Website / Bogleech

A sample of what to expect from the site.

"Run for your lives!"

Bogleech is a website devoted to weird fiction, insects, parasites and monsters in general—in other words, to the phenomenon of horror and all the things that cause it. Topics include horror movies, literature, mythology, TV, toys and video games, as well as facts about scary animals in real life like spiders, bats, and snakes. It was started by web cartoonist and biology buff Jonathan Wojcik, also known as Scythemantis. The main site also includes webcomics (notably, Awful Hospital) and flash cartoons, as well as Mortasheen, Wojcik's upcoming Pokémon-style Bio Punk tabletop RPG, the Creepypasta Cookoff, an annual harvesting of short horror works by his fanbase, and Nightmare Beings, where commenters describe a monster from their dreams to be illustrated by either Wojcik himself or a guest artist. Also hosts several nature articles written by himself (and has links to numerous Cracked.com articles by the very same), usually about the less pleasant aspects of Mother Nature (e.g. parasites that cause aberrant supernumerary leg growth in frogs).

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Works Bogleech has created include, but are not limited to:

• Awful Hospital
• Burgrr Entries
• Creepypasta Cookoff
• Don't Get Spooked
• Mortasheen
• Nightmare Beings
• Return of the Living

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This website provides examples of:

• Animal Lover: Wojcik loves all sorts of creatures commonly seen as frightening, repulsive and just plain weird. The only exception seems to be dolphins, but he mostly hates how they're idolized by pop culture. And he seemed to be okay with river dolphins if one of his blogs on strange animals in to be believed. Then again, river dolphins aren't what most people would consider cute and aren't as exposed in media.
• Animalistic Abomination: In his "Halloween Bestiary", among other creatures, are owl-like Strixoids, spider-like Heebie Jeebies, cat-like Caterwauls, and Skliders, spider-like creatures made out of Dem Bones.
• Animate Body Parts: Two recurring characters in his comics are Brains and Guts, who are a sentient brain and stomach, respectively.
• Anthropomorphic Food: Frequent.
  • Several examples in Awful Hospital, such as the Burgrr Inc. staff.
  • Also, of course, the Burgrr.com stories.
  • Sugar Fiends are members of the Halloween Bestiary made out of candy.
• Author Appeal: Horror fiction in general, but especially blob monsters, body horror and monsters based on invertebrates (especially flies, earthworms, ticks and cockroaches).
• Broke the Rating Scale: In the Bogleech Pokémon reviews, Lucario earns a score of 'Rotting, Rancid Lucario Skull' out of five pokéballs. The rating of 'Five Gold Pokéballs' might have counted at one point, but it's more or less become the standard top of the rating scale since its introduction.
  • Goodra gets a GIF of a tumbleweed on account of the fact that Bog has extremely positive opinions of what it is (a slime-dripping slug dragon) but extremely negative opinions of it not being what it could have been (Its preevolution was blind and legless, among other factors). Both opinions were too strong for a neutral rating, so Bog chose not to rate it at all.
  • The Abra line was given a rating of '666 and a crudely drawn headbanging demon' as a Take That! to the people who once claimed that Pokémon was satanist propaganda (and often used Alakazam as an example).
  • For his Digimon reviews, he was so repulsed by Nanimon that he gave it a "NO GOD" rating, though he clarified in the comments that his review was tongue-in-cheek and he appreciated its Refuge in Audacity. Played straighter with the Fairymon / Kazemon line, to which he gave a disgusted reaction instead of a proper rating for the producers making an 11 year girl turn into a lingerie fairy. This escalated into decidedly not tongue-in-cheek horror at seeing her final form. The non-Digimon lifeform known as Ex-Eraser Gamma got the same treatment.
• Canon Welding: Characters and settings from Awful Hospital and the Burgrr stories show up in Don't Get Spooked.
• Crapsaccharine World: Mortasheen is something of the Bizarro version of this trope. The setting is a sprawling continent-sized toxic urban wasteland of twisted science that is home to degenerate humanoids and hundreds of species of horrific bloodthirsty monsters (many created by the residents as living tools or weapons) where life is either nasty, brutish and short or agonizingly drawn out for far too long... and yet most sentient beings who live there cheerfully take it all in stride, and behave pretty much like you'd expect if this was a standard happy-go-lucky Pokémon-like world instead of a hell-world that could otherwise give Warhammer 40,000 a run for its money.
• Edutainment Show: Beneath all of its horror-related trappings, the site is actually incredibly educational, especially regarding biology. That said, it ain't for little kids.
• Eldritch Abomination: Some of his Mortasheen menagerie are Shout Outs to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Some are worse.
  • Sometimes appear in the comic and elsewhere on the site too.

• Fuzzball Spider: The Halloween Bestiary entry on Heebie-Jeebies starts by noting the various inaccuracies in spider-themed Halloween decorations, including that some of them look like blobs with limbs. This sets up for the text's reasoning that these creatures may not be spiders...
• Grossout Show: A lot of the comics, facts, and pop culture reviews printed on the site are done for maximum gross-out potential.
• Hostile Show Takeover: As part of the Halloween 2013 event, Bogleech was temporarily usurped by Borfladge, ostensibly a version of Bogleech's website from some other reality.
• Interactive Fiction: Two so far, both as part of Halloween 2013. Nausea Quest and Don't Get Spooked. The former is almost entirely text based, while the latter includes full artwork and over 60 characters.
• Mons: Mortasheen is a dark version of this idea, with several monster clowns, sentient iron maidens, an entire class consisting of various insects fused with humans and at least four different varieties of zombie fetus.
• Monster Clown: Mortasheen contains an entire monster type comprised of this trope, known as the "Joker" class, which is basically equivalent to there being a Pokémon type called "Clown".
• Monster Mash: There are three articles devoted to the monsters that represent and are ubiquitous to Halloween, with this, of course, as the result.
• Multiple Endings: Don't Get Spooked has three of them:

  • Fighting the Nightmare Queen with other monsters, in a parody of Pokémon. She wins, but then she stops being hostile because you have some Ecto-cooler.
  • A different fight to the Nightmare Queen is available once you recruit Vulthrax. Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?.
  • If you complete the Monster Album you skip the "fight" entirely and you get a Golden Ending.

• Nightmare Fetishist: Bogleech is very much one. Ironically, as a child he used to spook incredibly easily.
  • A good example is the Raremon page, wherein Wojcik fanboys over a creature that looks like a stinking blob of rot and machinery:
  Out of seven thousand (I'm estimating) monsters in the Digimon franchise, the stinking, rotting, bile-belching Raremon is my number one, uncontested most precious baby.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: On his website, Bogleech has a printable game called Homunculus Nightmare in which players battle monstrous beings who are trying to ruin their day just because. Most Homonculi cause minor inconveniences like giving people minor cuts, hiding their keys, mocking their hygiene or making them have to go to the bathroom. However, eventually scarier Homunculi show up who can do things like make a person forget their friends, attack their pets or give them new allergies. And then there are the Boss Homunculus.
  Father Homunculus: Erases your entire life from history.
  Nana Homunculus: Gives you an insatiable drive to harm everyone you ever knew.
  Mother Homunculus: Will turn you into a homunculus embodying what you hate most.
  • The Tiny Illegal Sirenheads, a horde of bootleg versions of Trevor Henderson's popular Sirenhead creepypasta, work the same way. Most of the Illegals are firmly in Harmless Villain territory, but a few are actually dangerous. The worst is likely Free Movies Head who offers people free movies to lure them in than kills them in a horrifying Death by Irony. Specifically she has a gun and shoots them to death.
• Ominous Owl: Crossing over with The Owl-Knowing One, the Strixoid, Bog's suggested moniker for bizarre-looking Halloween owls, is an Animalistic Abomination whose earthly form looks like a rough approximation of an owl. It subsists entirely on blood and chooses to go about it by striking up mutual partnerships with humans, giving them knowledge in exchange for regular feedings. It's generally quite affable so long as it and its students are treated with respect, though if it or they are not, it will go into vengeance mode and spy on the perpetrator whilst plaguing them with nightmares and delusions.
• Or Was It a Dream?: "Abyssal" pulls a particularly cruel example of this trope, when the protagonist, trapped in a deep sea nightmare of fish monsters swims desperately to a portal to his bedroom while a monster slowly closes in on him. He arrives in his bed, then relaxes and lies down to fall back asleep...blissfully unaware that it's all an illusion and he's being digested alive in the monster's stomach.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Explored in this article, which points out that Medieval European dragons were depicted as Animalistic Abominations until very recently.
• Our Gargoyles Rock: One article is entirely devoted to gargoyles, their history, and possible interpretations of them.
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • Bogleech has been known to invoke this, stating that he has room in his head for different kinds of vampires and asking for creators to draw on more features of bats for inspiration.
  • Mortasheen's Vampire-class monsters, aside from extremely freakish forms, are created by infection from an extraterrestrial (possibly extradimensional) super-parasite whose ultimate form is absurdly powerful. Fortunately, ultimate form vampires rarely live on Earth for long. Unfortunately, it's because they leave to spread vampirism to the four corners of the universe and beyond.
• A Rare Sentence: From his Pokemon review of the Ultra Beast Poipole and its evolution...
  "I never thought I'd say this about anything, but this design was cooler before its head became its butt."
• Running Gag: As far as the site is concerned, Christmas does not exist. The few times it has to be mentioned, it is censored as if it were some horrible swearword. Halloween is the one only true holiday (the site owner is even born on that date). It's just part of the absurdist comedy style of the articles.
• Stylistic Suck: Anything ostensibly produced by Burgrr, a creepypasta-born combination of Pocket Dimension, Genius Loci, and Eldritch Abomination formed around the concept of meat processing. It looks like someone flayed the idea of a butcher shop and made a puppet of its skin, and it's a lure for some of their raw materials.
• Surreal Horror: He's a fan of this, favoring the monster designs that are more bizarre and unconventional.
• Take That Me: In his review of the monsters from Lost in Vivo, he pokes fun at his preference for weirder more abstract monsters over more traditionally threatening ones by declaring that by next year his favorite video game monsters will be completely normal pieces of furniture that can't hurt the player or do anything at all.
• The Worm That Walks: Wojcik suggests in his review thereof that this might be the explanation for why all of Yu-gi-oh!'s blatantly non-worm 'worms' are referred to as such.
  Maybe even their solid tissues are just built from different worms, all woven together to construct semblances of other creatures.
• Wicked Witch: He has dubbed the "hat-with-legs" variety "Hocus" and the "cauldron-with-legs" variety "Pocus", considering them specific subsets of the witch monster.
• Word-Salad Horror: Some of the entries such as Pokeween slowly degenerate into this kind of prose. The Burgrr.com website uses this kind of writing extensively.

Specific strips from the webcomic include examples of:

• Body Horror: I'm just here to shop!
  • It would probably be faster to list the strips that DON'T contain any body horror, really.
• Cute Monster Girl: I don't hate you.
• Lightmare Fuel: Pretty much every strip to some degree.
• Mermaid Problem: Oh... We have ways...
• Our Zombies Are Different: Chapters 90 to 94 have 4 hapless zombie fanatics try to survive an actual Zombie Apocalypse with weird zombies that have strange and deadly abilities. It doesn't end well for them.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Subverted. And then double subverted by the Eldritch Abomination's closing line.
• Shout-Out: Penguins is a parody of Batman.
• Voodoo Shark: Played for Laughs and Invoked in the below comic

Brains: Alright, that sort of only raised a lot more questions. I apologize.

• Was Once a Man: I was two men!
• Weaksauce Weakness: But even FOUR pirates are no match for Louis-Jacques Thenard, co-discoverer of BORON!

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