Undead Abomination

Spooky Scary Skeletons...

Some zombies are different. So different that the human mind cannot even begin to comprehend what it really is.

The very nature of an Eldritch Abomination defies the natural laws of the universe. Therefore, an undead might count as one if the laws of said universe dictate that being "dead" is considered a fundamental state of existence (for example, souls which "live" in the afterlife are considered "dead", depending on how different the souls in question are). In such contexts, being an undead might be an oxymoronic, abominable state, as it means the entity is "dead" and yet somehow "alive" as well.

Basically, it might as well be the origin for Schrodinger's Cthulhu: if Death is personified as an entity capable of thoughts and actions, then is it part of the living, or of the dead? If a dead being is capable of influencing the world no differently than when they were alive (assuming they ever lived), then what constitutes being "alive" or being "dead" for them?

If it is even possible to kill such entities, then perhaps it is best that you don't, for what would happen if you slay something which could be death itself? Even if it isn't The Grim Reaper, then imagine just how horrible this thing truly is if death itself could not face it directly and win on the first try.

Undead Abominations are often the more common breeds of undead, including ghosts, zombies, skeletons, mummies, vampires, Frankenstein's Monster, even apparition-esque fairies like banshees and dullahan. Undead Abominations are non-euclidian entities which make these Gothic Horror monsters look like inferior, Lovecraft Lite xeroxes in comparison. Liches are also extremely common candidates, especially when they are extremely powerful, difficult to destroy or have few restrictions on their ability to resurrect themselves, and have few or no restrictions on their ability to act on a large scale.

May overlap with Body of Bodies, Flesh Golem, Monster Progenitor and Non-Human Undead. Related to Giant Corpse World and Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Sanzhiyan Five Generals from 3×3 Eyes are five extremely powerful Triclops who gave up their lives and most of their humanity to become, essentially, keepers of the streams of the "Naga", the life energy of the entire planet, and any Triclop who wishes to increase his powers must face their trials. The least mutated one, the Water Tomb General, resembles a mummified, four-armed skeleton merged with the ground able to unleash Mind Rape or corrosive water on whoever tries to undertake his trials, the others have even creepier form (such as a mummy emerging from the shell of a giant warty insect, a tapir-like gargoyle, a humanoid bird monster with sharp teeth and a floating big-brained baby). While they're not overly malevolent, that's only because they're simply devoid of any morals).
• Berserk: Usually, the ghostly spirits haunting Guts are simply accursed undead monsters that possess things and desire flesh. Nearing the end of the Incarnation Ceremony, an innumerable amount of restless spirits have amassed together in an an amorphous mass of acid, blood, flesh, and bones of countless living and dead people, with thousands of souls screaming and howling in agony as the mass devours more innocents like a tsunami of death. It's downright◊ apocalyptic◊.
  • Even worse is that this abomination was entirely a product of humanity collective screwing each other over, as the entirety of Saint Albion is made worse through the vicious purges of Mozgus, the cult of demon worshippers practicing Human Sacrifice, and everyone else in the middle being driven by extremes like fear and distrust and spite towards everyone else. All of this death and suffering and negative emotion gestates and metastasizes, eventually leading to the rebirth of Griffith on the material plane.
• Bleach: Menos-class Hollows are initially described as such, being amalgamations of countless Hollows (human souls corrupted into monsters) driven by nothing more than mindless hunger; capable of ripping apart the fabric of reality to create portals to and from Hueco Mundo. The first time a Gillian appears, Rukia is terrified and states that it's an entity that only a Captain-class Soul Reaper could hope to defeat, and even Ichigo only manages to push it back. Subsequent appearances reduce them to Giant Mooks, with more powerful Menos types like Adjuchas and Vasto Lordes retaining the consciousness of the Hollow with the strongest will.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Every time human transmutation is attempted, the attempt to resurrect the dead ends with a horrible monster somewhere between "only approximately human" and "writhing mass of hideous limbs", and is soulless; the Elric brothers are actually relieved to realise that they didn't bring their mother's soul back in the monster. The undead parallel gets even sharper in the 2003 anime, where the horror gains some of the memories of the person they're based on but are not, eventually taking on human form and becoming a homunculus, and being vulnerable to the person's real body except Wrath, who's made from it. The "abomination" part remains deep down, however, as shown when Dante casually removes Gluttony's ability to reason... and he becomes a mindless, monstrous engine of consumption that devours her.
• Overlord (2012): The titular character, Satoru Sazuki/Momonga, is a rather curious example, as he initially began as a player from a video game titled Yggdrasil, when some unknown force merged him with his avatar (a skeletal lich) and thrust him into the New World. Fortunately for him, his stats came with, and despite lacking muscular tissue, he's easily killed several giant trolls, ogres, and countless other monsters using only swords and maces, and crushed at least one human to death with his bare hands. His magical prowess is even more frightening, as he is completely unrivaled (except by maybe the New World gods) and has access to hundreds of spells and skills that allow him to summon gigantic Eldritch Abominations of his own, summon massive hordes of powerful undead, kill every living and undead thing (except himself of course) within a radius of several miles, and even stop time altogether. Among many other things. The only saving grace for the New Worlders is that he will genuinely go out of his way to protect those he rules over or respects, and the lives of the ones who do live under his rule have actually significantly improved.
• Soul Eater: The Wrath of the Pharaoh (official name "Anubis") is the malevolent spirit of a Nepharious Pharaoh summoned by the necromancer witch Samantha in a plot to command a mummy army, only for the Pharaoh to devour her instead. When Death the Kid encountered him, he could not bring himself to fight back, his OCD not allowing him to harm the perfectly symmetrical sarcophagus as his tentacle bandages beat him into submission, only for him to change his mind when he sees that the pharaoh's true form is a massive asymmetrical monstrosity.

Comic Books

• The "space-bug-zompire thing" was the term Spike used in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to refer the end result of one of his bug demon crewmates being sired by a zompire (a vampire sired after the Seed of Wonder was destroyed and thus lacked the demonic spirit that gives vampires sentience), creating a unique demon life-form. Due to the destruction of the Seed of Wonder, the bug mutated into a monstrous, vampiric beast with insectoid attributes and a secondary mouth inside its jaws. Nonetheless, they retained vampire weaknesses and limitations such as sunlight. Curiously, their design is identical to the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise.
• DC Comics:
  • The Black, alternatively known as the Rot, is a force which is strongly associated with death. The decay and rotting of living things is where it flourishes, with its base being in the "Bone Kingdom" at in the deadlands of the United States. As such, it works in opposition to life forces such as The Red (representing the Animal Kingdom) and The Green (the Plant Kingdom). Like the other elemental forces of its kind, the Rot is guarded by a Parliament; the Parliament of Decay. Each member of this Parliament is a former Avatar of Death, each avatar a member of the Arcane Family.
  • Nekron is one of many physical manifestations of the concept of death as a cosmic certainty and as the ultimate opponent and opposing force of all life that exists. He claims to have existed before the Big Bang and has since tried to snuff out the light of life and its many incarnations (the various embodiments of the Emotional Spectrum). He is also the creator of the Black Lantern Corps, a Lantern Corps representing the black light of Death and is composed of the reanimated corpses of heroes and villains alike.
  • In The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) the "Titan" is a giant undead thing powered by/living as the congealed souls of a dead world, which can turn the dead into zombies with which to kill more people.
• Judge Dredd: The Sisters of Death are spectral, psychic, extremely powerful extradimensional entities which appear as rotting, vaguely female corpses in their spirit forms. Whatever they really are, their morality revolves around the inherent sinfulness of life and thus seek to exterminate all of it. However, their "project" the Dark Judges, who are equally monstrous and messed up, were former humans.
• Thanos transforms Nebula into this during the events of The Infinity Gauntlet. After finding she wasn't quite dead after he burned her alive, but she might as well die soon, he changed his mind about her fate. As a gift to his beloved Lady Death, he froze her burned corpse in time just as she was passing away, trapping her in a mangled form that experienced nothing but pain, yet was neither truly alive or dead. Making her a monument and metaphor to what his vision of life was, as a living/undead abomination. (Once she got ahold of the Infinity Gauntlet, she bit back.)

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): The Many, who mix The Assimilator with Hive Mind and The Undead, are considered In-Universe by Mothra, Rodan, Thor and other Titans to be an Eldritch Abomination, as the Titans have had absolutely no concept of undeath or of the dead's leftover meat regaining a life of its own before Ghidorah's remains brought the Many into being.
• The Laughing Mare from Equestria Divided is essentially Pinkie Pie come back from the dead as an undead eldritch clown who uses her old body as a Haunted Fetter.
• Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger: Already some sort of Force vampire to begin with, Darth Nihilus took his eldritch nature to a whole new level as a Force ghost. Following his death, he became an incorporeal entity made of pure Dark Side energy who uses his mask as a Haunted Fetter and sustains his existence by regularly feeding on the Force energy (and souls) of living people. His true form is a shapeless black miasma that possesses the bodies of mortals and transforms his hosts into Living Shadows.

Films — Live-Action

• Ghostbusters
  • The ghosts in the franchise come in a variety of many different shapes and sizes, all of them monstrous from one degree or another.
  • Prince Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II was originally an Evil Overlord with a penchant for torture and sorcery. Before his Rasputinian Death, he vowed he would rise from the dead. In 20th century New York after Gozer the Gozerian's failed attempt at destroying the world, Vigo harnessed the mood slime within the sewers and the negative emotions of the citizens to unleash an army of ghosts onto the city. He was so powerful that in Ghostbusters: The Video Game, he is classified as a Class 7 entity (the ghostly equivalent of a Physical God), the same level as Zuul, Vinz Clortho and Gozer the Gozerian.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!: Godzilla was killed in 1954, but was reanimated by the vengeful ghosts of everyone who died during the Asia–Pacific War, making him powerful enough to kill the divine Guardian Monsters.
  • The version of Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong combines this with Draconic Abomination and Mechanical Abomination, because the machine is driven by the soul of King Ghidorah, drawn from its skull, which was used as part of the control system; once it contrives its own freedom and enough power to do what it wants, it immediately starts trying to destroy the city it's in and kill Godzilla.
• House on Haunted Hill (1999): The Darkness is a monstrous, amorphous mass of ghosts bound together by their own collective madness and hatred for the living, capable of warping reality within the confines of the house itself and can induce near-catatonic fear at the very sight of it.

Literature

• Cthulhu Mythos:
  • Cthulhu himself is often described as a dead god ("In his house at Rl'yeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"), but it's unclear if he's actually undead or just hibernating.
  • Some of Herbert West–Reanimator's zombies are downright abominations, especially once he starts reanimating individual parts and sewing them together.
  • The Thing on the Doorstep is one of the first modern portrayals of a lich, a sorcerer who swaps bodies to stay alive for centuries, then kills them. But his latest victim manages to reanimate the rotting corpse he's trapped in.
• A Dearth of Choice: The dungeon's first attempt at necromancy uses a collection of mismatched animal bones, which don't really fit together into a creature. But thanks to his accidental bonuses to death-aligned magic, something takes an interest and "blesses" the spell, making it try various combinations until it produces a Baby Bone Hydra that essentially just sticks all the bones together — including five heads and a tail several times longer than the body — and calls it good. It even has the ability to upgrade itself by incorporating new bones it finds. The Dungeon calls it Timmy.
• Dead Reckoning has a character see a vision of Death. It appears as a tower, reaching further than should be possible, made entirely of rotted corpses and skeletons from every species that has ever died.
• The Elder Empire: The Children of Nakothi, corpses "reborn" in a twisted mockery of life. Some are recognizably human, but most are so distorted their original shapes are hard to spot. Things like centipedes made out of spines and tentacles made out of arms are not uncommon.
  The Emperor: She had little use for living humans, so we scraped out our lives as best we could. What she did need were human corpses. By the thousands. She reforged them, you see. Stitched them together, brain and body, remade them into monsters. Her Handmaidens called it rebirth.
• The Locked Tomb:
  • The Resurrection Beasts are the ghosts of murdered planets, grown in power by devouring more worlds over millennia of insane hunger. Their physical bodies are thousands of miles wide, with thousands of Heralds that act as extensions of its will; their spirits scare away even the other denizens of the River of Death; humans can't perceive their true forms; and they're a Supernatural Fear Inducer that works over light-years of distance.
  • Gideon Nav, having been resurrected as Kiriona Gaia in Nona has been somewhat modified by her father, the necromantic God-Emperor of the Nine Houses. Her skin is harder than steel; her bones are worse. Her blood combusts outside her body, and she no longer has a heart.
  • In Gideon, Silas's habit of soul siphoning from his cavalier goes very, very badly when some things climb into Colum's body while his soul is displaced. By the time of Nona, these entities are revealed to be devils. They were originally believed to be limited to the planet of Antioch, but they've shown up in force on the Ninth House (ruining the attempt to actually rebuild the House), can possess both the living and the dead, and will slowly transform the eyes of anyone possessed into fanged mouths.
• Sunshine: Vampires are by far the most alien and fearful supernatural entities in the setting, surpassing even demons. Even the weak ones are otherworldly entities who can move and see through Extradimensional Shortcuts; in their final confrontation, Rae sees a master vampire as an unspeakable creature Made of Evil who could kill her with its presence alone.

Live-Action TV

• The Turok-Han from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are a race of humanoid demons that are offshoots from normal vampires. They are stronger and more resilient than the average vampire, lacking many of the vampire's conventional weaknesses (they are unaffected by crosses, do not have to be invited into a place and their tough hides make them unstakeable) and the only means of killing them are either sunlight or decapitation. They are described as the vampire equivalent to Neanderthal man, possessing no real signs of sapience compared to human-vampires.

Myths & Religion

• Japanese Mythology
  • Gashadokuro are giant humanoid skeletons that rise from the ground with the intention of grabbing any person unfortunate enough to be close enough to it before proceeding to bite their heads off. This is because they are apparitions created from the souls of people (and we mean a lot) who perished in famine.
  • Some onryō - vengeful ghosts driven by indiscriminate rage and hatred - could inflict insanity on those who cross them, and some were powerful enough to cause natural disasters unless pacified.
• The goddess Hel of Norse Mythology is the daughter of the honorary Aesir Loki and his giantess mistress. Because Odin and Frigga foresaw that one of the children of Loki would begin Ragnarok, she and her siblings Fenrir and Jormungandr were captured. To make sure Hel was out of the way (and because she was so cooperative), Odin allowed her total sovereignty over her own afterlife (which was named after her). Hel is often described as being Two-Faced, half of her body beautiful and alive, the other half a rotting, emaciated corpse.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Atropus, the "World Born Dead", is a moon-sized undead Genius Loci that wanders through space and inflicts a Zombie Apocalypse on any planet that crosses its path. Scholars believe it to be the "afterbirth" of the first gods, a primordial force of death to balance out the life that gods bring into The Multiverse.
  • Atropals are undead stillborn Physical Gods that take the form of giant rotten fetuses and work tirelessly to annihilate all life they encounter.
  • In the 3.5 add-on book Tome of Magic, characters can bind low-powered Eldritch Abominations called vestiges to their bodies. One of them is Tenebrous. It is the remnant of what happened when the undead Archdemon Orcus achieved divinity, and then was overthrown. The life status of Tenebrous is deeply in question, but most who bind the vestige don't particularly care since it grants them control over undead and darkness. The book describes it as "a shadow of a shadow", which seems very apt.
• Exalted: In the Divine Conflict between the Gods and the Primordials who created them, a few Primordials were slain despite lacking the metaphysical capacity to die. Their death throes broke through Creation and created The Underworld, where they became the Neverborn: Tortured Monsters working to unravel all of existence so they can finally properly die.
• Geist: The Sin-Eaters has the Kerberoi and the Chthonians of the Underworld. Even the most humanoid of Kerberoi look like something out of Hellraiser; however, they at least have some sense of purpose, as they rule over the Dead Dominions and impose the Old Laws on the realms of the dead, even if those laws are often cruel and arbitrary. The Chthonians, on the other hand, are believed to be the ghosts of species that predate human existence, reshape the Underworld to their whims, and only seem to be driven by base urges and inscrutable logic. The second edition of the game goes so far as to suggest the entire reason the Underworld is so broken is because the Chthonians colonized it.
• The Phyrexians from Magic: The Gathering make liberal use of necromancy, with many of the most horrific Phyrexians being made from a combination of living and dead flesh from multiple different species melded with machinery.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: Some of the vampire antediluvians have become sufficiently inhuman from millennia of honing their powers to qualify, including a many-bodied horror, a virtual Genius Loci of undeath, and a continent-spanning Living Shadow.
  • These make up the hierarchy of main threats to the player characters in Wraith: The Oblivion. Starting at the bottom, we have Spectres, wraiths who succumbed to Oblivion and seek to destroy reality. They have an entire caste system, at the top of which lie the Onceborn, Spectres who once walked the earth but have since reached the ranks of dread divinity in death. And above even them are the Neverborn, dead yet dreaming gods whose existence creates the Hive-Mind that binds all Spectres together and who basically emerged into the afterlife fully formed when Oblivion first screamed its way into being.
    • And to further add to the sense of the abominable, there are Hekatonkhires. Some Spectres who try working their way up the chain to becoming Onceborn just snap under the tide of Oblivion and becoming rampaging, amorphous, nigh-mindless behemoths.
  • The quasi-sequel series Orpheus takes it up a notch with Grandmother, the thing that birthed the Neverborn. Speculation on its true nature ranges from "the soul of a dead universe" to "God's evil twin," but it seeks to devour all life because it does not conceive the magnitude of beings lesser than itself.
• Many of the more powerful Zombie-type monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh! can be classified as this.
  • Pumpking the King of Ghosts is a Zombie-type monster resembling a cycloptic monstrous pumpkin with a crown. In the "Duelist Kingdom" arc of the anime, the card's effects would give a 10% power boost to all other zombie-types on the field, which is portrayed as its tentacle vines connected to their backs and literally pumping the power into them.
  • Vampire Genesis is a massive, muscular, purple-skinned creature with bat-like characteristics. Its name "Vampire Genesis" is a reference to some vampiric characters in fiction mutating into stronger, less human-looking forms through certain methods (such as dark magic, centuries of experience and skill, etc.), while gaining a more demonic appearance and stronger abilities than their previous states. It could even be considered the source of all vampires found in the Vampire archetype.
  • Cards like Archfiend Zombie-Skull and Revived King Ha Des are zombie-type synchro monsters similar in appearance to the popular Fiend-type monsters Summoned Skull and Dark Ruler Ha Des, effectively making such monsters the reanimated corpses of demons.

Video Games

• BioShock Infinite: Using quantum energy harvested and collected from Elizabeth, Comstock uses a device to resurrect the deceased Lady Comstock into the Siren, a banshee-esque creature with the power to bring dead humans to life as mindless killing machines. The Luteces describe her as being both simultaneously alive and dead and that her madness is her finding such a state "unagreeable."
• Black & White 2: Gods are created from human prayers and rely on human worship to exist, but somehow, the Big Bad deity in Battle of the Gods forms from a vast abandoned graveyard and sets off to create a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Bloodborne:
  • Darkbeast Paarl is a monstrous electrified reanimated beast skeleton residing in the yard of the Hypogean Gaol. It comes to life when you approach it, and attacks with a combination of strong bolt magic invoked attacks and lightning-quick swipes. A stronger version, called the Loran Darkbeast, appears in Lower Loran Chalice Dungeon as the boss of the bottom layer. The Beast Claw of Irreverent Izzy reveals that the lifeforce of darkbeasts and silverbeasts are tied to their bones, rather than their blood.
  • The One Reborn is a boss faced in the Advent Plaza that takes the form of a mass of undead human bodies sustained by the magical bells of chime maidens. It is presumably an inhuman experiment created by the School of Mensis's rituals.
  • Implied to be the case with the Orphan of Kos from The Old Hunters DLC. It can be found on the beach in a replica of the Fishing Hamlet in the Hunter's Nightmare. It looks similar to an emaciated, skeletal humanoid, born from the corpse of its mother. It is implied that the only way to end the cursed existence that is the Hunter's Nightmare is to kill it, the Old Hunter's actions in killing its mother having created the nightmare in the first place.
• Darkest Dungeon:
  • The Collector is a bizarre abomination clad in a yellow coat and made up of the heads and bodies of many unfortunate people who have died in the dungeons, and it apparently feeds off of energy drawn from the heads it collects. It can also summon spectres of dead people using those same heads to fight for it.
  • There is also the Necromancer, who was once one of several famous scholars that the Ancestor invited to the Estate to learn the secrets of necromancy from, and who the Ancestor then murdered and raised from the dead with their powers and intellects intact. Unlike the skeletons your parties encounter throughout the Ruins, there is something horrific underneath the Necromancer's robes, and it attacks your party with bizarre clawed tentacles erupting from its sleeves.
• Dark Souls:
  • Gravelord Nito from Dark Souls was one of the four keepers of the Lord Souls when the Age of Fire began, Nito himself being First of the Dead. Together with Gwyn and the Witch of Izalith, they fought the Great Stone Dragons for control of the world, in Nito's case introducing death and disease, and would eventually be heralded as gods to the humans that populate Anor Londo. After the war, Nito descended into the Catacombs and slumbered within what would eventually be known as Tomb of the Giants. Even in that state, he could administer the death of all life and offered much of the energy of his own soul to death itself, a convenant being founded to spread death in his name. He would eventually fall at the hands of the Chosen Undead, his lord soul used to access the Kiln of the First Flame. His origins are a mystery, but one of his titles "the First of the Dead" would imply that he was the very first creature to die and is the first undead, his body a mass of skeletons fused together in a cloak-like mass of furs.
  • In exchange for his services to Lord Gwyn in the war against the dragons, Seath the Scaleless in Dark Souls was given (alongside a dukedom, a fragment of Gwyn's lord soul, and possibly one of his daughters) a primordial crystal that helped bestow upon him an immortality that his kin possessed but he himself lacked due to his lack of scales. While it did keep him alive, it also classifies him as a unique type of undead, something that no doubt did little for his already waning sanity.
  • The Rotten from Dark Souls II was a patchwork entity born from an amalgamation of lost souls and the withered bodies they inhabited. Over time, The Rotten absorbed many undead unfortunate enough to wind up in the Black Gulch after he came to possess the reincarnated soul of Gravelord Nito.
  • Slave Knight Gael in the final Dark Souls III DLC starts out as just another undead, labouring through the aeons. When you fight him as in many ways the Final Boss of the entire trilogy, he's consumed enough of the Dark Soul by eating the corpses of its first bearers that he's become a hulking, barely sapient killing machine...and then he goes hollow as well (even taking extra damage from weapons like the Hollowslayer Greatsword) and becomes an undead shell, hollowed out and controlled by the Dark Soul itself.
• Dead Space: The Necromorphs are creatures born from corpses - both human and alien - reanimated by a mysterious alien virus. Necromorphs transform into various different horrifying forms upon infection, with an almost single-minded goal of killing all non-infected lifeforms around them. Eventually, the Necromorphs all merge into massive, planet sized space-faring masses of flesh known as Bretheren Moons, which go on to further assimilate other planets. The Necromorphs are a product of mysterious monolithic markers that can be found along various planets (including Earth), with the implications that the Necromorphs are some sort of alien super-weapon.
• The Beached Things (or "BTs") from Death Stranding are otherworldly entities that have somehow "stranded" themselves on Earth following the Death Stranding. Ghostly in nature, they are invisible to the naked-eye and can only be sensed by DOOMs (people with an allergy to chiralium, causing mental instability and unusual abilities) and bridge babies (unborn babies with a connection to the world the Beached Things came from that were artificially moved from their stillmothers into portable pods), their appearance differing, but usually taking the form of a Monstrous Humanoid attached to an umbilicus. They flock to locations of high chiralium density (such as when a dead body is cremated), their presence is hinted at by the manifestation of a black oil-like substance, seem to be blind and can sense people by their breath, can create more by devouring living humans, and if a dead body isn't cremated within 48 hours, it automatically becomes a BT. Larger BTs also have a small amount of antimatter at their core, so when they devour someone it causes a "voidout", a massive explosion caused by the energy released by the matter-antimatter annihilation.
• Elden Ring has the Prince of Death, also known as Godwyn the Golden, first of Those Who Live in Death, the source of both the Deathroot that births them and the Deathblight they spread. A mutated, soulless being resembling a titanic merman with an upside-down face, Godwyn's corpse fused with the roots of the Erdtree, endlessly replicating and spreading his body parts throughout the Lands Between, spawning copies of his eyes and face in places overtaken by Death. Aside from causing Those Who Live in Death to rise from their graves, creatures such as the basilisks and certain Giant Crabs living above his lair are tainted by him, bearing his mark and spreading Deathblight. His influence even exists where the Erdtree couldn't possibly have any roots, such as the local Floating Island Farum Azula, implying he's somehow corrupting the world itself and is powerful enough to overcome Farum Azula's nature as a Place Beyond Time.
• In Final Fight: Streetwise, one of Bella's so-called Four Horsemen is a giant collection of bodies of people who have died from the Fantastic Drug Glow. The bodies are all melded together, resulting in a giant heap of flailing limbs and other body part attached to a huge, vaguely humanoid main shape.
• In Guild Wars 2, Zhaitan, Elder Dragon of Death and Shadow, combines this with Draconic Abomination. Like all Elder Dragons, it's an unimaginably old creature that feeds on magic, it's capable of raising the dead on such a scale that it's blighted a whole country, and it looks like a massively decayed dragon with many smaller heads leaking from its mouth.
• The Grim Reaper from Kingdom Hearts II is a special type of Heartless created by Luxord as a personification of the Aztec gold's cursed properties, taking on an undead form when it takes any of the gold, activating the curse and inflicts it on Jack Sparrow. When Sora and the gang defeat it, the curse itself is destroyed.
• The titular lords in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords skirt the line between this and Humanoid Abomination, since it's unclear if they can be considered alive anymore.
  • Darth Nihilus and Darth Sion were both present at Malachor V at the end of the Mandalorian War, and they only barely survived the catastrophe that destroyed the world. Nihilus survived by becoming a sort of Force ''black hole'', an utter void in the Force who feeds on the lifeforce of others. The crew of his ship are all husks that have been nearly drained by just being in the proximity of the Sith Lord. You never get to see what's behind his mask, and it's implied that there is nothing.
  • Sion, who seems to have been active decades before, continues to live after being cut down by focusing on his own pain, while his body was blasted to pieces. He has pulled himself together, but it's clear that he is only "alive" by sheer force of will, maintained by his agony. His skin is greenish-grey and covered in open sores, cracks and scars, with an autopsy report by a Republic medic indicating all of his bones were shattered and yet somehow are holding together. If you convince him to let go of the dark side, he dies instantly.
• While managing Lobotomy Corporation, it's entirely possible to choose T-01-75 at the start of your day, which is less formally known as The Mountain of Smiling Bodies. The Abnormality was brought into existence after a prior containment breach created such a traumatic massacre that the staff chose simply to seal off the corridors rather than clean it up, and the neglect allowed an escaped Abnormality's will to melt and fuse the rotting corpses together. The end result is a mass of black tar-like gunk with mask-like white faces sticking out of it that, upon escaping, will roam the halls killing and eating corpses to grow larger and more dangerous.
• While zombies in Lollipop Chainsaw are all grotesque in their own right, being humans corrupted into undeath by energies from Rotten World, the Dark Purveyors - Zed, Vikke, Mariska, Josey and Lewis Legend - are noteworthy as being sentient zombies with a variety of different abilities and act as generals in Swan's Zombie Apocalypse. After Juliet kills all of the Dark Purveyors, it is revealed that they were all just fodder for a ritual to summon Killabilly, a giant Elvis Presley-like zombie god composed of the bodies of every zombie that Juliet had slew on her way to the Dark Purveyors (hens his title "the Zombie of Zombies").
• Minecraft
  • The Wither is a horrible creature made from the skulls of Wither Skeletons and the souls of the damned. It's easily the most dangerous mob in the game, thanks to its myriad of abilities (flight when above half health, a shield against arrows when below, explosive skull shots that do Damage Over Time, etc.) It will kill anything in sight that is not already undead if given the chance.
  • The Wither Storm from Minecraft: Story Mode, made by substituting one of the soul sand for a command block, is a thousand times worse.. Its mere existence breaks the world. Starting off as an average Wither (not that the average Wither isn't itself an Eldritch Abomination), it goes One-Winged Angel, looking less like its original shape and more like something from H. P. Lovecraft, sprouting Combat Tentacles, growing to ten times its size and eventually becoming a distorted, black mass of destruction and death. It gets even worse in Episode 3, where it turns out to be an Asteroids Monster.
• Pokémon: Some Ghost-type Pokémon qualify, with special mention going to the Ghost/Dragon-type Giratina, which is a powerful Legendary Pokémon that rules over an Eldritch Location called the Distortion World; and the Ghost/Fairy-type Mimikyu, the true form of which is said to cause whoever sees it to die of terror.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: The Buddhist Monks of the Senpou Temple on Mount Kongo are monks who rejected the Buddha's teachings of accepting the impermanence of life in favor of seeking eternal life through immortality. Experimenting with the rejuvenating waters, the monks have since gained emaciated mummified forms (similar to the real life sokushinbutsu) overrun with centipedes and other horrifying vermin. Those in the more advanced stages of corruption have massive centipedes sprouting from a hole in their abdomens.
• The Undeparted from Sunless Skies are not so much undead as an embodiment of the violation of the laws of mortality. The reason they're naturally invisible unless exposed to bright light is a side effect of how light enforces the laws of reality in that universe, the light makes them more real and therefore visible.
• Super Snail from QCplay Limited has a somewhat heroic example in the player character's Zombie form. The first alternate form for Super Snail is a zombie. Initially just a zombified snail, the Zombie Form mutates further into monstrousness as Super Snail consumes zombie cells, experiencing artificially enhanced evolution to become an increasingly hideous blob of green rotted flesh, rubbery set arms, and a singular massive eye. The game even calls these later evolutions abominations as Super Snail grows more godlike in power (in fact, the Zombie Form's last evolution only happens if you have discovered the 4 other evolutionary forms!).

Webcomics

• Goblins: Behold Mr. Fingers. an undead abomination in the best traditions of the clade composed entirely of fingers, pulled from the dreams of a child. As per Dungeons & Dragons he has a stat block◊, which says Mr. Fingers is a 'lesser' Finger Horror.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: If The Plague doesn't kill someone, it will instead change them into a horribly mutated Perpetual-Motion Monster that operates like a Plague Zombie and can become part of a Body of Bodies under the right circumstances. The Kade is a particularily dangerous variant, inhabiting the hazy region between troll and ghost. They are made from finnish mages who succumbed to the plague, seemingly exist without physical form, and are capable of mind controlling other mages by looking into their eyes. They also have Mind Hive properties, as finnish mages who die under their influence are usually absorbed into the whole.
• Unsounded: The "Silver Weapon" is a giant undead monstrosity created from the unhappy ghosts of its victims and their repurposed bodies, along with some First Silver spelled to allow the Selver to warp the rules of reality within its confines. It can stuff itself into a single person, or be as large as a several story house, and can grow its own monstrous mooks made out of the cancerous flesh of its victims. The whole thing has several minds of its own rather than being controllable like those who funded it were expecting.

Web Original

• Mahu: In "Second Chance", the Bone Collector is an abomination made of the living flesh and bone of dozens of different corpses. Just like its name says, its main function is to collect bones and bodies to fill any wounds within its large body.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: The Lich, the greatest threat within the entire show, appears to be a giant horned humanoid skeleton creature Evil Sorcerer. However, it is later revealed to be an ancient beast of extinction itself, having manifested in many forms throughout the millennia and implied to predate existence. Its very breath is capable of reducing a person to dust. Its very presence quickly destroys a multiverse prison designed to keep the most dangerous creatures in the universe. If its body is destroyed, its spirit will possess others till it can create a new one. To top it all off, it's a sadistic Omnicidal Maniac who desires the extinction of all forms of life and describes itself as "the last scholar of Golb".
• The Owl House:
  • The Titan, a massive decaying corpse that forms the Boiling Isles and exudes a Background Magic Field that witches use to cast spells. Death seems to be more of a gradient than an absolute state for it; the Titan's heart continues to beat despite its body's massive desiccation, and Emperor Belos insists that it continues to speak to him. Belos is lying through his teeth about acting out it's will, though it is still alive to a certain degree.
  • Emperor Belos becomes one himself after his true form is revealed to be a twelve foot tall, skeletal monster made of rotting, liquefied flesh, that is absolutely covered in glowing blue eyes.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Hungry Larry from episode of the same name is a seemingly harmless Bedsheet Ghost that Star and Janna summon to the Diaz residence to liven up Halloween after Marco's father fails to scare trick-or treaters. Later he swallows the trick-or-treaters, Star, Marco, Mrs. Diaz, Janna and all of their candy, speaking in a Voice of the Legion and leaving a black, viscous trail of saliva, the floor pooling with the inky substance being a sign of his presence.
  Hungry Larry: I'M STILL HUNGRY... I'M STILL HUNGRY...
• Steven Universe: Cluster Gems are the shards of shattered Gems (shattering being the closest thing to death Gems can experience) who have been forcibly stuck together through Homeworld's experimentation, manifesting as a horrifying mass of body parts mindlessly attacking those around them. Later on in the series, it is revealed that these were merely prototypes for the Cluster, an artificial Gem Fusion planted within the Earth's core whose gemstone is the size of a small moon. The only part of the Cluster that ever manifests is a massive, skinless arm nearly the size of Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond's armships. If it were to form completely, it would destroy the planet from the inside out.

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