Lamprey Mouth

Score one for Body Horror.

We've all seen a lamprey mouth before: a ring- or funnel-shaped mouth with many sharp, inward-pointing teeth. Rather than being embedded in horizontal (or vertical) jaws, teeth completely encircle the oral cavity. Extreme examples may occur in conjunction with Flower Mouth. In fiction, this feature is often a trait of monstrous characters, and may offer a convenient visual shorthand implying that a creature is a parasite of some kind. In both, it's almost always used in the form of Body Horror, whether intentional or not.

On film, it's often a makeup technique used to make Humanoid Aliens of the Rubber Forehead variety appear more alien by suggesting Bizarre Alien Biology through its outward appearance. Such an orifice could also appear on a radically non-humanoid creature. Common in horror, where it may convey Eldritch Abomination implications.

A common feature of Sand Worms or an Antlion Monster, and an occasional Cthulhumanoid may sport one. Does not cover insect-like mandibles.

Often overlaps with More Teeth than the Osmond Family. Sub-Trope to Monster Mouth.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Bleach, Aaroniero Arrururie's Zanpakuto looks like a mutant sea anemone with such a mouth. When he goes One-Winged Angel, we can see that his gigantic octopus-like lower body has a gargantuan lamprey mouth complete with rows of teeth in the middle of his body.
• The Angel Sandalphon from Neon Genesis Evangelion, being essentially a monstrous version of an Anomalocaris, has this kind of mouth.
• Oddman 11: Seigi is a Humanoid Abomination who looks like a middle school-aged girl but can turn into a monstrous form for attacking people. At one point she's depicted with a lamprey-like maw that takes up most of her face.
• Shalltear's true form in Overlord (2012) has a mouth like this with a single row of sharp fangs and a long protruding tongue. One bandit even calls her a lamprey.
• A pretty common type of maw for the monstrous shapeshifters of Parasyte to bite peoples' heads off with.

Comic Books

• In the MonsterVerse graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, the Swamp Locust's mouth is just a fang-studded giant ringlet with more sharp teeth inside the maw, including phosphate incisors.
• The Superman villain Parasite has a mouth like this in some depictions.
• The Sandlings in White Sand have round mouth full of several rings of inwards-pointing teeth.
• Wonder Woman (1987): The scavenger worms on Hope's End, which are designed as a shout out to the Sarlacc, have round mouths ringed with rows of sharp teeth and a set of fourteen crab-like arms each ending in a single claw reaching out to grasp at food from just behind their "lips".

Comic Strips

• Dilbert has at least two examples. First there is a coworker named Floyd Remora who attaches himself to Dilbert's back and feeds off his success. On another occasion, the Pointy-Haired Boss briefly hires a sycophant with a deformed lamprey-like mouth.

Fan Works

• Nine Days Down: While crossing the Fields of Asphodel, Twilight and Bait are attacked by a pack of creatures resembling raptors with eyeless, circular rings of razor teeth for heads.

Films — Animated

• In How to Train Your Dragon and the TV spinoff, the Whispering Death is a breed of dragon with this kind of mouth. As a Boulder-class dragon, capable of feeding on rocks and soil, it uses this mouth to literally eat its way through the ground like a mining drill, complete with the rows of teeth inside spinning like drill bits in different directions.
• The underwater monster guarding the Armor Impenetrable in Kubo and the Two Strings has an absolutely huge one.

Films — Live-Action

• 10 Cloverfield Lane: The aliens revealed at the very end of the film are, or just use for hunting, large, scaly dog-like creatures with these instead of heads.
• The Reapers from Blade II double up on this trope, having one set of lamprey mouth teeth on their tongues and another set surrounding them.
• In The Cabin in the Woods, the Ballerina Dentata/Sugar Plum Fairy's entire face is one of these (currently the page image).
• Coneheads: Beldar is revealed as having this during a dental exam.
• Deep Rising: The monster, a giant mutant cephalopod, has a main mouth that is just a giant opening littered with numerous backwards-facing teeth.
• In the film adaptation of Dreamcatcher, the worm-creatures' mouths resemble a lamprey's that's been folded Vagina Dentata-style, as do the controlling aliens' entire upper bodies.
• The sand worms in both 1984's Dune and Dune: Part One-Dune: Part Two are depicted this way. The 1984 one has pedipalps parting to reveal a ring-shaped, saw-toothed maw, and that example has influenced most of the following sand worm designs. The latter removed the pedipalps, because the director, Denis Villeneuve, wanted symbolism that "when you look into a worm's mouth, it looks like an eye. It has this feeling of the presence of a god.".
• A couple of creatures from Evolution (2001) (a carnivorous "tree" and a large green bug) have mouths like this.
• Apophis in Gods of Egypt has a truly gargantuan one.
• The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: The were-worms have five fleshy tooth-tipped protrusions in a ring around an inner circle of teeth.

• The Carnictus worms from King Kong (2005) that eat the cook have mouths like this.

• In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the Kraken has a mouth like this, with a full ring of multi-jointed pedipalps surrounding it.
• In Predator films, the alien hunters have the pedipalps, although the mouth beneath them isn't actually ring-shaped.
• A many-limbed critter screams straight into the camera with one of these in Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.
• Star Trek (2009): The creature Kirk runs away from on the icy world he's marooned on would probably qualify.
• Star Wars
  • The Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi has the look, particularly in the original edition before extra tentacles and a maw were added in digitally.
  • The Mynocks in The Empire Strikes Back use these to attach to ships.
  • The Force Awakens continues the tradition of using this trope, in this case for the rathtars.
  • As a circle lined with several thin triangles on the inside, the First Order's logo resembles a lamprey mouth. This is fitting for how aggressive and murderous they are.
• The "Driller" from Transformers: Dark of the Moon has a lamprey-like mouth on its main body and several of its appendages.

Literature

• Bas-Lag Cycle:
  • In The Scar, the magical statuette used by Silas Fennec has a lamprey mouth.
  • In Iron Council, the many-armed creature that menaces Hiddentown has a lamprey mouth on the end of each tentacle.
• Chaugnar Faughn, one of Frank Belknap Long's contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, has an elephant's trunk that ends in one of these.
• Deeplight: Post-transformation Jelt's secondary mouth is conical, lined with many rows of teeth, and lunges out to grab prey.
• Deltora Quest has flesh-eating plants known as Grippers. From above, they appear to be small ferns, or clumps of grass. However, buried underground, they have a huge, funnel-like mouth, with rows of sharp teeth. When unsuspecting prey walk over the top of them, the ground parts as they open their mouths, and the prey falls in to be eaten.
• Sandworms from the Dune series have massive ones, arranged in three large "jaws" that can open wide to swallow entire Spice Harvesters. Pieces of their teeth are used as blades by the Fremen, who call them crysknives.
• One species of needle monsters in Eden Green has a long neck ending in a lamprey mouth, which they use to pick up and shred humans.

• Garrett, P.I.: In Petty Pewter Gods, one of the trio of double-ugly thugs in the Godoroth pantheon has a mouth like this.
• Round mouths are the norm for animal life on Longtunnel, a cave-dominated world from Humanx Commonwealth. Naturally, this means that most of its predators have a Lamprey Mouth, although spore-feeders and some insectivores avert this by having no teeth.
• The Lord of the Isles features one of these at one point. It's sported by a magical creation made entirely of wood.
• The Chtorran worms in The War Against the Chtorr. Their teeth encircle their mouth, curving inwards to draw the prey into their body. Once they've taken a bite, they can't stop or they'll choke to death.

Live-Action TV

• The "Bathing Beauty" teaser for American Horror Story: Roanoke features a woman looking into a bathtub, only for her head to turn around and reveal this in place of her face.
• Blake's 7: The worm-like giant predatory creatures on Terminal which Vila referred to figuratively as "snakes" had mouths like this.

• The giant pre-Cambrian worms from Primeval have this sort of mouth, most apparent when one's head is pinned under a photocopier's plate and a bunch of copies of its maw are printed out.
• Star Trek:
  • The Salt Vampire◊ in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Man Trap" has one of these.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation and other modern Trek series have the Nausicaans, who have appeared in every series except the original series and were inspired by Predator. Their mouth-structures are a slightly more humanoid version of this trope.
  • The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Nemesis" features an example very similar-looking to the above, but even more pronounced, in the Kradin.
• In Stranger Things, the mouth of a Demogorgon has both an inner tooth-ringed gullet and five encircling petal-like flaps lined with teeth that can close over it. The Demogods also have this.
• Supernatural: In "The Kids are Alright", the Changelings, creatures who impersonate stolen children and feed on the human mother's blood at night, have this kind of mouth in their true form for feeding.
• The Wheel of Time (2021) portrays the Myrddraal with oversized mouths that are lined inside with multiple rows of inward-hooked teeth. In the books, they have stark white skin and no eyes, but otherwise look human.
• The X-Files: Flukeman from "The Host" has a lamprey mouth that incorporates features of a tapeworm's scolex. Ironically, flukes are in the class Trematoda and don't have a scolex (they hang on to their host with one or two muscular suckers). Scully identified the parasite she found inside the Russian sailor as a "Turbellaria"... which is, in fact, a flatworm, but they don't have a scolex either! The only flatworms that have a scolex are tapeworms, which are in the class Cestoda. As Phil Farrand (author of The Nitpicker's Guide for X-Philes) might point out, "Tapeman" doesn't sound nearly as cool as "Flukeman". This was hardly the only fluke in this episode, but The Nitpicker's Guide is a more appropriate place for those.

Pinball

• The "Darkside" table of Balls of Steel includes a squat red alien with a Lamprey Mouth and More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
• The Leapers in Scared Stiff have these, most visibly when they Eat the Camera.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Older editions depict the purple worm with this sort of mouth, although later ones shift to a more typical pair of hinged jaws.
  • The otyugh is a monster with a mouth on its torso, and some depictions give it this type of mouth.
  • The thessalhydra is a very strange critter with a gaping Lamprey Mouth surrounded by a bunch of conventional hydra heads. Its clamp-like tail picks up victims and stuffs them into the former.
  • Kopru had mouths like this in their original illustration from the adventure X1: Isle of Dread.
  • Mind flayers, also known as illithids, sport a circular mouth of this sort, although it's usually hidden by their facial tentacles.
• Rogue Trader: Sand tigers are sand-dwelling predators with circular, jawless mouths lined with backward-pointing fangs.
• Shadowrun's rockworm, an Awakened concrete-eating giant earthworm, is depicted with this sort of mouth.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • Sea Squids, but Depending on the Artist, they may be shown with "regular" mouths.
  • The Visorak (again, depending on the artist), whose teeth come in the form of overlapping circular saws.
• The action figure of Mantenna from Masters of the Universe. The original toy has a lamprey mouth, although for the cartoons, Mantenna was given a watered-down, more goofy and less menacing look.

Video Games

• Awesomenauts has the Entins, who, despite otherwise being space caterpillars, sport these mouths. It also features more traditional Sand Worms on planet Sorona.
• Brütal Legend has the Lamprey boss, though the mouth is shaped more like a vagina.
• Dead Lander α and the Devourer from Bug Fables can be found sporting lamprey-like mouths.
• Promos for Defiance feature a giant monster with a lamprey mouth on the top of its body.
• Deepstalkers from Dragon Age: Origins are small, poison-spitting dinosaurs that utilize this trope.

• The Great Serpent of Ronka, from Final Fantasy XIV, is a tiny little Tsuchinoko, and therefore has one of these. It's never seen eating, just wriggling and screeing adorably.
• The Japanese horror game Gloomy Room features a monster with (among other surreal biological deviations) one of these in the bathroom at the beginning of the game. It only appears if the player takes too long to complete the puzzle to escape the room, in a scene that plays along beautifully with Mirror Scare. The monster in question? A stock Unity asset.

• The Pols Voice from The Legend of Zelda were already plenty creepy enough for their sheer "otherness", being a limbless, bloblike creature with a few recognizably lagomorphic features like long ears and whiskers. Their 3-D appearance in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass ups the creepiness by revealing that their entire underside consists of a huge mouth filled with sharp, concentric teeth.
• The squid from Minecraft has one of these. It's much toothier than would be realistically expected, although the squid itself is completely harmless.
• Monster Hunter:
  • Monster Hunter (2004): Khezu is an eyeless, pale-skinned Flying Wyvern with a large lamprey mouth which can reach great lengths when the neck stretches. Its drool can weaken hunters' defenses, and when attached to the ground it can unleash a strong electrical discharge. This also applies to its red-colored subspecies, which made its debut in the game's Updated Re-release.
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri): Gigginox is an eyeless, pale-skinned Flying Wyvern similar to Khezu, albeit a bit more slender and while having a slightly smaller lamprey mouth. Instead of unleashing electricity, its mouth can spew puddles of poison from its mouth. Unlike Khezu, it also has a lamprey anus, from which it can expel eggs sacs from which smaller Giggi come out. The subspecies Baleful Gigginox, which debuted in Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, also fits the trope, though it attacks with electricity similar to Khezu.
• The Pokémon evolution line Tynamo, Eelektrik and Eelektross. While Tynamo looks like a leech, its evolutions Eelektrik and Eelektross resemble lampreys and they mainly attack by discharging electricity while attaching to their victim with their lamprey mouth.
• A couple in the Resident Evil games:
  • The final mutation of "G" (formerly William Birkin) in Resident Evil 2.
  • The Grave Digger, a huge, mutated worm from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, has a mouth like this, along with four giant teeth jutting out along the edges of its maw.
  • The Ooze from Resident Evil: Revelations.
  • The Rasklapanje from Resident Evil 6. Not only does it feed by biting onto a person's face and sucking blood, but it also gives them a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong in the process.
• The Sapling added these as part of the Food & Fire Update's diet overhaul. They specialize in drinking blood, though they're also capable of feeding on live prey if it's small enough.
• Spore has the "Leeyotch", "Gnathognasher" and "Saginaughty" mouth parts which vaguely resemble the mouths of lampreys and other animals with radial, jawless mouths.
• The Crawlers from Sundered have gaping ring-shaped mouths full of sharp white teeth in their center of mass. This mouth is normally concealed under the Crawler’s robes and tentacles, but becomes visible whenever it lunges at the player character.
• Wildcat Gun Machine have the purple slug-creature monsters having this mouth design, as does their boss, Sluggoth.

Visual Novels

• Under her ratty long hair, it's revealed that the Urashima Woman from Spirit Hunter: NG has a giant lamprey-like mouth, with multiple sets of teeth beneath the first circle of them. This emphasizes her connection to the lake and her death by drowning.

Webcomics

• Sleepless Domain: In Chapter 13, Rue encounters a a worm-like monster whose "face" appears to be an outer shell with six eyes and a set of large mandibles. She promptly throws some of her explosive potions at it, only to discover that it not only survived, but that the explosion destroyed its shell to reveal a gaping maw with a ring of sharp teeth underneath. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the back half of the monster had split off from the rest of its body and had a ringed mouth of its own.

Western Animation

• In The ChubbChubbs!, the eponymous chubb-chubbs have these. They also rotate like sawblades.
• Futurama:
  • In the movie "Bender's Game", the Tunneling Horror has a lamprey mouth in which concentric rings of teeth rotate in opposite directions.
  • Leela's father, a mutant, has a normal-shaped mouth but teeth arranged in a ring.
  • The shape-shifting predator from "Murder on the Planet Express" gobbles its victims whole with an extensible example of this trope.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In the episode "The Headsucker's Moxy", the girls fight "the Robbing Leech" (a pun on Robin Leach) who uses his lamprey mouth to suck knowledge from peoples' brains in order to steal things. He's defeated after he tries this on The Mayor of Townsville, whose brain is a more perfect vacuum than the Leech's.
• Scraplets from Transformers: Prime, essentially metal-eating flying piranhas. They look cute until they see metal, then they open their mouths and reveal rings upon rings of churning, mechanical teeth.

Real Life

• Found in lampreys, obviously.
  • Also in some extinct fish taxa, before jaws evolved and proved to be more efficient for most feeding strategies.
• Subverted by the tapeworm's scolex, which only looks like a mouth, and functions, instead, more like an anchor.
• Velvet Worms have teeth arranged in this format.
• Leeches have a watered-down version of these. Still good enough for blood-sucking, though.
• Sea urchins have teeth arranged in a ring on their undersides, although they're blunt grinding teeth rather than pointed.
• The cookie-cutter shark, while it has actual jaws, shifts them into a position resembling this in order to bite perfectly round chunks of flesh from its prey.
• Anomalocaris, largest predator of the Burgess Shale fauna, had a tough constricting ring for a mouth, lined with bony prongs. It and its relatives are classified as Order Radiodonta, meaning "encircling-toothed".
• Leatherback sea turtle's mouth has teeth over all the buccal wall.

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