Jar of the Bizarre

"Ah, Eye see you're interested in our Jar of 1,000 Eyes!"

"I've got a jar of dirt! I've got a jar of dirt! And guess what's inside it!"

— Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

In the lairs, studies, and hideaways of unusual folks, one can find dozens of mason jars, bottles, and glass containers filled with oddities and unusual things, many of them preserved in alcohol, formaldehyde, brine and other chemicals for study.

Cluttered shelves holding rows of bottled curios and failed experiments are ubiquitous in wizards' workshops and Mad Scientist Laboratories. Canned and pickled oddities of various sorts will also make up a good portion of the wares of The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday and the Bazaar of the Bizarre.

The exact stuff in these jars can be as varied as the writer's imagination. Weird dead creatures floating in alcohol or brine are some of the most common, alongside bits and pieces of larger beings. Weird live creatures are also fairly common. As a rule, human parts are reserved for the collections of the nastier sort of characters. These display jars are usually just used as Cow Tools, props made to enhance the strangeness of the environment. In other cases, they can be ingredients of use to whatever witch or mad scientist that keeps them in their workspace, or be keepsakes of some specific personal interest to their owner.

Weird things that humans don't understand provoke the two main emotional responses to uncertainty — curiosity in what it is, and fear that it might be dangerous. A glass jar is a barrier that dampens the fear (it can't get to you) but increases the curiosity (you can't get to it), with the added factor that you often can't tell which side the glass is meant to protect. However, someone had to put the thing in the jar, which means that someone knows something about it (and also raises the possibility that it's fake, threatening the imagination with mundanity) and, while a fancy case may suggest that person found it as unique as the viewer, a cheap glass jar suggests a world where such wonders could be found by anyone, and may even be considered completely ordinary. A safe mystery on a thread connected to a larger unknown world is also an excellent hook for audience attention, especially when you have a whole shelf of such mysteries teasing that they'll never get to find out about all of them.

May overlap with Collector of the Strange or, more concerningly, with Creepy Souvenir. Supertrope to Brain in a Jar and People Jars.

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Examples

Advertising

• The Burger King: In a kid's meal commercial for the Danny Phantom toys, a little girl shows her friends her collection of ghosts that she caught. The ghosts are displayed in jars on the shelves of her bedroom closet. One of the girl's friends says that there are no ghosts in the jars until one of them shows his face and frightens the kids.

Anime & Manga

• Panorama of Hell: The unnamed Mad Artist collects deformed fetuses and animal parts preserved in jars full of formaldehyde, among other grotesque stuff.

Art

• "Bottled Creatures" is a series of pictures on DeviantArt by the artist emmalazauski depicting glass jars and bottles containing a variety of fantastical creatures, such as small snake-like dragons, a nightmare, a series of colorful slimes in test tubes, creatures that can turn into smoke and back and a bat that breathes out fumes with strange effects on dreams, each bottle labeled with a small tag bearing the scientific name of its occupant. Warning to those that follow the link that a couple of the creatures are not the most pleasant to see unprepared.

Comic Books

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: One of the many strange things kept at the League's secret base is a dead Cottingley fairy preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.

Film — Animated

• Beauty and the Beast: Played with. The glowing rose floating in a bell jar is one of the first signs of the Beast's Hidden Depths, serving as a symbol of the story's gothic themes and setting. However, while it further attracts Belle's curiosity into the mysteries of the castle, part of its strangeness is its relative normalcy compared to everything she's already seen. (Of course, the audience recognises its significance from the prologue.)
• The Little Mermaid (1989): The sea witch Ursula has a few oddities in glass containers on a shelf in her lair. Some of these become ingredients in her roiling cauldron that transform the mermaid Ariel into a human girl. One or two of these ingredients seem to be live creatures, helplessly watching their demise unfold.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas: During the "Jack's Obsession" song sequence, Jack briefly inspects a small series of jars containing preserved possessions. What are these objects that Jack has preserved for study? Christmas toys and a gingerbread cookie. This can be considered an inversion, as creepy things like body parts or animals would be the norm in a place like Halloween Town, so to have Christmas toys and cookies instead would be appropriate.
• The Princess and the Frog: The voodoo priestess Mama Odie is blind and toothless, and keeps what appear to be her original eyes and teeth inside a jar in her house in the bayou (a boat in the branches of a tree). The eyes can still move and follow Naveen and Tiana when they walk past them.
• Wendell & Wild: Manburge has collected and trapped demons in jars. He puts them on display on the shelves of his laboratory. The demons happen to be Buffalo Belzer's children before Manburge brought them back to him.

Film — Live-Action

• A recurring motif in the films of Guillermo del Toro:
  • Cronos: The villain is a fabulously wealthy old man who, trying to prolong his life as much as possible, routinely has his aged organs swapped out for new ones. He keeps his discarded organs in jars on his shelves.
  • The Devil's Backbone: The kindly Dr. Casares has a collection of "pickled punks": stillborn infants preserved in jars. Owing to prenatal malnutrition, they all possess the titular deformity — an oddly prominent spine bursting through an underdeveloped torso. The doctor is able to make a bit of supplementary income selling the brine from the jars to superstitious locals, who believe it is a cure for impotence.
  • Nightmare Alley (2021): The carnival barker has a collection of pickled punks as well. The star of his collection is a fetus with a gigantic cyclops eye in the middle of its forehead. At the end of the movie, under unclear circumstances, he has sold this one to another carnival barker.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): The Collector's abode is full of display cases and jars containing many impressive items with several that are Mythology Gags to the Marvel comics, including living creatures, such as Howard the Duck.
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action: Area 52 keeps some of its bizarre alien creatures in giant Mason jars with air holes punched in their lids. One of these aliens is Marvin the Martian, who escapes easily once he receives his orders from the Big Bad.
• The Mask of Zorro: Murrieta's head and Jack's hand are found in large, alcohol-filled glass jars.
• The Mummy (2017): In the Prodigium Headquarters, various objects are found in storage, including a preserved jar of a human skull with fangs and a preserved gill-man arm in a cube-case.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Tia Dalma's shack is teeming with strange objects including a jar full of eyeballs that stare back at Ragetti when he looks at them.
• Stardust: A jar full of eyeballs is one of the oddities for sale at the Bazaar of the Bizarre in the film's prologue. When Dunstan pauses to look at them, they return the favour.
• There Will Be Blood: Discussed when Daniel tells Eli that, compared to his more successful twin brother, he is "just the afterbirth" and "should have been kept in a glass jar on the mantle".

Literature

• The BFG: A notable feature of the BFG's cave is the many thousands of glass bottles filling every nook and cranny. These contain the dreams which the BFG collects, although this is not revealed for several chapters after the bottles are first mentioned. Even an enemy giant's curiosity is tickled by the bottles.
  Bloodbottler: You and your pibbling bottles! What is you putting in them?
  BFG: Nothing that would interest you. You is only interested in guzzling human beans.
• Harry Potter: Harry notices that the potions classroom at Hogwarts is full of jars and urns with strange contents:
  "Potions lessons took place down in one of the dungeons. It was colder here than up in the main castle, and would have been quite creepy enough without the pickled animals floating in glass jars all around the walls."

  — Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
• A House With Good Bones: Sam's misgivings about her late grandmother's house spike dramatically when she finds a jar of hundreds of human teeth in the rose garden — not least because of the question of how her grandmother collected them. It turns out to be part of a Protective Charm over the house.
• Igors Lab Of Fear: The plot of A Jar of Eyeballs is kicked off by a question about the titular jar.
• "The Jar", a Ray Bradbury short story, plays this for horror. Charlie, a man in an unhappy marriage, finds a mysterious jar, in which everyone seems to see something different and wondrous. His popularity soars. Then his wife Thedy goes hunting for the secret of what's in the jar (which is considerably underwhelming) and taunts him with her plans to reveal it. He kills her, dumping her body in the swamp and various cut-off identifying pieces in the jar.
• Johannes Cabal: The titular Necromancer stocks his laboratory with specimen jars of human (and inhuman) parts, including those of a fellow necromancer that he'd retrieved from a lynch mob as a professional courtesy. In the finale, those parts vanish from their jars, implying she's come Back from the Dead.
• Lost in the Moment and Found: The Shop Where the Lost Things Go is an Eldritch Location that stocks itself with ever-changing displays of items from across The Multiverse. The protagonist finds several shelves with jars of lost teeth — specifically, from her and everyone else the Shop has drawn in to serve it, as a sort of Shrine to the Fallen.
• Petals on the Wind contains an Ambiguous Situation when Cathy spontaneously begins bleeding heavily from the vagina. It may or may not be a miscarriage. An extremely Unreliable Expositor claims there was a "two-headed embryo with three legs — twins who didn't separate properly." Complicating matters, Paul (Cathy's guardian and also the doctor who oversaw her treatment) apparently does have such an artifact, preserved in a glass jar, leading her to believe that he kept and preserved the malformed fetus. Even if Cathy did have a miscarriage, though, the idea that Paul kept and preserved the embryo seems pretty far-fetched.
  Cathy: She said you kept the embryo, one with two heads. I've seen that thing in your office in a bottle. Paul, how could you keep it? Why didn't you have it buried? [...] There is a bottle in your office with a baby like that inside! I saw it! Paul, how could you? You, of all people, to save something like that!
  Paul: No! That thing was given to me years ago when I was in med school — a joke, really — med students play all sorts of jokes you'd find gruesome.
• The Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal Lecter tips Agent Starling off that a public storage unit may contain something of interest to the hunt for elusive Serial Killer Buffalo Bill. When she searches the unit, she finds a jar containing a severed human head, which turns out to have been one of Bill's very first murders.
• The Strain and its TV adaptation: Abraham Setrakian keeps the still-beating heart of his vampirized wife in a jar because he can't bear to fully destroy her. The villainous Eldritch Palmer, like the bad guy in Cronos, keeps his discarded organs in jars on shelves.
• "The Terrible Old Man" has a somewhat baffling example in the titular old man's house. He keeps jars and bottles containing suspended leaden pendulums that he names and speaks to, and which answer through vibrations. Apparently, he can even invoke some lethal protection from them, as a trio of would-be robbers discover, though we never learn what exactly he does to them.
• The Zombie Survival Guide: Kublai Khan owned a glass jar containing the pickled head of a zombie, which would attempt to bite the fingers of anyone who got too close to it.

Live-Action TV

• CSI: Entomologist Gil Grissom keeps various insect specimens in his office, but among his collection is also an irradiated fetal pig in a jar. When he leaves the Crime Lab, he gifts it to David Hodges, who later returns it to Gil's office (which a few of the other CSIs are sharing by then) and says "This belongs in here."
• Firefly: "The Message" opens in a spaceport with a hawker claiming to have proof of alien life in his exhibit. Gilligan Cut to Simon declaring the jar's contents a cow foetus. Kaylee isn't sure, but Simon points out how it's been mutated with extra limbs, then stored upside down.
• House of Anubis: When Eddie and KT break into the Gatehouse to investigate Denby for the first time, they discover a few creepy jars filled with dead insects and frogs. They're both appropriately freaked out that she owns them, and it's never explained why she has them. It's used to establish early on that Denby is hiding some unsettling secrets behind her Cool Teacher facade.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Phlox's sickbay contains many jars of various substances, which include medicines, samples, and food for his alien pets.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The Infestation Expert is depicted alongside a collection of glass jars holding a variety of living arthropods that she is studying, which she can release to create small Insect creatures. After she turns into a werewolf, these creatures move to living in her fur.
  • Jar of Eyeballs depicts precisely what it says — a tall glass jar stuffed full of eyes.
  • Mass Diminish depicts a wizard in the act of stocking his collection of magically-shrunken megafauna trapped under bell jars.
  • Necromancer's Stockpile depicts a collection of zombies stored in tall glass-and-metal containers filled with fluid, at least one of which has broken loose.
  • The transformed form of Panicked Bystander, Cackling Culprit, keeps a collection of glass jars each holding a cranium, rib, or other bone from a past victim.
  • The Shadows over Innistrad set includes a cycle of artifacts, one for each of the five gameplay colors, that can be sacrificed for a gain and are visually represented as glass jars with strange things inside them, with their flavor texts implying you're breaking the jar to free its contents. Vessel of Ephemera contains a pair of ghosts, Vessel of Paramnesia seems to contain a broken bust and/or a memory spell, Vessel of Malignity contains a Tome of Eldritch Lore, Vessel of Volatility contains a miniature roiling thunderstorm and Vessel of Nascency contains a chest with an eye on its lid.
• Warhammer: Any Clan Moulder laboratory will have many jars containing mutated and still living organs extracted from all manner of creatures that the Master Moulders will use in their tests, most times implanting random body parts in their subjects of experimentation just to see what happens to them — subjects that can be exposed in jars later if the Masters consider the result to be interesting enough.

Video Games

• Bloodborne: Since Yharnam's unique Mad Science focuses on transplanting blood and eyes, nearly every building the player character enters has entire shelves of these... along with other samples that aren't for the faint of heart. ^{Though for the morbidly curious...}  Standouts include mutated organs, mold collected from corpses, eldritch-infused invertebrates and stillborn fetuses. You can even collect some of these harrowing ingredients yourself, as they are required to access the Chalice Dungeons.
• City of Heroes: The decoration options in the base editor for City of Villains include organs in jars, ranging from preserved to rotted.
• Divinity: Original Sin II has two variants that show up in Mad Doctor lairs: Grotesque Jars contain preserved body parts but have no value, while Jars of Mind Maggots can be crafted into powerful mind-control grenades.
  Flavor Text: Is that... oh gods... on second thoughts, best not gaze too long into this particular abyss.
• Fallen London: Souls, a ubiquitous part of the setting's underground commerce, are usually stored in glass jars and bottles, with the spirit visible inside the container as a cloud of colored fluid and a floating human face.
• Kingdom Hearts II: In a flashback, King Mickey pays a visit to Ansem the Wise in his office underneath Radiant Garden's castle, and tubes are seen containing floating stylized hearts behind his chair. Per the series' lore, everyone in the universe has a heart, which means the hearts might belong to subject tests.

Web Animation

• Strong Bad Email: In the cartoon "your funeral", Strong Bad suggests that after he dies, he might want to end up as this trope.
  Well, maybe I'll just preserve myself fetal pig-style in a mason jar filled with the salty tears of all the heartbroken private school girls that will pine-uh for me-uh. That way, there'll be something left to re-animate once the zombie uprising cometh.

Webcomics

• Charby the Vampirate: Mye's shelf of potion ingredients includes jars with a glowing liquid inside and another one full of eyeballs.
• Daughter of the Lilies: Inverted. One of the first signs that the fantasy world is connected to reality somehow is a jar containing a D battery as an ancient relic.
• Girl Genius: Unusual things in flasks appear frequently as background decoration, and given that the few that are released get weaponized, they're probably safer that way. An in-universe Heterodyne Tale ends climactically with the opening of a literal ocean-in-a-bottle, and later advancements in the Other's Hive Engine technology produce a small ominous glass globe full of meat and clockwork that manufactures a prototype slaver wasp capable of infecting a Spark.
• Hemlock: Baba Yaga throws a jar full of eyeballs out the door of her house in a fit of rage.
• Homestuck: Dave collects "weird dead things preserved in various ways", including a fetus in a jar.
• Prague Race: Amongst the many strange items in Sela's little shop that wasn't there yesterday, there is a sealed jar with some kind of dead bird-like thing inside it.

Western Animation

• As Told by Ginger: Carl's most prized possession is his petrified eyeball, which he keeps in a jar in his doghouse.
• Gravity Falls: In the opening, there is a brief shot of Wendy at the cash register, the foreground displaying a glass jar full of eyes (on sale), the various eyes briefly moving to face the viewer.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: Ren collects, among other bizarre things, jars of rare incurable diseases.

Real Life

• The Meguro Parasitological Museum in Tokyo, Japan is a real-life science museum that keeps every parasitic organism mankind has encountered, all preserved and on display.
• Generally speaking, any real-life museum of natural history will have no shortage of specimens preserved this way, whether on display or behind the scenes. The collection at the Natural History Museum in London, UK ranges from tiny insects in glass vials up to a fully-grown giant squid in a specially commissioned tank.

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