentacles each terminated with a flesh-eating huge head of Cassandra. Oh, and it moves by crawling on its back.
  • On a similar note, the Heterodyne from Dai-Guard are similarly bizarre, but have some commonalities. No two are quite alike in design, shape and abilities, but are all based on the same basic composition which is equal parts fungus and octagon-shaped crystal. They then form a body out of surrounding matter, making no two quite alike. They can move freely (some even fly), are usually attracted to EM waves and often have odd powers to defend themselves. That's it. Everything else is up for grabs.
  • Most Shinigami of Death Note are designed in such a fashion. Ryuk and Rem are the most human looking and resemble a winged vampire and a mummy whose arms are vertebrae, respectively, but the others are downright freaky:
    • Sidoh looks like a mummified owl/moth hybrid.
    • Gelus is a Frankensteinian puppet made from...other monsters.
    • Armonia is a skeleton thing either covered or made of gold and gemstones.
    • Midora is a hominid salamander-y thing.
    • Nu is a giant rock covered with eyes.
    • The King of Death is a spherical Eldritch Abomination chained to various surfaces and covered in tree roots made of bone that lead to a skull-shaped structure whose "mouth" contains his actual head... also a skull, but with three eyes.
  • Many of the Mons in Digimon are based on real-life animals and mythological creatures and figures, but of course, there is an abundance of ones that are downright bizarre. Notable examples include Sukamon, a living yellow pile of dung with goofy teeth and skinny arms, Deramon, a peacock with a flowering bush in place of a train of feathers and Deputymon, a cowboy Digimon with a giant revolver for a body.
  • Hell Girl has the first antagonist of the third season get grabbed and thrown by a human-eyed elephant shaped like a two during his Afterlife Antechamber sequence.
  • Pick any youkai of the week in Inuyasha, and readers are bound to find this trope, including bird monsters with upper human bodies attached to giant furry balls of teeth with wings, a sickle armed white... thing with a Bishōnen head that is an offshoot of the Big Bad's body and lives inside the intestines of its human-looking younger brother like a parasite, a spider demon who masquerades as a kindly monk but whose form is actually a GIANT FLESHY SPIDER WEB, a hair demon whose true form is a red comb covered with hair entangled with skulls, two conjoined-at-the-waist youkai who fight for control of their body, and a giant dragon that would look indistinguishable from any other dragon if it were not for the talking mask on its forehead which is its real face.
  • The extracanonical Series Mascot of Lucky Star is Nyamo, a white ball with catlike features.
  • The Dragonosaurus from a Crossover movie featuring Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, Getter Robo G, and UFO Robo Grendizer characters and Humongous Mecha was a... amorphous, gigantic, flying red-and-black blob with a huge face on the body and several grey-indigo, snake-like, crested heads sprouting from it. It was told it was a previously-thought-extinct Prehistoric Monster had mutated cause industrial waste spilled in the seas, but still what the heck that thing was?
  • Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion. One of them takes a human form and a few of the others are vaguely humanoid; most of the others are as bizarre as they come. Examples range from giant flying shapeshifting octahedron to giant hovering phallus with laser tentacles to a living sea of negatively charged particles with a three-dimensional shadow.
  • The witches from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. On the normal end of the scale you have a human-shaped silhouette that attacks by growing a tree at its target. On the weird end there's a giant monster made of skirts and arms. The others fall somewhere between.
  • Bloodsuckers like Mosquito from Soul Eater have the power to shapeshift into their younger selves at various points in their life. Mosquito's own de-aging reveals that his life cycle has been full of bizarre shapeshifting, having gone from an amorphous Eldritch Abomination, to a humanoid vampire-esque figure, to an elongated insectoid, to a comically buff gorilla-esque figure with a massive upper torso and arms, to an extremely tiny old man.
  • Just like its parent series, SSSS.GRIDMAN has some strange kaiju lurking about. One of the stranger ones has to be a monster deliberately designed to look like a person in a cheap costume, only for it to be revealed that it is essentially a cheap, fleshy costume for a humanoid creature to hide inside. Said creature is also a bundle of nerve-like tentacles and absolutely Ax-Crazy.
  • Many of the creatures and plants in Toriko. Especially the ones based on normal foods. A crossover with One Piece briefly features the immeasurably strong Pig Inside A Fox Inside A Tiger, to give one example.
  • The hat of Ushio and Tora. Some Youkai are indeed base on folklore, others include a soul-sucking sea monster with a giant belly mouth, smoky tongue and a mishmash of limbs for a body, a Giant Enemy Crab with a living human-like face on his pincer and a colossal, hair-covered blob with a perpetual goofy grin and a set of eye-covered crab-like legs at the bottom of his body.

    Comic Books 
  • Doom Patrol: Grant Morrison's run. For evidence, just take a quick gander at John Dandy or The Candlemaker.
  • Monster Allergy features many types of monsters, most having the ability to become invisible to humans. There are harmless monsters like Bombo, and his species called Bombos. And there are dangerous monsters like Gorkas who can shapeshift into humans and mind control people, or the All-Eating Bonz, who look like purple Bombos with Fu Manchu-like mustache that, if provoked or you say their full name in their presence, go berserk and start eating everything they can catch. And then we have the Tamers, who have multiple powers including the signature abilities to force monsters to obey orders and lock them into boxes, who look like Humans.
  • In Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom, Kal and Kara travel to an alien world and find all kind of weird creatures, like a pair of beasts which seem an elephant-sized, grey-maned, grey-scaled, green-blooded mix between a wolf and a lizard.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): While some of the monsters beyond Doom's Doorway are fairly traditional, but the notable ones tend to be quite odd; there's Cottus whose spine can be mistaken for a large set of floating stairs when he lays just right, and other than the white boxes which make up his spine is a shadowy creature made of a hundred arms with glowing eyes and mouths peering out from the darkness at its center; and a spiral pillar of screaming faces which affects the minds of those who hear it among others.

    Fan Works 
  • With Strings Attached:
    • Brox develops a spell that turns random bits of inorganic trash into living creatures (which the four dub Nasty Bits). They encounter such delights as a boulder with tentacles, a spidery glass-thing, an animated statue of a god with a penis as long as its leg (and using it like a sword), and feet (broken off statues) that hop around, prompting George to mutter "Monty Python, Monty Python." Also, Ringo's pair of black opaque glasses comes alive and scuttles out of his beltpouch. Paul later learns how to actually make these things himself. He loathes the spell, but it comes in handy once.
    • The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World also has its share of weirdies, particularly in the library when the Book of Characters is used. Ringo reports on some in Ketafa; some are so disgusting that he can't look any more, or describe them out loud.
  • It's Always Spooky Month: Monster is a tall, black figured thing with a lemon-shaped head and pink teeth, can run on all fours, and can devour at least a human teenager whole. In chapter 7 of It's Always Spooky Month, he mentions that he's had three heart attacks over the course of the night, and if he were human, he'd be dead; in chapter 2 of You Can't Escape Spooky Month, Lila compares him to a gecko, he mentions Skid and Pump called him an octopus due to how he can squeeze into tight spaces, and he curls onto the bed like a cat - and when Lila decides on a whim to pet him, they both find he can purr.
    A low, rumbling purr emanated from the Monster and Lila jumped back in surprise. "What the..."
    The Monster looked equally surprised. "I didn't know I could do that."
  • Kaiju Revolution: The Skull Island Menageries showcase this the most, with stand-out examples being terrifying spiders who slowly transform other animals into their species, giant toads that explode to reproduce, and sauropods that slowly transform into trees.

    Films — Animation 
  • In Monsters, Inc. and its prequel Monsters University, the Monster World is shown to be home to a wide variety of weird and wonderful monster species, each with different physical traits, such as tentacles, one or multiple eyes or even being large jawed heads on legs.
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas has a monster that has fingers like snakes and a spider for hair among more generic monsters and some even weirder creatures than the aforementioned example.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!. The name says it all.
  • Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Born out of a love affair between a mortal woman and a demon, it consumes people with a soapy ectoplasm, and dissolves them in a Pocket Dimension of stomach acid.
  • The Golgothan from Dogma, a for real shit elemental. But what's truly weird is that they came up with a theologically sound reason for it!
  • Then there is Tabonga, the s-l-o-w-l-y walking killer tree-stump of From Hell It Came.
    • Better yet are the monsters from the Filipino "Blood Island" series, plant/human hybrid that take forms varying from a recognizably human "chlorophyll man" to a giant man-faced running tree who dismembers women out of frustration because...well, he's a tree now, so he can't do what he really wants to do with them. Maybe he needs to watch Evil Dead for a primer.
  • Gamera: There is a certain flying turtle who qualifies.
    • Guiron, as well. For Pete's sake, he's got a huge freakin' knife for a head (which he can also shoot ninja stars out of)!
    • Zigra is a giant goblin-shark monster from another planet. Oh, and he's one of the few monsters in the Gamera films that can talk.
    • Barugon (not to be confused with the Godzilla monster Baragon) probably tops all the other Gamera monsters put together. He's a giant crocodile-chameleon monster that can spray a freezing mist out of his extendable tongue, bleeds purple, is vulnerable to freshwater, and can shoot a rainbow death beam from his back.
  • Ghostbusters, in all media. Although the trope doesn't really kick in until The Real Ghostbusters, signs of this still creep through in the original movie— the Squid Ghost is one, and there was another idea in which the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would become something truly monstrous in the final battle.
  • The Gingerdead Man, who gives a new meaning to Just Eat Him.
  • Several throughout the Godzilla mythos
    • The popular consciousness' conception of Mothra fits. As Big Creepy-Crawlies go, butterflies are pretty tame. Then you find out that she's a god or other supernatural being related to protective goodness, things make a whole lot more sense—or get even more confusing. Either / or? Not weird. Together: Weird. The fact that she's the only monster to have a consistent string of victories against Godzilla says volumes for her prowess. A lot of Japanese monsters tend to fit into the "weird" category.
    • Gabara of All Monsters Attack, however, certainly falls under this. He's an oni-like (Oni are essentially a Japanese equivalent to ogres) monster who basically exists to bully Godzilla's son Minya, and it's implied that he's nothing more than the result of some kid's overactive imagination. Also... he looks like a cross between a cat and a toad.
    • To the average American, King Caesar of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla makes no sense whatsoever. He's actually based on a Shisa; an Okinawan variant of the temple-guarding Chinese Fu-dog. Why he has scales is anyone's guess, though other parts such as the crystal, energy-beam-reflecting eyes hint at his golem-like nature.
    • Baragon, who is some sort of ancient reptile...thing with big floppy ears. Awww. Oh, and he's also the smallest monster in the Toho Universe. AND he's possibly the inspiration for the Nidoran line from PokĂ©mon! Made even stranger in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! where he's a freakin' god.
    • The Dorats of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Cute foot-tall lizard-bat-cat things that are basically genetically engineered...things...created to be the "perfect pet". That is, until they are exposed to radiation from the SAME atomic bomb that creates Godzilla and become King Ghidorah. It's a case of three weird-looking small monsters merging into one HUGE weird monster.
    • Godzilla vs. Gigan has Gigan. With hooks for hands (chainsaws in one film) and a buzzsaw on his stomach.
    • Godzilla vs. Megalon: Megalon certainly counts. He's a giant bipedal beetle god-monster with drills for hands! He spits napalm and shoots beams from his antennae.
    • There's Destoroyah of Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, who happens to be a giant demonic-looking creature who's also billions of tiny crab-like monsters merged into one entity of pure evil. Just like Hedorah, but made of little crabs instead of sludge.
    • Spacegodzilla of Godzilla Vs Spacegodzilla, a giant alien clone of Godzilla with huge crystals growing out of his shoulders. Even weirder, one of his given origin stories is that he grew from cells of the titular plant monster of Godzilla vs. Biollante that went through a black hole and fused with some crystalline organism on the way out.
    • While neither of these monsters have appeared onscreen with Godzilla, Maguma and Bagan have found their way into the fans' consciousness. The final product in Super Godzilla was considerably different, but the original concept of Bagan was a dinosaur, a bird-monster, and a fish-monster that would then combine together in a final form. Maguma was a giant walrus that appeared out of absolutely nowhere in his sole appearance, the asteroid collision film Gorath.
  • The Green Slime: Alien monsters with rounded heads, no shoulders. Cyclopean, they have tentacle arms that end in pincers and 2 feet ending in tridactyle claws. They are Psycho Electro and eat energy. If cut, their blood can grow into new ones. Their touch is lethally electric and they can use that energy in their claws to seal any wounds. Strangely, regular fire kills them fine.
  • The Silicates from Island of Terror are some of the most bizarre monsters of all. Small, starfish-like creatures with mouth on the end of a long tube. They are covered in a thick calcium based shell which makes them well armored. They feed on calcium by injecting a dissolving fluid into a victim and sucking up the liquid goo leaving behind the flesh and organs untouched. Even better? They divide every 6 hours.
  • Behold, The Killer Sofa!
  • If you can believe it, there is such thing as a killer piñata movie, called Pinata Survival Island. Unfortunately, it does not contain candy, only murder.
  • Robot Monster: Ro-Man, a gorilla wearing a space-helmet. Notable especially for having somehow or another murdered all of humanity, save six people.
  • Troma Films is the filmic king of this trope, with the Killer Condom, Zombie Chickens (of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead), and Harry Balls the Penis Monster (of Tromeo and Juliet) just three examples of their madness.

    Literature 
  • Catseye: Troy finds the hur-hur revolting and alien in appearance, even a wrongness in its form. Only the prospect of facing hunger and unemployment again lets him even stand carrying the case that holds it. Citizen Dragur, in contrast, is greatly enthusiastic and even calls it beautiful.
  • China MiĂ©ville:
    • Baslag Cycle: There are such creatures as a race of mosquito-headed women who are scrawny when they haven't fed but turn buxom when they had some blood, or an otherdimensional monster dragging around a city in the sea.
    • Legends Ofthe Red Sun: A Mourning Wasp is a docile giant insect with a human skull for a face.
  • The Cogno series has a massive array of these oddities, although it's somewhat justified since they're aliens. Just among the protagonists, pretty much all of them are utterly bizarre. It says something when the least strange one is a three-eyed cyborg (Volo).
    • Cogno, the eponymous character, is a Faceless Eye connected to an orange stalk with a small mouth and four tentacle-like feet. He also has two orange tendrils on top of his eye.
    • Scribo is a robot with a head shaped like a pen nib and a four-legged, trapezoidal base.
    • Phonica is a snakelike pink elephant with two trunks and three stalk eyes. She also has a photographic memory and can speak in dozens of languages at once.
    • Chrono is probably the strangest one- he's a bulky Armless Biped made of twisted red-and-blue tentacles that is capable of Time Travel.
    • Undula is the Last of Her Kind of a spacefaring race of bluegreen-and-yellow serpents capable of faster-than-light travel.
    • Quaestor has five legs and four eyes (one pair is large and the other pair is stalked), and is also the galaxy's best detective.
    • The Gemini Twins are a pair of orange seahorse-like Planimals with Psychic Powers. They also cannot talk, since they have evolved telepathy over anything else, so they rely on Cogno to speak.
  • Deltora Quest. Dear GOD, Deltora Quest. Where to begin? Lilies that eat your flesh, game-playing finger-biting mini-Yetis, giant snakes, the Kobb, a giant slug-thing, and worse... far, far worse. Did we mention that the author is Australian?
  • Discworld has the occasional one-off joke about some of the weird monsters that have evolved on the Disc, like the shadowing lemma, a two-dimensional creature that eats mathematicians, and the .303 bookworm, which is designed to burrow very quickly through magical tomes. Finally, the Luggage. Built out of sapient pear-wood, it looks like a normal traveling trunk, if normal traveling trunks had dozens of little legs, giant teeth, a tongue, and an apparently endless place to hold clothes and/or dead bodies. It cannot be killed, and once it's yours, it's yours for good.
  • In Hollow, the monsters, called "Woebegots" by the church and "Filthlings" by peasants, are the works of none other than Hieronymus Bosch brought to life and are absolutely bizzare.
  • In Chris Evans The Iron Elves trilogy among the Big Bad's minions are black, blood-sucking trees. In the third book a few of them feed from buried dragon eggs. Some of them learn to walk, grow arms and become explosive when shot. They also can throw fireballs. A pair grow wooden wings and claws and essentially become tree-dragons. That's right folks, flying trees.
  • John Dies at the End: Some of the creatures envisioned in this story are truly bizarre — such as the "Wig Monster" that looks like a dog-sized scorpion, with seven chubby babies' arms for legs, a parrot's beak for a mouth, an empty space where a waist should be (presumably this part of its anatomy is just invisible for some reason), and on its head is a toupee very obviously held on with a rubber band. Its body is randomly covered in different kinds of eyes, including roughly mammalian eyes as well as big compound eyes like you might find on an insect. Its scorpion tail injects a Psycho Serum that breaks down a human's natural Weirdness Censor, letting them see the supernatural, which usually ends with the human dying or going insane. It can also instantly teleport across the room and even through walls. And this thing is almost played for laughs; the ones that aren't truly bizarre, are bizarre and unbelievably horrific. The sequel This Book is Full of Spiders manages to take things even further with its titular spiders, a breed of Puppeteer Parasite that mutates its victims in unpredictable ways but generally starts by crawling into a person's mouth and then becoming their mouth.
  • Journey to Chaos: The source of all monster are the mutations by caused excessive exposure to mana. Mana comes from the goddess, Lady Chaos. Thus, the monsters spawned are very weird indeed.
    • A Mage's Power: boasts of a horse, that has a human head, and a snake tail, and thinks that Eric (a bog standard human) is the weirdo. Eric later sees monsters that look like they were "stitched together by a mad scientist".
    • Looming Shadow: There's a creature whose fur is permanently shaped into a question mark and a giant pelican that hosts a smaller monster in its beak.
  • Stephen King makes the killer cymbal-monkeys, killer chattering teeth, killer laundry presses, killer toy soldiers, killer word processors, the guy can come up with some really, really creepy monsters. The "shit-weasels" from Dreamcatcher probably take the cake.
    • Parodied in Family Guy when King pitches a lamp monster as the latest scary thing.
    • Parodied in Full Frontal Nerdity, with a bloodsucking radio. That has to be killed by singing "Achy Breaky Heart".
    • Parodied in Futurama where the Library of Congress has an entire wing to King's novels. One sign reads "Stephen King: A through Aardvark."
  • In Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series, humans deal with an alien race that are a revolting, nightmarish combination of spider and wolf in appearance — all the more oddly in that their aesthetics, judging by the colors of their clothing and their elegant spaceships, are similar to human. Despite the impeccable graciousness of their behavior toward humanity, many humans are outraged that the fleet allied with them to fight against teddy-bear-like aliens, even though those aliens immediately attacked without responding to any hails.
  • H. P. Lovecraft:
    • The Mi-Go in "The Whisperer in Darkness'':
      They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be.
    • The Shoggoth in At the Mountains of Madness:
      Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes — viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells — rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile — slaves of suggestion, builders of cities — more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative!
    • The Great Race of Yith in "The Shadow Out of Time" are cones of rubbery flesh with four appendages sprouting from the tip, one ending in a cluster of eyes, two in claws and the fourth in a set of organic "trumpets" of no visible purpose. These also weren't their original bodies, but a species that already existed on earth millions of years ago whom they all body swapped with to escape their world's destruction.
      ... were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases.
      • And the Flying Polyps from the same work. They're not even made of the same kind of matter as other life.
  • Monsters in My Mailbox: Not only do you get them in the mail; when wet, the monsters will shrink, then turn into harmless fireflies.
  • Oracle of Tao: There are creature (that is, living/created things), and there are Monsters (not creatures, because they are not created). Monsters are kinda like a baby Eldritch Abomination, they are composed mainly of the fear and negative feelings of people. These start as Shadows, which can possess animals (so a goldfish possessed by a Shadow becomes a giant deformed goldfish). After a Monster gets a reputation (for instance, Yog Sothoth), people fear it more, and it becomes stronger and stronger until finally becoming an Elder Being.
  • The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades appears to be a parody of zoological hoaxes and science journals. The number of ways these animals supposedly uses their snouts is staggering.
  • In Jasper Fforde's Song of the Quarkbeast the title creature, "a small hyena-like creature covered in shiny leathery scales and often described as one-tenth Labrador, six-tenths velociraptor and three-tenths kitchen food blender" which feeds on metal.
  • Kent J. Starrett does this constantly, dreaming up (and sometimes illustrating) surreal monsters like something from particularly disturbed/nervous child's bad dreams.
  • In The Taking by Dean Koontz, the devil is portrayed as a colossal organic spaceship with control over enormous storms tearing up the entire planet. There are also walking fungus monsters from Hell, and other, unseen monsters that seem pretty strange.
  • In The Traitor Son Cycle, while Miles Cameron put his own spin on traditional creatures like trolls and dragons, he has a pair of odd creatures unique to the setting. There's the hastenoch which are similar to giant elk if they had thick armor plates and a tentacle-fringed mouth, that said a dead hastenoch makes good eating. The same cannot be said of the eeeague. The eeeague are gelatinous blobs with a sharp beak inside of them that they can manifest outwards to eating humans. These sea serpent-riding raiders can also extend out tentacles and their flesh is full of a Hollywood Acid that'll quickly melt weapons used against them (they also exude this acid to cause extra-heavy damage from their already mighty tentacles). Luckily sea water will counteract the acid, but unless you can shoot the eeeague from a distance or have a magic weapon, you can expect heavy causalties or Total Party Kill during an eeeague raid.
  • Among the various monstrous creatures encountered by Máel DĂşin and his crew in the medieval Irish romance The Voyage of Máel DĂşin, the most bizarre is the "twisting beast" — a huge monster "with a hide like an elephant" that spends his time alternately running circles, then twisting his body inside its skin, twisting his skin around its body, and twisting his back against its belly. How a body that can do all of these things is actually built is up to your imagination.
  • Walter Moers's Zamonia books are filled with strange monsters. These include giant insectoids with a kazillion suckers, crystal scorpions, an army of cyborg robots and cyclops with spines in their tongues.
  • The thing on the cover of the first book on this page. It's like a cross between a porcupine, a hammer, and one-and-a-half people.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel use this trope more and more as time goes on. It gets to the point where you have demons that make you just want to yell "Why can they do that!?" or "Why do they look like that!?". Clem is a perfect example. Why does he have dog ears? Why the weird skin? What is his true form that we never really see? Does it have any real uses at all? Is there a point to his continued existence? Or, to sum it up, "Why?"
  • Doctor Who has a lot of these guys.
    • Two of the show's most iconic elements are pretty bizarre:
      • The TARDIS that the Doctor uses to travel around is a pandimensional Genius Loci, in the form of a blue police box with an infinite Pocket Dimension on the inside. TARDISes are apparently all female and grown from coral.
      • The Doctor's most persistent foes are the Daleks. A Dalek looks like a human-sized saltshaker with a single eyestalk and a pair of lightbulbs on its head, two appendages that resemble a toilet plunger and an egg beater, and round bumps studding its lower half. And that's just its armor; the creature inside is just a brain with tentacles and a single eye.
    • Everything in "The Web Planet": the Menoptera, bee-butterfly humanoids with AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle speech that communicate partially through hand gestures; the Zarbi, bipedal giant ants that communicate through synthesised beeping sounds and have a larval stage with a long nose that it can fire like a gun; the Optera, grunting troglodytic creatures that speak in barely comprehensible metaphor; and the Animus, a spider-like Eldritch Abomination that communicates through web tunnels. The surreal look of the serial is the point here.
    • The Yeti, which blogger El Sandifer called "a monument to insanity". They are actually robot yeti controlled by floating spheres that enter their backs and control them, these spheres being part of a Eldritch Abomination hive intelligence. They have glowing eyes and use pistol-like guns that allow them to shoot smoke that turns into malevolent web fungus. They are controlled by moving wooden figurines around on a board and can use these as homing devices.
    • The Krotons, which have a Tin-Can Robot appearance but are actually sapient tellurium crystals that are technically immortal, with the closest thing to death that they have being to 'exhaust' (turn into a gaseous state and leave their vessel). The implication (made explicit in the books) is that they can possess any machine and make it their body. They are blind, power their machines with mathematical aptitude, Mind Rape people in order to get the power, breathe fluid through hose lines in their chest, and have inexplicable accents.
    • "Terror of the Autons" featured murderous plastic daffodil monsters and an inflatable chair that eats people.
    • The Wirrn in "The Ark in Space" has a truly bizarre multigenerational life-cycle that functions as The Virus and parasitism simultaneously. Wirrn larva are created through fertilising the skin of another species (non-sapient animals are used for this purpose on the Wirrn homeworld, but humans and presumably Time Lords work just as well) and converting their body and brain into that of a larva. The larva then pupates and develops into a fully-fledged Wirrn, a huge wasp-like creature, which gains all the knowledge its host knew. It then lays eggs containing larvae that hatch under its direct control, and any hosts they fertilise transfer the knowledge back to the swarm leader as well.
    • The Swarm in "The Invisible Enemy" is a sentient brain parasite that transmits itself across space through a flashing pulse of light. Witnessing this light pattern causes the Swarm to be created in your brain.
    • Meglos. A dangerous and psychotic alien Diabolical Mastermind, technocrat and shapeshifter, who accomplished all this despite being a sessile cactus with no discernible sensory organs.
    • The Kandyman, a psychopathic torture robot made of candy.
    • The Empty Child is The Virus represented by a little boy wearing a gas mask. If he touches you, your skin and bone morphs into the shape of a gas mask.
    • The Adipose, Ugly Cute little monsters made from human fat.
  • Farscape managed quite a few of these as one of its goals was to showcase the work of the Jim Henson's Creature Shop.
  • The Masters of Horror episode "Deer Woman", about a vengeful Native American spirit who seduces men in the guise of a beautiful woman, then tramples them to death with her powerful deer legs.
  • Some creatures appearing on The Muppet Show qualify, like these dancing U-shaped thingies.
  • Special Unit 2 was all about this trope. Besides the basic creatures (gnomes for example), just about every Link is some weird, unconventional monster. Like the Barney the Dinosaur expy who was the inspiration for The Pied Piper (his plush felt "costume" is actually his body) and the creature made entirely of human fat.
  • A good deal of Tokusatsu monsters fall into this category. Many fit standard tropes, but every now and then something really WEIRD shows up.
    • The Ultra Series has lots of weird kaiju, but since Tropes Are Tools, many have become beloved by fans on both sides of the Pacific because they are weird. Some of the most iconic are:
      • Nova from Ultraman Leo is a big, red Teru-Teru Bōzu who can turn into a flying saucer, breathe insanity gas, and has a three-headed whip and a scythe in place of arms.
      • Every monster in Ultraman Ace is an example, but the crowner is probably Lunatyx, a Moon Rabbit kaiju that drinks magma and is able to launch its own regenerating eyeballs like missiles.
      • Bullton from the original Ultraman is about as far as you can get away with calling something a kaiju. It's a giant living meteor from the Fourth Dimension covered in tubes that allow it to manipulate time, space, and reality. Has spawned Expies in the franchise for its abstract appearance alone.
      • A good number of franchise aliens can fall under this category, bordering on Starfish Aliens. A good example is Metron from Ultraseven, whose design can only be described as some kind of shellfish that had evolved to walk upright like a human.
      • Another bizarre alien is Dada from the original series. He's more humanoid than Metron, but every bit as surreal as his namesake and a mascot of the movement in Japan.
      • Ultraman Gaia is another series where about 90% of the kaiju could be called weird. The most iconic of the bunch is the Gan Q, a giant eyeball with legs and arms that constantly cackles and giggles like a madman because it finds everything not from its native dimension to be hilarious, especially if said things are being destroyed.
      • The original Ultraman's final opponent Zetton is a humanoid alien kaiju with a beetle's shell and antennae, as well as a glowing orange patch for a face and two more on its chest (apparently, they're its eyes!). It can teleport, shoot fireballs from its face patch, create a force field, and catch energy beams to shoot them back at enemies, which it used to kill Ultraman. Oh yeah, it's also stated to be a dinosaur.
      • Kaiju with tails on the top of their bodies and heads at the bottom are a popular design in the Ultra Series, thanks to Return of Ultraman's Twin Tail, who looks a bit like a shrimp with a frog-like head, but standing upside down. It also influenced the iconic Twin Tails hairstyle in Japan.
    • STARFISH HITLER!, the most infamous monster from a series where some of the monster were clones of famous people combined with animals. Why they chose a starfish for Hitler is apparently just because "Starfish Hitler" sounds funny in Japanesenote .
    • Choujin Sentai Jetman specialized in turning objects into monsters—a pachinko machine, a hair-dryer, a drink machine— and later combined them randomly with animals, creating things like "Spotlight Armadillo" and "Hammer Chameleon."
    • In the original live action Giant Robo series they had some bizarre monsters, like a giant flying hairy eyeball — that grew legs, no less — and a giant robot hand. Just a hand. Maybe they wanted to give the good guys the finger.
    • Toho's Zone Fighter had these in most, if not all, episodes. For example, in Episode 4, the monster was Wargilgar, a huge, long necked alien insect creature that has comb-like wings, pincers, breathes fire, and has a double-barrel cannon in its mouth. Then again, Wargilgar is tame compared to some of the other monsters. Zandolla from Episode 15 had a friggin' drill for a head!
    • While the earlier monsters from Choujin Barom 1 are pretty standard humanoid creatures based on an animal or plant, the last ten monsters are all based on a single body part; for example, Kuchibiruge is a giant mouth, while Hyakumeruge is a walking mass of eyes. See Bogleech review them here.
    • Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger: all the Trinoids are fusions between an animal, a plant and a object. To name a few: a crow/mint/sniper rifle monster (Trinoid #5: Hakkarasniper), a bear/mushroom/bank cash machine monster (Trinoid #9: Bankumushroom) and a Bonito/Olive/Fishing Rod monster (Trinoid #15: Tsuribakatsuolive).

    Music 
  • Billy the Mountain, title character of Frank Zappa's epic length song, a walking, talking mountain whose wife, named Ethel, is a tree growing off of his shoulder. He's also a draft dodger.

    Mythology and Religion 
  • Aboriginal Australian Myths are full of creatures that might as well come from your worst high. We are talking about over 40,000 years of distorting megafauna accounts, adding new details from Southeast Asian traders and possibly literally drugs:
    • Yolngu lore is the Meccanote  of weird creatures. Here we find the Nadubi (an echidna man thing with spines on its vagina), the infamous yara-ma-yha-who (a red frog creature that consumes children and regurgitates them, doing so multiple times until they're one of them), the Garkain (a bat/bird thing that kills its victims with its awful smell and leaves their souls to wander forever), the Malingee (an evil night spirit with rattling knees; arthritis must be a bitch) and a sun goddess with many pubic hair arms.
    • Gamilaraay lore is the source of Yowies and Bunyips, which are pretty tame in the source material but have been warped into pure weirdness in pop culture.
    • Ngarrindjeri have the Whowie, an evil six-legged gigantic reptile that eats people in their sleep.
    • The Yuin have the Dulagal, an evil hairy man who lives in the forests of Mount Gulaga and apparently can only walk sideways.
    • Tasmanian mythology has the "man's eye" (buga nubrana) an eye that just watches you from the sky. Thankfully seems to be benevolent.
  • Christianity: Keep in mind that these creatures have no corporeal/earthly forms — what with being beyond the physical world and all — though angels did have the ability to appear in human form in the Bible, and demons had methods as well.
    • Angels. When they did not appear as ordinary humans they had 4 wings and the faces of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle (Cherubim); 6 wings and are covered in fire (Seraphim) or are giant glowing wheels covered in eyes (Thrones). Even when human in appearance the first thing someone did upon discovering they were with an angel was to freak out. When they showed up in one of the aforementioned appearances the greeting was usually "fear not".
    • Demons could also get pretty weird too. Try looking up Bael, Asmodeus (Not the D&D version) and Decarabia, who appears as just a floating pentagram. Look at any of Hieronymus Bosch's work dealing with demons, such as ''The Temptation of St.Anthony'' or the ''The Garden of Earthly Delights''. Little red chappies with pitchforks they ain't.
  • For many westerners, the Kappa (imp with a hollow space filled with water in its head) fits into this category, if just for the really dumb weakness (it loses its powers if the water falls out, it bows if you do, and it loves cucumbers). Also, Karakasa, the one-eyed, long-tongued umbrella spirits.
    • The Japanese were all over this: women with insatiable hungry mouths hidden on the backs of their heads (futakuchi-onna); tapirs that eat dreams (baku); invisible walls (nurikabe); giant feet that crash through ceilings and rampage through the house if they're not cleaned (ashiarai yashiki); even more giant skeletons made of regular-sized skeletons and powered by the collective hatred and misery of their souls (gashadokuro); the angry little dude assembled out of a ceramic tea-set (seto taisho); and inanimate objects, if not taken care of, become animate after a hundred years or so (tsukumogami), with popular examples being the umbrella (karakasa), the paper lantern (chochin-obake), the straw sandal (bakezori)(, the koto (koto furunushi)...
      • And the one thing that most of these things have in common is their aversion to electricity. This is said to be the reason why objects in museums never come to life, and why tsukumogami literally can't exist anymore.
    • Tanuki qualify for this seeing as one of their defining characteristics is their massive nutsacks. Incidentally, the massive scrotums are an exaggeration of a property of real tanuki.
  • Aztec Mythology has a lot of strange creatures and gods.
    • The Aztec's Tzitzimitl, for example, were skeletal star goddesses with snakes sprouting from their groins that protected midwives but also attacked the Sun during a solar eclipse. If they would succeed in killing the sun, they would descend onto Earth and kill everyone. Their warrior-Queen Itzpapalotl,the Obsidian Butterfly, could take the form of a woman with a skull for a head and obsidian-tipped butterfly wings. She ruled over the paradise of still-born children and women who died in labor.
    • The ahuizotl is a dog-like monster from Aztec folklore with prehensile feet and a hand on its tail. It lived in rivers, where it liked to drown people, pluck out their eyes, teeth, and nails, and eat them.
  • Rabbit crossbreeds seem to be popular in world mythology, for some reason. A few examples:
    • The Jackalope, an alcoholic jackrabbit with antlers that can mimic human voices.
    • The Wolpertinger, a winged vampire jackalope with duck feet that faints when it sees breasts.
    • Al-mir'aj, a harmless-looking gold bunny with a unicorn horn... that kills and eats cattle. And cowherds. And suddenly Anya's fear of bunnies makes perfect sense.
  • The Ramayana featured Kabandha, a headless demon with a mouth on his stomach and arms that spanned for miles. He was originally a Gandharva (celestial musician) who gotten cursed by either a powerful sage or Indra for his hubris against them. He could only change back if his arms have been cut off by Rama and his brother, which, fortunately for Kabandha, happens during the epic.
  • Philippine Mythology features quite the Rogues Gallery of strange and almost always homicidal mythological beasties. The most famous is probably the Manananggal, a vampiric creature that Eats Babies and can fly by separating its torso from its legs. Additionally, there's the Tiyanak (a vampiric baby that died before it could be baptized), the Kapre (a Sasquatch-like figure that guards people but also likes to play tricks on them), the Alans (mischievous bird-humanoids that like to take care of lost or abandoned children and have backward facing hands and feet), the Bungisngis (cheerful but dimwitted cyclops-like giants) and the Aswang (a frightening, shapeshifting predator).
  • The ever popular Fearsome Critters. And not just the Squonk and the Hodag; we've got cyclops-vampire-dragons with tentacles for a tongue, birds and fish that only move backwards, wiener dogs that eat axe handles, birds with lassos for noses, killer fur coats, rubber-skinned bears that explode in fire, corgis that constantly whistle and spew steam from their mouths, funerary caskets on legs, mouthless crocodiles with club tails and giant nostrils..do we need to go on?
  • The Khara, or "Persian Three-Legged Ass", of ancient Persian myth certainly qualifies. Imagine a gigantic unicorn with six eyes and nine mouths. Also, it lives in the middle of the ocean and commands sea animals like Aquaman, while also using its horn to smite evildoers.
  • In the folklore of Devon, England, there's the Yeth Hound, the spirit of an unabptised child that takes the form of a giant headless dog that haunts the forest at night making wailing noises (somehow...).

    Podcasts 
  • Dash Two monsters from Find Us Alive, with their bizarre pseudo-mammalian biology, blood like quicksilver, and the apparent desire to immobilize people rather than kill them. Every time one is described, no one seems to know which part counts as the head.
    Harley: -mouth was just teeth. Rows and rows and rows of-
    Lancaster: -broken glass, just stuck all over its head. I don’t know much about spiders, but I know their eyes are usually round and NOT supposed to look like-
    Love: -Mercury, or something, dripping out from where she shot it.

    Tabletop Games 
  • 13th Age: Every Iron Sea monster is unique. Some resemble grotesquely enlarged and malformed sea creatures, others are alien conglomerations of limbs and organs, and still others are partially elemental creatures, whose flesh melds into flowing water or cracking ice as they move.
  • Dreamblade includes a plethora of weird monsters, mixing and matching elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror in their designs.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Hoo boy, D&D has a lot of them.
    • Especially in the early editions, D&D has had a huge variety of monsters that are disguised as harmless things, such as coins, clothing, a wall, a scroll, a puddle, and even an entire bridge. It is what popularized the Chest Monster trope.
    • Many of the silliest and weirdest monsters in D&D history got their start in White Dwarf's Fiend Factory article series, which printed fan-submitted monsters. Many of these would become official D&D monsters and appear in the original Fiend Folio, which also added several more bizarre creatures.
      • The flumph is infamous in Dungeons & Dragons circles. It’s an intelligent, innately good, acid-dripping, psychic, floating, subterranean jellyfish-creature.
      • Another particularly infamous monster is the umpleby, which is a fuzzy ape-like creature resembling Cousin Itt that fights by using its long hair to build up enormous amounts of static electricity.
      • The carbuncle is an actual creature from mythology, but the D&D version is a very interesting interpretation. It is a small creature with psychic abilities and a precious gem on its head which can only be removed while it is still alive because the gem turns to dust if the carbuncle dies before it's removed. The carbuncle also happens to have the ability to die at will and is spiteful enough to actually do so if you try to take the gem by force or take it captive. Since the gem eventually grows back if removed, it will use the gems it produces to bribe its way into joining a group of adventurers. Don't be fooled. While they are not directly dangerous, they are malicious little things that use their psychic abilities to get people killed by indirect means, such as tricking people into fighting each other or attracting other kinds of monsters.
      • Nilbogs are backwards goblins that are healed by attacks and harmed by healing and cause people around them to do the reverse of what they want to do.
      • The flail snail is a giant snail with several tentacles on its head ending in spiked balls which it uses to club enemies to death.
      • The disenchanter is a blue-furred quadruped with the trunk of an elephant which it uses to consume magic.
      • Lava Children are humanoid hybrids of fire and earth elementals that are "immune" to metal (it just passes right through them harmlessly) and sport chimpanzee-length arms with scything claws and a permanent cheerful grin.
      • The sheet phantom takes the concept of the Bedsheet Ghost and turns it into something actually dangerous by giving it the ability to smother people and then take over their corpses, which doesn't stop it from looking ridiculous.
    • The 1988 module Castle Greyhawk had the Plane of Silly and Unused Monsters, a dimension filled with all of the bizarre and stupid monsters that TSR had created up to that point. It included the flumphs and modrons already mentioned, and many more. Similarly, during 4th edition WoTC released a short adventure for April Fool's Day called Fool's Grove that included several of D&D's silliest monsters that had previously been left out of 4th edition and explained that they were all failed experiments of the Formorians.
    • Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons classics, Gelatinous Cube (yes, it's a moving cube of transparent gel), Cloaker (an intelligent manta ray-like animal that flies around in caves and in early editions would diguise itself as a cloak).
    • And don't forget about the Ascomoid, a gigantic fungal ball covered in holes that attacks by ramming you.
    • The tojanida sort of resembles a turtle, if turtles could stick out claws and eyestalks as well as flippers, and could rearrange which came out of which hole in its shell on a whim.
    • From Forgotten Realms: how you'd like the lichling: an Immune to Bullets undead skull-headed cockroach?
    • Nearly the entire monstrous cast of the classic "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" adventure was Gygax deliberately messing around with this trope.
    • The thesselmonster from 1E was entirely an excuse for this trope, being a genetically-unstable critter designed by a loony wizard to interbreed with whatever other monsters he happened to have in his menagerie. Luckily it died some time after having been crossed with a hydra, a chimera, a gorgon and a cockatrice ... otherwise, the world might be overrun with even more "thessel-whatever" creatures than the 2E Monstrous Compendium could cram in.
    • "Well, we've got five lion legs and two lion heads left... how about we make them into a wheel with a head on either side?"
      • That's Buer, straight out of the Key of Solomon.
      • The Tome of Magic, which is the source of the above Roving Mauler, also includes a bear whose hair and eyes are replaced with teeth, a constantly dancing humanoid with blades instead of hands and feet, and an undead severed giant's head that walks upside-down on its Prehensile Hair.
    • A lot of the oldest D&D monsters were created by Gary Gygax trying to come up with identities for a collection of weird Japanese plastic monsters. These include the owlbear, the bulette, and the rust monster.
    • Spelljammer also has a ton of weird monsters. One of the is the Fractine, which are living mirrors that fly around in space. It was one of the monsters that was brought back to fifth edition in a D&D Beyond online supplement.
    • The wingless wonder is a pathetic egg-shaped creature with nine tentacles on its head, a pair of stumpy legs and a tiny pair of arms that are constantly flapping like it is trying to fly. They can produce randomized magical effects and are constantly shielded against magic except for a short time after using their magical abilities. A significant number of them are actually transformed wizards. Some are wizards in disguise, some are trapped in that form by rival wizards, and some are wizards who reincarnated in that form.
    • Pathfinder, being a Captain Ersatz to D&D, used as many classic weird monsters as it can get its hands on. Notably, it often came up with fairly sensible explanations for them. For instance, the aforementioned flumph is a Lawful Good Eldritch Abomination acting as a defense against more evil aligned ones, the carbuncle's signature attack of dying for no reason other than depriving players of loot became a deceptive teleportation effect that leaves behind a fake corpse, and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, who provides the page quote, had its lure changed from a part of its body to a puppeteered cadaver.
  • Exalted:
    • The game dives into this trope whenever dealing with the denizens of Malfeas. At the top of the food chain you have the Yozis, who take forms such as an endless silver desert, a constantly shifting multi-dimensional city that also serves as the dimension of Malfeas in which it is itself trapped, a silver forest, a carnivorous swamp, or a typhoon of emotionally-intoxicating rain. And then you have the demons under them — many of which are their own numerous souls — who take forms such as a brass forest, a quicksilver highway, or a contagious and eventually lethal emotion.
    • You can also get some very strange things coming out of the Wyld.
  • Gamma World has this trope nailed for most of its monsters, like the winged mandibled lion who has laser eyes and eats fabric, or the bunny-men who turn stuff to rubber. And let's not forget about the Pineto, AKA the cactus horse!
  • Genius: The Transgression: Leaving aside the ones you can grow in vats, the things a moderately inquisitive Genius can find include stuff like culturally Hispanic goblins made out of paper, and pixies spawned from failed equations. Then things get weirder.
  • Kingdom Death is purposely full of these for your settlement to kill. The Lion Knight which is a lion-headed demigod in plate armour, with a flaming mane and 3 foot-long claws for fingernails, is the most mundane creature of the game.
  • In Low-Life, most of the monsters fit into this category, but a special note goes to the Cremefillians who are basically freaking Twinkie-men brought to life by the pollution from the Apocalypse and bitter towards the long-dead hyoomanrace for eating them back when they were non-sentient. And the best part? They're a PC race!
  • Mage: The Awakening applies this tendency to creatures of the Abyss, on the general principle that if you think "monsters from outside reality" are just "squamous things with too many tentacles," you're not thinking big enough. A formula that represents the physical laws of hell and rewrites reality around it! A contagious form of aphasia that takes the hallucinatory form of an angel! An alternate history aborted by reality itself that has twisted inward and turned cannibalistic!
    • In fact, when the New World of Darkness wants to do wandering monsters, it does this a fair amount of the time. Some good examples include the things lurking in the Hedge (one piece of fiction has a changeling pursued by a ventriloquist's dummy with a few human parts, armed with a camping hatchet) and the entities of the Underworld (it says a lot that the Geist core book makes mention of one of the few Kerberoi that have anything approaching a humanoid shape, and even then it looks like something out of Hellraiser).
  • Magic: The Gathering has many strange creatures, but the elementals of Lorwyn are probably the most bizarre.
    • The kami from the Kamigawa block, which includes the picture at the top of this page (a Waxmane Baku), have them beat. The tame ones are faceless humanoids with elongated limbs. The really weird ones might take the form of a flying mass of coral covered in mouths.
    • Of course, if you really want your monsters to be Weird, just ask the Izzet.
    • The Fractals from Strixhaven are basically math-elementals created through Formulaic Magic by Quandrix mages. Despite their orderly and recursive appearance, most Fractals are also shaped like animals.
  • Steamlogic's Mechanical Dream indulges in its French-Canadian weirdness. It may not have the most extensive bestiary around, but it more than makes up for it in surreally designed creatures such as the Laudoling. These creatures have an extreme case of Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism, the males are upright human-sized creatures that look like a mosquito got crossbred with a satyr while the female is gigantic quadruped that looks a bit like a giant scorpion with no tail or pincers and a round helmet-like head. It's been speculated amongst academics, that the Laudoling were originally two different species (male Laudolings can mate with any living thing and the resulting offspring is almost always the mother's species, though some matings result in a male Laudoling offspring).
  • The "monster the GM made up himself" from Munchkin. It gets - 2 on a Saturday, among others.
  • Numenera has this as a core concept. Highlights include dinosaurs with internet access, super thin flexible discs that cut you with their sharp sides, hyper intelligent cats with energy spheres for heads, headless turkeys covered in vesicles that spit sharp seeds from their necks and more tentacled beasts than you can reasonably remember. And thats not even touching on the various Energy Beings and KillerRobots that might not count as monsters.
  • Reign has giant fleas made of earthen materials with hot mud for blood, that can destroy entire cities by landing on them, suck minerals out of the ground, and are full of precious metals, gems, and demons — as here, demons are natural and earthly magical creatures that hatch out of eggs that form in the soil.
  • There are some more traditional ones in Rocket Age, like giant spiders or dinosaurs, but then are some straight up weird ones, such as Fog Wolves, flying razor edged mollusks, and Mist Clingers, which are best explained as amoebic armoured starfish. As an interesting note, both come from within the mists of Venus.
  • RuneQuest: The game's intentionally unorthodox setting taking out most of the "normal" monsters you'd expect to find in a fantasy setting and going beyond DND stupidity levels instead. Highlights include: the Duruluz (duck-people), the Gorp (which amounts to an giant acidic living booger), the Jack-O-Bear (a bear... with a jack-o-lantern on its head), and the Walktapus (an octopus with legs). Even its version of the Standard Fantasy Races is weird: elves are a type of plant, dwarves are machine-like, trolls are an ancient and dying culture, and some humans are non-sapient and hunted for food by the tapir-like Morokanth.
  • The Splinter: Monsters in The Splinter are one part traditional fantasy creatures put through a weirdness filter (Living Avalanches instead of Earth Elementals), one part creatures that would make sense in other genres but are shockingly strange in a fantasy dungeon crawl (Cats of Ulthar, Robotic Attack Drones), and one part truly bizarre (humanoid, chitin-covered bio-weapons that can integrate found technology directly with their bodies; clockwork, parasitic hummingbirds.)

    Toys 
  • BIONICLE's wildlife. Just a few examples: Tarakava are said to be water-lizards, but they stand upright, have huge tusks, enormously long punching fists, and tank-treads for legs. Muaka and Kane-Ra are a tiger and a bull respectively, but they have dinosaur-heads, extending necks and also have treads. Nui-Rama are gigantic insects with large teeth and clawed arms. Manas are crabs that resemble tanks with pincers. The Rahi-Nui is made up of all of these, plus a scorpion. Gukko are large birds with four flipper-like wings and no legs. Just click through the galleries. Some are fairly familiar-looking, others are near indescribable.
  • This is the concept of UglyDolls.

    Video Games 
  • The monsters of Alice: Madness Returns that don't come straight from the books (and naturally even many of those) are utterly bizarre by default: black ooze with mechanical components and broken doll parts sticking out of them, flies made out of iron bolts or ink, predatory fish that live inside ice, wasps in full Samurai gear, crabs that smoke cigars with a cannon in place of a claw, doll-heads that fly with four legs attached to them like a propeller, vomit on the player, and are called 'B—— Babies', etc. etc.
  • Angband and other roguelikes, given that they don't depict creatures visually, are free to have all kinds of bizarre monstrosities. Browsing through the monster files of those can be quite an experience for someone with a vivid imagination. For instance, in Angband there are quylthulgs, pulsing mounds of flesh that defend themselves by summoning other monsters.
  • Being a D&D adaptation, Baldurs Gate 3 occasionally borrows from the long history of weird monsters across the gameline. One notable instance is Inspector Valeria, who's investigating the murder of a priest that may be tied into a spate of serial killings in Baldur's Gate. She's a brusque yet shortsighted investigator who's more interesting in a stiff drink than in getting to the bottom of a case... and she's also a [[hollyphant https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hollyphant]]. So if you see a flying small celestial elephant interviewing a murder witness, don't worry - you're not having a stroke.
  • Baroque contains some pretty award-winningly strange monsters. Like the Bubugel, the Soconpo, and the Johanna Kyon, just to name a few.
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was one of the most successful Kickstarter projects ever. One reward for backers was to put their pets in the game as monsters. So this game has giant horned cats that cast spells and giant disembodied heads of dogs that rush at you. This is an addition to oddities such as the Dullahammer which is a large, armoured bipedal sea urchin with an Epic Flail
  • Borderlands 2 has definitely one-upped its predecessor in the weird monster department. Notable are the stalkers, invisible, teleporting creatures that look equal parts bat, scorpion and panther, and the Goliaths, which at first glance are just beefy, helmet-wearing bandits. However, shoot the helmets off and they become enraged, dropping their guns, turning red and coughing up their own skulls, to hang suspended above their shoulders on a rope of viscera as they charge the player fists swinging.
  • Almost all of the summons in Bravely Default and Bravely Second are given this treatment.
    • Girtablulu is a massive hermit crab thing with surreal glowing lights all over its body and a CITY on its back.
    • Hresvelgr is described as an enormous black eagle. It looks and sounds more like a possessed F-16.
    • Promethean Fire is a hellish train whose cab opens into a freakish mouth to launch massive fireballs.
    • Deus Ex is an array of television sets on the front of a giant robotic spider that shoots lightning.
    • Susano-o is a shadowy warrior who fires dark lightning using what looks like a radio tower as a staff/sword.
    • Charibdys is a fleet of steamboats that weakens opponents with spectral anchors.
    • Amaterasu is a radiant kitsune who appears to be the spirit of a streetlight.
  • Played for Horror in Bug Fables: Most of the types of enemies are fairly standard plant monsters, robots, criminals, or real-life bug species, but there is one major exception. The inhabitants of the Giant's Lair, only known as the Dead Landers, are bizarre beings that barely resemble anything on Earth. One looks like a heavily mutated stick bug with circular mouths on its face and hands, another looks like a green spiky pot with a long tongue floating in the air with balloon-like attachments, and a third looks like a one-eyed cross between a spider and a crab that shoots spores that can put people to sleep. All three are exceptionally powerful in both gameplay and story. They are all weak to ice, implying that they might be at least part plant or fungi. The unfightable Dead Lander Omega is never seen in full, but apart from the giant eye it appears to be skeletal based on its hands. This helps makes the location they're found in that much more jarring and alien compared to everywhere else in the game.
  • Castlevania got into this territory after it moved into Metroidvania games. A lot of the monsters are very accurately modeled after demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon... which, as noted above, means they're going to be odd by default.
  • Cry of Fear has weird monsters. In fact, they just get weirder as you go along. Chicken-things whose heads explode to stab you with knives, scissor-throwing enemies tied to beds that are floating upside down and female ghosts whose bellies explode, so the fetuses can take a stab at you. Literally.
  • In the Commodore 64 oddity Dancing Monster, the titular creature is a chunky purple man with curved horns, a green ratlike tail, big elephant-like ears, a pinkish trunk, and finally a long cyan tongue. Oh, and it wears pants and a belt.
  • Dawn of the Dragons has plenty that qualify. For example:
    • Vhaliribdis, a tentacled flower-like creature that unfolds into a vaguely humanoid thing with the lower body of a squid, spiky fins for arms and a skull for a head.
    • Thratu's Abomination, a golem made of stitched-together corpses whose chest opens into a massive vertical mouth.
    • Spire of Ancrates, a castle animated into a giant scorpion.
    • Dirthax, a boat-sized anglerfish whose lure is of a beautiful woman.
  • Dofus, a MMORPG... Half the jokes and puns revolved around making bizarro version of common animals and traditional monsters. E.g., the Mopy King is the king of all mop-related monsters... Other examples include the Dragon Pig, the samurai-like Fungi Master, the martial artist known as the Tanukoui-san who needs stilts not to walk on his huge scrotum, strawberry- and mint-flavored jellies, etc..
  • Dragon Age II features the Profane, also referred to as rock wraiths. They appear as floating "skeletons" composed of glowing energy and surrounded by chunks of solid stone.
    • Dragon Age: Origins and its expansion feature the Broodmothers; women "tainted" by the Darkspawn who turned into large, obese monsters with 8 breasts, various tentacles and a mouth that just looks wrong. They almost constantly give birth to various kinds of Darkspawn, depending on what species they belonged to before being turned into broodmothers.
    • Awakening also gives us the Children; things looking like oversized, fat maggots with the face of a three-eyed baby with lots of teeth who walk around on insect-like legs ... and can mutate to grow even more and even longer legs to stab you with.
  • Dwarf Fortress has randomly-generated titans, their subterranean variants, forgotten beasts, and their Hidden Fun Stuff variants, demons and angels. One generated during testing had the body of a giant shrimp, covered in bright purple fur, with a long elephantine trunk. Another was a giant lime-green crow with huge mandibles and three eyes. Once the version was released, it just got weirder from there. They can even have features of animals that don't currently exist in any other capacity of the game. The weirdness is increased by the way the game announces the monster's full physical description to you when it appears. You get a box appearing in the middle of the screen to tell you, for example,
    "The Forgotten Beast Bisek Nirurnokgol has come! A towering feathered leech. It has wings and it has a gaunt appearance. Its scarlet feathers are patchy. Beware its noxious secretions!"
  • EarthBound (1994) has a ton of enemies that don't make sense. They have a blob of vomit, a man made of balls, a ball Made of Explodium that keeps smiling, and Giygas, a red, swirly, skull-fetus... thingy... and his alien minions.
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:
    • Fitting nicely with the game's alien setting, Vvardenfell's wildlife is mostly unique with very few real-life analogues. They range from Silt Striders (giant flea-like insects used by the native for transport) to Netches (Living Gasbag jellyfish creatures that drift through the sky and are farmed for their leathery hides) to Alits and Kagouti (two predators with vaguely theropodian dinosaur-like features) to Kwama (insectoid creatures that change drastically through different stages of their lives and are farmed for their eggs). And that's just scratching the surface.
    • In addition to the series standards like the various forms of undead and lesser Daedra, the Sixth House enemies have a very weird and "other" feel.
  • Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark has some pretty weird monsters.
    • Niwots are bipedal, bear-sized platypuses that play magical music from their clarinet-shaped beaks.
    • Thervas are wingless dragons that constantly handstand because their hind legs are tiny.
    • Pektites, the resident Elemental Embodiments, are floating jellyfish with a tiny humanoid upper body inside of the jellyfish’s bell.
    • Bulldrakes are giant draconic bulldogs that breathe various elements, can heal themselves by going to sleep, and snore so loudly that it damages every unit on the map.
  • Final Fantasy VII is famous for its roster of weird, nonsensical monsters that barely fit into the story. However, there are some hints in the setting as to why the monsters are so otherworldly: First and foremost is that most of them are the results of science experiments and toxic waste from a mystical substance. Second of which is that it's possible that humans come from another world entirely, and brought alien creatures with them.
  • Final Fantasy X brings us the Spectral Keeper, a vaguely mantis-like thing whose lower body consists solely of a stinger tail. It's pretty fitting that it has a weird battlefield to match.
  • The Guardian Legend for NES has some pretty strange enemies, especially for a sci-fi shooter-hybrid. Giant lobsters, eyeballs that shoot sea-weed walls, color changing spiders that multiply exponentially if you don't kill them quick enough, and the three-eyed final boss! Also the multi-eyed boss who shoots his eyes out at you.
  • FromSoftware games are filled with wacky monsters:
    • Dark Souls: Most monsters in the series are pretty stock fantasy monsters: skeletons, dragons, zombie substitutes, and what have you. But there are a handful of monsters that are just plain bizarre.
      • Mimics in the series are as goofy and bizarre as they are dangerous. Wake one up and they suddenly grow a humanoid torso with long legs with the treasure chest functioning as its head, while a pair of arms and a long wagging tongue come out of its mouth. A mouth that is lined with finger bones instead of teeth. They then prance around making goofy noises while they try to kill you. Which is not difficult for them to do since those long legs can kick extremely hard. In Dark Souls II they crawl upside down on all fours instead of standing upright and can spit poison, while Dark Souls III contains both of the aforementioned types.
      • The Chaos Eaters of Lost Izalith are large inverted cones with eyes studded all around their bodies that walk around on 4 stubby legs, with a pair of tube-like and claw-tipped tentacles on what we suppose must be their "front" that they use to spray acid, and huge lamprey-like mouths studded with teeth that take up the entirity of the tops of their flat heads. By far the weirdest and most alien creatures in the game, they more resemble something from the Cthulhu Mythos.
      • The Gaping Dragon from Dark Souls is a huge creature that was once a normal dragon but was so consumed by gluttony that its entire torso split apart into a giant vertical Belly Mouth lined with teeth that were presumably once its ribcage, just so it could eat more.
      • Darksuckers in Dark Souls II have worm-like bodies, but their heads are a fanged maw surrounded by tentacles that give the impression of a human hand. You will not forget the first time one bursts out of a pit of oil within the pitch-dark pit that is Black Gulch.
      • Dark Souls III has a few swamp areas infested with what appear to be spider-like creatures that may or may not be made of parts of humans, mutated tadpole-men with dangerous vomit breath, hulking ogre creatures whose heads are giant hands with too many eyeballs in the palm, and a couple of weird beasts that looks kind of like someone tried to make a giant spider out of bits of wolves.
    • Bloodborne ups the ante on weird monsters in compared to Dark Souls, especially after the game becomes a Cosmic Horror Story filled with lovecraftian abominations. Sure, bosses like the Cleric Beast and Vicar Amelia were frightening, but later on you fight big-headed blue humanoids with psychic powers, coiled masses of venomous snake parasites, and whatever the hell the "Winter Lantern" is. The DLC includes bloated giant mosquito spiders, immortal blobs of flesh that drink their own brains, mollusk mermaids, and the spawn of an elder god who uses their own placenta as a giant bladed boomerang yo-yo. With blood grenades.
    • Elden Ring somehow manages to out-weird Bloodborne, with a plethora of monsters who have gone fantasy-cyborg and grafted too many magical limbs to their bodies, magical advisors that look like giant mutilated hands, the king of those venomous snake parasites, magma giants who have animated faces on their torsos, bosses that were scrapped during the production of Bloodborne for being too weird, and the final boss is a gigantic tree-star hybrid beast that uses your god as a sword.
  • The good ol' Half-Life series still has some of the weirdest aliens in gaming history. Half-Life features alien xenofauna being teleported to Earth from "the Border World of Xen", which in itself has a food chain:
    • Headcrabs, little Puppeteer Parasites that latch onto your head, devour the brain and mutate the body into a nightmarish Zombie. The bottom of the food chain, most die before reaching maturity: a massive, armored Gonarch, a "testicle-on-spider-legs" that spawns other crabs by the dozens.
    • Houndeyes, three-legged dog-like things with massive compound eyes that hunt in packs and attack with powerful sonic waves. They seem to feed like spiders, by dissolving the prey before eating it.
    • Bullsquids, fast, vicious predators hostile to almost everything they see (including, occasionally, others of their kind) that spit poison at long distances and can beak a man's legs off with a swing of their tails. Characterized by the multiple tentacles arranged around the maw. Will try to eat or mate with almost anything. Seems to hunt Headcrabs.
    • Barnacles are... growths on the ceilings that form a mouth rigged with sharp teeth. They snatch up their prey with a long, sticky tongue that hangs down all the way down to the floor, no matter how high up the ceiling is. "Prey" being anything that touches the tongue. They swallow said prey whole and alive, and it disappears without a trace. Key word being "alive", if they taste an inanimate object or a dead body they'll just toss it aside, even if it's an enemy Dr. Freeman has freshly beaten to death with his crowbar mere seconds ago.
    • Vortigaunts/Slaves, Grunts/Soldiers and Controllers/Masters form what seems to be a civilization of sorts; the species are obviously related to each other. Characterized by breathing tubes on the sides of the head, vertically-opening mouths, multiple red eyes (three or five), hooved legs and a third arm on the chest. The Vortigaunts and Controllers can manipulate electricity, while the massive Grunts use a biological rifle that spawns and launches small, vicious homing insects.
    • The Gargantua... is best described as a massive bipedal tank. Its beetle-like armor is impervious to small arms fire, and even explosives have a hard time going through. They have four arms, of which the upper two can be used as devastating flamethrowers. The animal is likely full of fuel, and goes off with a huge bang when killed.
    • Tentacles are somewhere between a plant and an animal. Massive, snakelike monsters that usually emerge from pits and kill anything around it. Blind, but very sensitive to ambient sound.
  • KanColle:
    • The Abyssal Fleet are amalgams of eerily pale humans, giant ambulatory mouths, and naval vessels and hardware, in varying combinations.
    • A minor enemy that sometimes shows up in (fan) artwork note  is the "Enemy Naval Mine", a bio-mechanical black sphere with glowing lights, at least one huge mouth and a number of tentacles, whose attack is to strip the ship girls and... presumably worse. They also prefer submarine girls and other Pettankos.
  • Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls: Anchovy — have you ever seen a pizza slime?
  • Kid Icarus is full of these, featuring flying eyeballs, flying noses, one-eyed toad things, and Eggplant Wizards.
  • The Heartless from Kingdom Hearts tend to be weird, such as the Trickmaster boss from the first game, anthropomorphic cartoon cars, demon dogs, walking gumball machines with teeth... the list goes on. Possibly the strangest is the Final Boss, who starts off human(oid), but has a bizarre One-Winged Angel form. Y'know, the one where he's a freaking boat with his old humanoid torso, arms, and head sticking out and ALSO the stage you're fighting on! And that's not even getting into Nobodies, Unversed and Dream Eaters!
  • Kingdom of Loathing is weird, especially for something which has an art style that rarely ventures too far above stick figures. With no context whatsoever, here are some honest descriptions of some of the enemy monsters in this game:
    • A carnivorous plant that uses a flower shaped like a pile of steaks to lure victims close enough that it can strangle them with tendrils.
    • Various golems made from white chocolate, fruit, pencils, topiary, nachos, alcohol-soaked turkey stuffing, and even an entire collapsed mine shaft (complete with a zombie canary).
    • A shapeless blob covered in ears.
    • A nightmarish, tentacled, pincered Lovecraftian amalgamation of mutated Christmas elves.
    • A can of asparagus brandishing a knife.
    • The disembodied buttocks of the game's co-creators.
    • Although it's an ally rather than an enemy, you can construct a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot (the Trope Namer) to fight alongside you. It can damage or delevel or steal money from your opponent, or it can restore your HP and MP in battle. It even has a special attack where it can pelvic thrust at an enemy, hitting them in the head with a piece of toast launched from the toaster used in its construction. The enemy is generally too shocked to attack that round. Yes, you can eat the toast afterward.
  • La-Mulana has plundered mythology and literature for many of its monsters, sometimes making them even weirder than the original. Examples include the Miraculous Flower-faced Snouter; an animal that uses its five noses to camouflage itself as a flower, Hekatonkheires; a Mini-Boss which resembles a ball with lots of holes in it with snakes coming out and Tai Sui; a monster which keeps throwing its innumerable eyeballs at you and appears to be made of nothing else.
  • The Legend of Zelda has featured some utterly bizarre boss monsters throughout the series:
    • Arrghus, the giant eyeball in a floating jellyfish surrounded by little cloud monsters with eyes.
    • Barinade, the hideous flesh-pile covered in electrified jellyfish topped with three tentacles that end in ray guns.
    • Bellum, some kind of flying jellyfish/eyeball/tentacle thing.
    • Blizzeta, giant flying Russian doll made of ice, and a funny, fuzzy blanket-ball in the middle.
    • Bongo Bongo, the huge phantom monster that looks like an upside down armless torso with a red eye where the head should be with 9 yellow pupils and six eyelids that open up like flower petals, and has a pair of massive floating hands that constantly play a huge bongo drum (which is also the fighting arena).
    • Facade, which is both the boss and the floor of its own boss room.
    • Vitreous, which is yet another giant eyeball, this time in a pool of corrosive... stuff, surrounded by other, tiny eyes which fly at you.
    • Scaldera, a giant six-legged, one-eyed ball of magma encased in rock.
    • Molgera, a giant Sand Worm with a head that looks like a manta ray, but with a mouth that opens down the middle, that can fly and also brays like a donkey when damaged.
    • Zaganaga, a giant burrowing cactus which has a flower that opens up to reveal four eyestalks. It can also fire laser beams from the flower.
      • There are MANY more (peahats, Majora, etc.), but the above list should be enough to give you an idea.
  • The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games have Omfak, a... demon? that shapeshifts heads between a wolf, a fire breathing lion, and a shoop da woop wannabe; Their portrayal of Ganon as a shape shifting spirit-ogre-wizard could also count.
  • The Mega Man (Classic) series certainly seems to have their share of these, even though they are robots (the Mets, for example, are essentially living hard hats). The Robot Masters, in particular, tend to be notable in that respect (a robot made out of wood, a robotic centaur, a military camo robot with two heads, a baseball robot (as in, shaped like one), etc). Given that some are made by sane and respected genius inventors, it makes you wonder.
  • The eponymous Metroids are floating jellyfish with teeth that will suck out your life. If left alone, these jellyfish turn into flying dinosaurs that spit fire/lightning (no ice, for a very good reason). From the same series comes the X, which are floating piles of viral stem cells, and the Ing, which are five-legged spiders from another dimension that specialize in Demonic Possession.
    • Other enemies in the games are often weird, weird things. From super-fast sea serpents to walking tree monsters that can Spindash to plants that shoot plasma and who-knows what else.
    • The Prime series, aside from the aforementioned Ing, has giant lava clams, a mutated praying mantis plant, tusked rock toads, a bisected shark-like creature that is held together by electricity, trilateral armored squids whose solution to everything is ramming into it, flying plants that turn invisible and shoot sonic waves, teleporting dogs, and pretty much everything on Phaaze.
    • Other M is the most notable. It's got giant purple chameleons with huge tails, oversized humanoid armadillos, six-legged tree dinosaurs that can flip over and walk upside-down, explosive worms that wear horseshoe crab-shaped Powered Armor, a bipedal frog-whale with antlers, a giant lava monster with flailing limbs and devil horns, huge dinosaur-like creatures whose posterior is a giant mouth, giant growths on the ceiling with one huge eye and a centipede-like extremity, a gravity-controlling box-shaped thing that wears a mask, what appears to be a fusion of an Anomalocaris and a lemur that is capable of flight and firing rockets, and cyborg humanoid beetles that act as door locks.
  • The Freeware RPG Middens has monster portraits that look like what might happen if Salvador Dali painted in the style of Leonardo da Vinci while on drugs. Special mention goes to the skeleton womb nursery car. Its sequel, Gingiva, likewise follows suit, with everything from jellyfish to a strip of DNA.
  • In Minecraft, most of the monsters are relatively normal, but:
    • Creepers are just wrong. It's said that they came about from a failed attempt to make pigs.
    • There are also Ghasts, giant floating jellyfish-like creatures that spit fireballs.
    • Blazes are floating heads surrounded by flaming golden rods that orbit them at high speed while shooting fire all over the place.
    • The Wither is a massive, flying, desiccated three-headed torso that actually has to be constructed by the player out of skulls and soul sand.
  • This is the main appeal of Monster Party. Deep-fried food, fish with human legs, naked pairs of disembodied legs, wandering pants, umpires... it could be renamed "Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Game".
  • Monster Rancher is a mon game with a huge variety of creatures to train and battle with that vary from being based on Japanese myth to fantasy-tale creatures to robots to... things. Tri-segmented wind-up ducks, rhinos riding on wheels, clown-faced caterpillar triplets, humanoid shape-shifting blobs with the face of Scream, mole-dogs wearing giant pointed hats. Hell, the very mascot of the series is a yellow, comma-shaped monster with only a big eye, almost as big mouth, and a tail that it stands on. All of this is even worse when you consider the possibilities that can be made when combining monsters. Golems with a goofy smile for a chest, giant beetle monsters with duck heads for a horn and arms, a giant blue-skinned camel-elephant with a joker-smile, a multi-colored humanoid jell with the colors of a little girl in a kimono, a weird, round creature with a pug-like face that randomly sprouts legs and dabs... Jeez, this goes on. Over 328 of these guys exist, and a big chunk of them could easily stand-up the current trope image in surrealism.
  • While most of the Shades of NieR are basically expies of Heartless from Kingdom Hearts, larger more tentacle-y versions of said Heartless, or monstrous animal-looking things, the giant Shades named Hook (named after the villain Hook from Peter Pan, since all boss shades have some form of fairy tale motif to them) and Wendy are notable exceptions. Hook is basically a hideously lumpy misshapen lizard-thing with numerous breast shaped growths with vague eye-like markings growing under its chin (earning the nickname "chin testicles" by some players), a hand at the end of its tail, and a shark-like head with numerous teeth and Monochromatic Eyes, while Wendy is an Eldritch Abomination made up of a stone sphere surrounded by a swirling mass of pulsating darkness with a great big menacing eye at its center making it look like a closed lotus flower that eats up the local inhabitants of the town, essentially becoming a confused Mind Hive. Its name also makes this a case of Fluffy the Terrible).
  • A lot of stuff drawn by Tetsuya Nomura is rather quirky. Even some of the monsters in the games where he was a debugger or minor monster designer. Some stuff done by Amano is pretty interesting but it isn't quite as freaky compared to Nomura's almost mind screwy Noise and Heartless. Or Ultimecia. ('Course, he didn't design 'everything).
  • With monsters like the Paramite, Fleech and Scrab, it's pretty obvious why the games are called Oddworld.
  • You'd expect weird monsters from the game named Pandemonium — and you'd be right. The monsters — allies or enemies — are usually so weird that most of the time they cannot be even described properly. For example, the Final Boss of the first game is a giant eyeball with cannon that transforms into spider tank (with legs attached directly to the eye) halfway through. And even if the monster looks relatively normal, it makes at least weird sounds, such as the turtles in the sequel that serve as a springboard and that meow each time you bounce of them.
  • Numerous, numerous enemies in the Parasite Eve series are weird even by JRPG standards. Mostly, in the first game they largely consisted of at least semi-recognizable mutated versions of animals (with exceptions, such as the composite body-part centaur-like creatures in the Hospital) but the sequel took this to new lengths with the ANMC's. Most of those are very animal-like, but with human-like faces and features and studded with visible cybernetic implants. Others, such as Stalkers and Scavengers, one can only guess at the origins. It turns out they were all once human. Including the Stalkers and Scavengers. The 3rd Birthday took that step across the line right into Eldritch Abomination territory with enemies which can only be described as impossible.
  • The final boss of Persona 2: Innocent Sin. It is literally a tentacle monster made from the fathers of the protagonists in bondage gear.
    • The final boss of Eternal Punishment is obviously Lovecraftian with a crapton.
    • On the subject of Persona... the true forms of the shadows in Persona 4. Other than Naoto... FREAKY.
  • Most of the lifeforms in Pikmin are basically this, but the ones that take the cake are a lumpy stone-like thing with what appear to be tribal tattoos that loves flowers for decorative purposesnote , a goldfish on two legs with a natural glass windshield that shoots mortar roundsnote , a spider merged with a machine that shoots with a machine-gun when agitated enoughnote , a three-legged clump of marshy soil with a fruit for a head and two vines that serve as eyestalksnote , and what could be described as a "hominid" made out of water that rolls around on stone rollers and is implied to be an Eldritch Abominationnote .
  • Even — or especially — big fans of the games will admit that PokĂ©mon has a few of these.
    • Shuckle is a barnacle/mold/turtle thing. It lives in the mountains and feed by allowing fruit to ferment in its shell.
    • Sableye, a weird little gremlin ghost that lives underground and... eats rocks. Because its eyes are made of diamonds and it wishes them to remain so.
    • Deoxys. It has tentacles and it shapeshifts. And is a space virus mutated by cosmic rays. And its four original forms (Defense, Normal, Attack, Speed) anagram to DNAS.
    • Eelektross, an oversized navy-blue electric lamprey... thing. That floats over land.
    • Claydol is a floating black statue thing with eight pink eyes and cannons for hands. It also has psychic powers, for some odd reason.
    • There's also a walking palm tree with multiple psychic heads note , a haunted cicada exoskeleton note , explosive balloon-like smog creatures which fuse together note , giant magnetic moai heads note  and a large blue monster fused with a pipe organnote .
    • And with the Generation V PokĂ©mon, it just gets even weirder. Like the "ice cream cone" that's actually a sentient rod of ice with a face covered in frostnote , the embryo PokĂ©monnote  and a giant floating snowflakenote . Also, have fun guessing whatever Sigilyph is supposed to be.note 
    • Then comes Generation VI, which includes such oddities as Cthulu-esque bioluminescent squids with the power of reversing thingsnote  and a humanoid collection of barnaclesnote .
    • Even the legendaries get bizarre sometimes. There's a psychic cat fetus note , a giant shape-shifting ghost-dragon-centipede thingnote , a floating psychic moon swannote  and a giant, armless centaur with a golden wheel attached to its torso (which is also God)note .
    • It says a lot about the world of PokĂ©mon that this franchise has a pure fighting game with a playable chandeliernote .
    • PokĂ©mon Sun and Moon introduces a couple. Sandygast and Palossand are carnivorous, mind-controlling sandcastles, and Dhelmise is a haunted mass of seaweed using an anchor and ship's wheel as weapons.
    • Sun and Moon also introduced the Ultra Beasts, who are Starfish Aliens. Standouts include Nihilego, a parasitic glass jellyfish whose poison controls and strengthens its host; Xurkitree, a vaguely humanoid collection of power cables that function as limbs and has a spark-ball for a head, which makes it look like a tree; and Celesteela, a gigantic, flying metal thing that looks like a long-necked priestess with what seem to be detached, floating pillars for arms that inexplicably uses a lot of Grass-type moves.
    • PokĂ©mon Sword and Shield introduces a Dragon-type apple Pokemonnote  that can evolve into either a cross between a tortoise and a pienote  or a winged creature whose wings are apple skinnote , a walking stone archwaynote , a penguin with a breakable and reformable ice cube for a headnote , a metallic dragon that's shaped like a miniature skyscrapernote , the ghosts of coral bleached by climate changenote , ghosts made of tea that live in teacups and potsnote , four fossil-revived PokĂ©mon who each look like the result of swapping one creature's head onto another's bodynote  and a ghostly catapult dragon that fires its own pre-evolution as projectilesnote .
    • PokĂ©mon Scarlet and Violet introduces dogs made out of breadnote , garden eels that are convergent evolutions of mole Pokemonnote , a rock salt mushroom that develops a blocky body as it evolvesnote , anthropomorphic chili peppersnote , possessed tumbleweedsnote , creatures that look like floating combustion enginesnote , walking mushrooms that are convergent evolutions of jellyfish Pokemonnote , poisonous crystal flowersnote , a fish that mutilates itself to swim fasternote , and tiny dragons that look like sushinote .
    • Scarlet and Violet also introduces Paradox Pokemon, Pokemon from the distant past or future (depending on the version), but some are rather bizarre compared to their contemporary counterparts. From the past, we have a giant flightless moth with a reptilian tailnote , a prehistoric robot with giant horseshoe magnets for legsnote  and a floating head with wing-like hair that's said to be a pterosaurnote . While most of the future Paradox Pokemon aren't as bizarre as the ancient ones (mostly being robotic versions of contemporary species), we have a robotic elephant with a detached body-encompassing wheel for a trunk note , a toy-like penguin robot with a cryogenic fluid container tethered to it and a detachable headnote  and a robotic sumo wrestler with floating hands that is said to be a cyborg human athletenote .
    • And that's not even getting into the countless Fakemon thought up by fans essentially on a daily basis.
  • Prayer of the Faithless: The Caged Heart enemy looks like a Animate Body Parts human heart in a cage, but then the cage has crab claws and what looks like hands on tentacles for legs.
  • Puyo Puyo gives us such beings as a flamboyantly gay skeleton, a fish with human arms and legs who is obsessed with dancing, a harpy with a dismal singing voice, an oni that has an onion for a head and can only say "Onion", and an acorn-frog. And that's just some of the bizarre monsters you'll find.
  • Rayman. One of the earlier monsters you meet is a tall yellow blob with lips, that spits out other monsters.
  • Many early Resident Evil monsters were necessarily unusual, but they at least looked like products of genetic engineering or bizarre medical experiments. Lately, though, it seems like the design team has just been phoning it in. Sergei Vladimir in The Umbrella Chronicles is probably the most relevant example.
    • Resident Evil 6 has the J'avo, standard mook enemies whose gimmick is that they are capable of random mutations based on where they are damaged, and some of these can get truly wild. Blow off a J'avo's legs, and their lower body may suddenly burst into a pair of long, cricket-like legs and an insectoid abdomen that allows them to jump high in the air. Or a pair of moth-like wings that fly into the air, leaving the human upper body to dangle underneath, firing its machine gun at you while upside down. Other mutations can range from stretchy arms with bear trap-like claws to multiple cicada-like heads sprouting from their necks to becoming a bloated mass of flesh on human legs that violently explodes when the player gets too close.
  • Scarlet Nexus: All the "Others" are designed based on surrealist art to evoke alieneness, sadness, and beauty, reflecting that they feed on human brains, as well as that others are all animals or humans transformed by alien particles. It helps make the enemies hard to predict, compared to many japanese roleplaying games which just recycle the same basic enemy designs.
  • Shadow Hearts loves these. The most notable are the Police Dog and Mailman, dogs with human arms coming out of their faces (which they balance on). Then there are the ones that, in any sane world, would be arrested for sexual predation...
  • A proud tradition of the Shin Megami Tensei meta-series, thanks to the fertile (and twisted) imagination of artist Kazuma Kaneko. The fact that all the monsters are drawn from real-world mythologies — which, as you can see above, have thought up plenty of truly bizarre creatures — helps too, but Kaneko manages to make even mundane-sounding deities weird and creepy.
  • Slay the Spire has mostly stock enemies with interesting takes such as the cultists with crow masks. But in Act 3, you can some pretty weird ones such as a shadowy thing that can do tremendous damage but gets weaker if you damage it and a gang of odd geometric shapes that always includes a spiky shelled creature. Also one of the most powerful creatures in the game is an Act 3 boss that's just a tasty, giant donut with some limbs.
  • Silent Hill monster Pyramid Head. Even if he isn't as weird as others, Freud would probably like to have a word with him...
    • All of the monsters from the series fit this trope, except for the very traditional looking demon at the end of Silent Hill: Origins. There are, among other things that are all horrific, monsters wearing straitjackets made of their own skin, a woman in a cage with her mouth locked in a perpetual scream, and a nine foot tall doll with porcelain armor and soft, bloody insides. None of these fit normal monster categories very well, but they are all absolutely freaking disturbing, and all of them are out to kill you.
    • In general, abominations made from the twisted psyches of highly disturbed individuals (e.g. Alessa, James, Claudia, Walter) will result in this trope.
  • Spore has this as one of its main selling points. It comes with a very detailed creature creator (with even more parts added through DLC) that you could use to give life to whatever unnatural abominations are floating around in your head. Your creatures could then go on to populate the game worlds of other players, and theirs in yours.
  • Super Mario Bros. has a few. Okay, the sun's trying to kill you, but some pretty weird other examples exist in the RPGs. Giant wedding cake of doom? Giant cloud thing of doom? Monster made of SODA? A few other possible examples:
    • Count Down, the killer robot clock.
    • Junker, which is a robot made from rubbish bins.
    • Sea Pipe Statue, which is a killer water fountain (mechanized by Fawful, an evil genius bean man).
    • Earthwake, a Humongous Combining Mecha made of buildings.
    • Bogmire from Luigi's Mansion, a mix between a Blob Monster and a Living Shadow that's made of fear.
    • Six Face Sal from Yoshi's Island DS. A killer... wheel?
    • The Smorg, a borderline-Eldritch Abomination made up of buzzing balls of black lint.
    • The X-Nauts in the second game also engineered the Yux family, floating X-shaped monsters with weird faces that shoot rings of energy from their mouths and spawn "Mini-Yuxes" that will form shields around the main body as long as it's there.
    • The Pigarithm from Super Paper Mario is a giant piggy bank that shrinks when it takes damage and starts moving faster.
    • Mount Pajamaja. It's... a sentient, killer volcano. As in, a volcano with hands, feet and a face that decides it wants to run Mario over in return for Mario waking it up. It also manages to jump off another mountain in pursuit of Mario and co.
    • Don't count the regular platformers out. The main villain is a spiky shelled turtle-ox that commands walking mushrooms and sentient missiles with arms, among other things, and regularly uses angry slabs of rock as a castle defense system. And that's not getting into the buck toothed fuzzballs, turtle/mole mechanics, carnivorous polka dot plant monsters, and shambling, permanently smiling cacti that Mario regularly runs into.
    • Super Mario Odyssey introduces a whole new set of weird monsters once you start traveling out: Tropical Wigglers (technicolor accordion caterpillars), Magmatoes (tomato-like monsters that dissolve into hot magma) and Komboos (flat, tri-legged seaweed) are just a few of the oddities.
  • The Gentleman monsters in the Tales Series are featureless humanoids that sometimes wear dress suits (As the name might imply), the hats of various Tales characters or even the hats of characters from other Namco games. Their attacks tend to be no less weird, consisting of things like bowing, running through the air, and swimming across the ground. Despite their weirdness, they're usually very dangerous compared to run of the mill monsters, and some are optional bosses.
  • Many of the Dead Apostle Ancestors from Tsukihime are this, such as the guy who fused himself with 666 beasts, the bird human and the Kaiju from planet Mercury. But the really weird part is that only one is unique in its weirdness (yes, even the alien Kaiju has two counterparts): the Forest of Einnashe, whose true form is that of a forest with vampiric tendencies that was born when the Dead Apostle Ancestor named Einnashe was killed in the forest but its killer botched the disposal of the body, leading to it corrupting the entire forest.
  • Undertale takes place in the Kingdom of Monsters, and while there are several traditional monsters like living skeletons and Mike Wazowski-like creatures, and many others that are literally just furries, there's also an impressive assortment of creative ones as well:
    • Froggit, which appears to be just a rather large white frog until you realize its true eyes might be on its underbelly
    • Snowdrake, some type of bird-reptile with a snowflake-shaped pattern on its head and teeth that shift sideways like a chainsaw blade
    • Gyftrot, a deer-like creature with small pine trees growing out of its antlers and a disturbing sideways mouth
    • Woshua, which appears to be a living wringer-washer with raptor-like legs and a round head
    • Vulkin, a small, four-legged volcano who mistakenly thinks its lava can heal you
    • Knight Knight, who seems humanoid until you notice that her face is on her torso... except the opening on what looked like a helmet also seems to be a jack-o-lantern style mouth that opens and closes... and there seems to be a third eye inside the other mouth... OK moving on
    • Glyde, a whale-tadpole thing with very long fins and something that looks like a scorpion's stinger on the end of its tail
    • Some of the unnamed monsters in the overworld. Examples include a large mouth with razor-sharp teeth in Grillby’s, and the MTT Resort receptionist whose head is a hand.
    • And that's without even getting into the Eldritch Abomination that Flowey turns into or the Amalgamations that Alphys's test subjects melted together into...
  • All of the monsters in The Void probably qualify.
  • The Void Rains Upon Her Heart has a lot of strange monster designs, some of which are otherworldly to the point of not even looking like creatures:
    • Shambles are Reality Warpers who feel themselves as multiple beings, which is why they constantly refer to themselves as "we". Their designs include a brown ball with toothy holes in it, two linked spheres surrounded by eyeballs and a white sphere with a bird-shaped hole from which paint runs out.
    • Guardians include an eyeball with bat wings, and a worm-like thing with one eye in one end, and a giant saw in the other.
    • The Eyeric Glyphs look like the glyphs (symbols/words) used in the game's alien language, and are frequently surrounded by wings in odd shapes and formations. They have powers relating to the symbol they resemble, and (in-universe) they were created after the language itself.
    • Most Glass Flora look like flowers, except that they have an eyeball in the centre (which is used to absorb nutrients), and that removing a piece of them will make it turn into glass. There's also Pearl. She has a humanoid upper body, but with leaves replacing hands and hair. Her lower body is a stem with an eyeball flower at the end.
    • Veyerals are black spheres with only a single red eye breaking up the colour.
    • The Void looks like a big black blob of nothingness floating in front of a giant wall of nothingness. Totaria is similar, but more prone to manipulating the walls of nothingness.
    • The newborn monsters all have weird designs: Shamra looks like a four-pointed star surrounded by small black circles, Default consists of four squares that can project other monster forms, Echo looks like a small circle with heart-shaped petals moving around her, Oudenai looks like the symbol for "new" and Forma looks like The Void.
    • Weird monsters among other categories include Anomaly (looks like just a heart, and not even a heart of the in-universe species), Nova (a rainbow-coloured sphere with one eye), Unity (a winged gray collection of motes with six coloured dots on her face), Trinity (white worm-like things with gem shapes on their body segments and big red spots in both ends), and both Polyps (spiky black balls with a red/green symbol on them).
  • In VVVVVV, we have random numbers, buses, glitched-out blocks, lies, and other such enemies. Apparently, all these ideas came from a dream journal the developer kept, which makes them all the weirder.
  • Yume Nikki. Justified (as far as this can be justified) in that it's a dream, so of course it's weird. Examples include Tokuto-kun, an upside down obelisk with arms, legs and a face that is leaking red liquid from the top of its, um, head? And O-Man, which appears to be a θ with pink legs and purple shoes.

    Web Comics 

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Aaahh!!! Real Monsters had plenty of these. For the main Power Trio alone, you had:
    • A small, red, long-eared Ugly Cute Killer Rabbit who could balloon to horrifying heights as a sort of One-Winged Angel mode.
    • A squat, hairy Cephalothorax with blue lips and free-rolling eyes he normally carried in his hands who scared people with his overwhelming stench.
    • A black and white candy cane with spindly limbs, slit-pupil eyes on eyestalks and big, bloated lips whose primary method of scaring humans was ripping out her guts and showing them to her victims.
    • The series also revolved around how these three were students learning how to scare humans as part of finding their place in monster society.
  • Adventure Time is full of monsters that would not be out of place in the furthest corners of a Dungeons & Dragons monster manual. Examples include a Wall of Flesh, a Snake-Armed Ruby Brainbeast, a Crystal Guardian that copies your every action, and an unnamed monster that appears to be 2/3 giant heart and 1/3 electrified skeleton.
  • The old Bugs Bunny cartoon with Gossamer, the monster that looks like a giant furry red tooth. That wore tennis shoes!
  • Extreme Ghostbusters following the example of its predecessor series The Real Ghostbusters, some of the weirdest include; Cenobite-like demons that modify humans, living furniture, a monster with eyes in the tongue, and son on...
  • Gravity Falls:
    • The normal monsters get pretty out-there. Alongside zombies and gnomes, you have things like Multi-bear, a bear made of heads, the Gremloblin, a creature that looks like neither a goblin nor a gremlin and inflicts your deepest fear when you look into its eyes, or the Leprechorn, a unicorn with the head of a leprechaun.
    • Some of the monsters that show up in "Weirdmageddon" are as strange as it gets, including the giant, man-eating, disembodied head of Louis C.K. with a single beefy arm growing out of its forehead, a disembodied pair of teeth, and a knuckle-walking loaf of bread.
  • Men in Black: The Series did with aliens what The Real Ghostbusters did with ghosts. Every episode shows Starfish Aliens each as much surreal as the one before.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic loves this trope. While a good deal of the fantastic creatures in the show are from real-life myths, the creators enjoy coming up with their own wacky beasts too. The Parasprites, the Timberwolves, the Ursas (which are living constellations), the Cragadiles, and the show's version of changelings are all pretty strange.
    • The Expanded Universe is introducing even more bizarre beings and it seems that their creatures are getting weirder and weirder as new seasons show up. However, it is up to the fans to believe or not if the expanded material is canon.
  • The Disgustoids from Secret Mountain Fort Awesome: A purple monster wearing nothing but underwear, a monster made of nothing but butt cheeks, a hairy one with a huge nose, a giant pus ball and blue dog-ish monster.
  • The Secret Saturdays: The Rakshasa, a giant, purple feline-like cryptid that is able to copy its head and arms on its back to fend off enemies that try to get on top of it. And then there's Eterno, a thousand-year-old living mummy whose body is now composed of the salt he was preserved in. He can encase people in this substance by touching them.
  • Steven Universe delights in showing us strange and fantastical monsters, from giant eyeballs, to sentient buildings, to gems that cause clothing to come to life. The gem fusions can also tip over into freaky territory, such as Alexandrite (six arms, a second mouth in her jaw), Malachite (four arms that act as legs) and Fluorite (a caterpillar-like body with the head of an old woman). The artificial fusions that start appearing in season 2 are especially horrifying, being assemblages of various body parts stuck together seemingly at random.
  • Ugly Americans is this taken to an extreme extent, where weird miscellaneous creatures outnumber the "normal" monsters.

    Other Media 
  • Wayne Barlowe is an artist who specializes in drawing the weirdest monsters possible.
  • Cyriak has many weird monsters as well. He animated the 'retarded running horse' above.
  • The Future Is Wild, as a demonstration of a possible future world, starts getting progressively bizarre as time goes on.
    • 5 million years in the future, nothing too strange has come up yet, although there are the Spinks, birds that look and act like prairie dogs with spade-like front feet, and the Gannetwhales, which are walrus-like seabirds.
    • Then 100 million years into the future, things start getting strange. The Ocean Glider looks like a giant floating red-and-transparent raft with small sails that is home to groups of defending sea spiders, and the Reefgliders are bulbous creatures with frilly tails. The Lurkfish is a swamp-dwelling electric anglerfish.
    • 200 million years on, and things just start going crazy. The series' Mascot Mook, Flish, are bird-like fish with telescopic jaws. Slickribbons are underground lake-dwellers that are basically giant worms with huge, folding-out jaws. Desert Hoppers are rabbit-sized snails that hop around on one foot. And then there are the squid monkeys and elephant squid, as well as predatory slime mold.


 
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Unitang

Already an unusual member of Yapool's creations by virtue of her strange appearance and her formation (consisting of ten separate disguises that all combine to form her), perhaps Unitang's most versatile power is her ability to spontaneously reform after being dismembered in a matter of minutes. Once she's back on her feet, Unitang wastes no time in using her webbing to wreak havoc in a nearby city.

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