It's about to add one more.
"The Unburied are formed from human corpses that were flung together into mass graves without a proper burial. This hideous amalgamation of bodies decomposes together into one being, bound by some foul magic. For all my knowledge, I could only flee from it... and I would expect any other sensible person to do the same."
— Abd al-Hazir's notes on the Unburied, Diablo III
An excellent way to add some horror to a creature or show off how abominable your Eldritch Abomination is. These monsters can be either made of various corpses "glued" together, or just being an amalgamation of random body parts disposed in a casual manner. Sometimes it can be the result of the villain or another creature absorbing their underlings or Devouring the Dragon in order to become much more powerful. Hence it can fit nicely for a One-Winged Angel. Unlike a Flesh Golem (which is likely started as a sort of homage to the Frankenstein Monster), these creatures tend to be "natural" (as in not artificially crafted), or the result of a One-Winged Angel transformation. Very often the result of some disaster (such as The Plague) or atrocity (such as a genocide, or attempt at genocide), and may canonically only result from such circumstances. Can overlap with Genius Loci if the location in question is an Indian Burial Ground or similar (and these examples may be somewhat friendly, if highly unnerving). More rarely, can be the result of a large group (such as an army) who have Unfinished Business in common. An embodiment of the primal fear of losing one's identity. Although it is Older Than Feudalism, this trope became particularly prominent in fiction written after World War II because one of the final elements of The Holocaust was that the Nazis went out of their way to make identification and proper burial of the victims difficult.
Sometimes related to Blob Monster, often is the result of Appendage Assimilation. See also Body Horror, The Worm That Walks and Undead Abomination. Super-Trope of Flesh Golem and Walking Ossuary. Two related but far less icky tropes are Fusion Dance and Combining Mecha.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Apocalypse no Toride: This is what makes the Bokor so terrifying. Using his voice, he's able to make the normally slow and mindless zombies contort themselves into a gigantic rock-solid mass capable of moving at disturbing speeds that can trample or tear apart enemies.
- Ayakashi Triangle: Iyo are formed from (mostly negative) emotions of humans and so have human body parts, but utterly bizarre body structures. Arms and fingers are arranged like legs or tentacles on invertebrates, while eyes, faces, and heads are spread all over their bodies or clumped together in one place.
- Cells at Work! CODE BLACK: This is how a thrombus (blood clot) is depicted. The original deposit is shown as a mass grave, but when the Body (on a weekend-long TV marathon) stands for the first time in two days, it becomes a massive ball of fused-together corpses steamrollering everything in its path.
- Chainsaw Man:
- The Darkness Devil appears as several dead bodies on top of each other; two of them serving as legs, that are attached where the shoulders should be with a single head on top, and three others make up the torso with their heads aligned in the middle, and a bone formation somewhat resembling a goat skull serving as the devil's actual head.
- The Falling Devil's Establishing Character Moment is performing Psychic-Assisted Suicide on an entire apartment complex, and forming a body for herself out of the female corpses that's mostly humanoid, but with hands for feet, a pointed tendril covering the groin, and multiple sets of arms jutting from her back with one pair holding her decapitated head in place.
- Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai: when pushed into a corner, Zaboeira proceeds to murder all the Demon World monsters around him and use their corpses to form a colossal suit of carcasses which forms his Hyper Zombie form. Downplayed in that while at first it looks like it's made of interwined bodies it soon forms skin tissue, bone growths and hair patches to cover itself up.
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Envy's true form is a massive green monster
◊ made of the souls of those used as Human Sacrifices to make the philosopher's stone that is basically its heart.
- Gantz: One of the many forms of Nurarihyon was a gigantic body of a woman formed by several naked bodies of women.
- Gyo: This starts happening once humans begin getting infected by the Death Stench. The larger walking machines (which may have once held sharks or larger fish) require more infected bodies to act as power sources, and what results are shambling machines carrying tens of the infected at a time.
- Inuyasha:
- Naraku's true form is a giant mass of demonic body parts, with his human head dangling in the middle of it.
- The Flesh-Eating Mask produce a large, blobbish body made from the various corpses of the people it ate.
- Another one is an ancient demon similar to Naraku and born in the same fashion, now sealed inside the Shikon Jewel.
- Another example is the Kodoku spell: Naraku locks a bunch of demons in a pit and force them to fight. The winner assimilates the body parts of the fallen, ending up in a giant, grotesque beast.
- Moryomaru's late forms are a mix of many different yokai merged together, and only his face is the same.
- Kekkaishi: Ichiro Ougi is revealed to be a human-shaped mass of flesh comprised of himself and four of his brothers.
- Naruto: In a filler, three guys are merged together in a creepy-looking beast of flesh. Things get awful when two of the merged people go crazy and start eating themselves up.
- 3×3 Eyes: When Yakumo evokes all his Juuma at the same time to deliver a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, they appear as a giant mass of light out of which poke out the heads and other bodyparts of his Juuma.
- Shaman King: Faust VIII turns every skeleton in a graveyard into a 20-Ton Calcium Giant. Even so, Ren dispatches it with ease.
- Soul Eater: Even if it doesn't seem at a first glance, Mosquito's Form from Four Hundred Years ago is actually composed of eight thousand tiny bats, which he can use to storm his enemies and shred them to pieces with ultrasounds. He actually mentions that it's "the period where I was the most numerous" when describing this technique.
- Tamagotchi! Miracle Friends: In episode 22, the gang accidentally scare a Dreambakutchi and it flies to the top of a building that's too tall for them to reach. Candy Paku Paku uses her Pocket Designer to create numerous clones of Kuchipatchi, who form into a giant Kuchipatchi that grabs the Dreambakutchi.
- Ushio and Tora: A few Youkai have real bodies consisting in horrid amalgamations of body parts mashed together. Examples include the Hiyo demons serving Hakumen, who can merge together to form horrible abominations, and the Plague Demon infesting Satoru's heart, a grotesque-looking, upside-down demon with a series of naked human women's bodies forming a skull-like figure on his back. For the final battle against Hakumen, all the bakemono from the East and West join together to form the "Fire Brother", a colossal mecha-like entity able to use the power of all the combined Youkai to cast fiery rocks and other elemental techniques.
- Yasuke: In the final battle against the Dark Daimyo's forces, she fuses all of her soldiers into a gigantic Kaiju to destroy the village's magical Deflector Shields.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Done in a slightly less gruesome manner in one episode. One duelist had a deck centered around "Doll Chimera," a monster that cannot be defeated as long as its controller keeps sending Doll Parts to the grave when it's destroyed. As she sends more pieces, Doll Chimera adds them to its body, becoming one of these.
Art
- In the art book Drawing and Painting the Undead, a creature known as the Pripyat Beast is described, a horrific amalgam of mutated human and horse corpses fused together and re-animated, zombie fashion by the radiation, that do battle with the unfortunate cleanup squads (called "Hunters" here, in reality they were called "Liquidators"). It supposedly came around because of the Chernobyl Incident. Said beast was drawn by a certain Keith Thompson and can be seen here on his gallery.
- The Ur-Example might be Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who is famous for painting people made of smaller things — objects and fruits most of the time, but sometimes animals or human bodies as well.
- The Miami Holocaust Memorial, colloquially known as "Hitler's Hand."
- Japanese painter Utagawa Kuniyoshi also did a portrait of a man whose face and extended hand are made of naked people cobbled together (using cloths and fans for the eyes and hair).
Asian Animation
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: The Cloud People in Flying Island: The Sky Adventure can come together to form a single being called the Cloud Giant, who helps the goats to reassemble the Sky Crystal near the end of the season.
Comic Books
- In Adventure Time: Marceline Gone Adrift, the magnetised Cinnamon Bun becomes a horrific giant mass of trapped Candy People.
- Batman: Harvest is a creature of sentient vegetation used by Poison Ivy. It was created when a carnivorous plant that Poison Ivy fed her victims to absorbed the personas of the people it ate. In this form it was able to rapidly regenerate and transform itself into any plant-life it chose to, and would manifest itself with the faces and other physical characteristics of Ivy's victims across its surface. Harvest attempted to take revenge on Poison Ivy by attacking her inside Arkham Asylum although Batman intervened and protected her. Harvest was seemingly destroyed in this battle although Batman remarked that its regenerative abilities meant it could come back and attack again at any time.
- In Fantastic Four, villain Terminus once created a body for himself by fusing hundreds of the Mole Man's Moloid servants into a single body. Reed Richards even compared Terminus' new form to the giants from Clive Barker's "In The Hills, The Cities" (see Literature, below).
- In the IDW crossover Infestation, the Elder God... thing from another dimension is a skull face made of human bodies.
- The Multiversity: Demogorgun of the Gentry is one of these, a large mass of corpses that move and act as one.
- In PK2, the minidroids seen in Issue 10 can assemble themselves to form a body proportional to the number of minidroids employed, ranging from rats to dogs to a whole person.
- In an Alan Moore Swamp Thing story, the disembodied title character lands on the planet J586 and grows a vegetable body as per usual. However, all plant life in this world is sapient, and the resultant fusion of multiple minds within his own drives the Swamp Thing insane, until the planet's Green Lantern manages to disassemble him. Meanwhile, the experience of having their consciousnesses fused together permanently changes the outlook of many on J586, for better or worse.
- In The Transformers Ongoing, the Decepticons and Sweeps were forcibly combined into the massive "Deceptigod" creature. Only Megatron and Shockwave were successful at resisting the merger, the former due to his considerable willpower and the latter due to his emotionless nature.
- One issue of X-Men contained a Morlock with a power to increase his size and strength by forcibly fusing touched people into his body. His victims could be seen all over his body, melting into him and each other, still screaming and struggling. In the end Jean Grey had to shut down his brain to save his victims from permanent assimilation.
- In the second Superior Spider-Man volume, Master Pandemonium resurfaces with a scheme the fact that his limbs have been replaced with demons. Having many civilians possessed by demons, he melds them all into a giant-sized, anatomically accurate replica of his own body, with him sequestered in the head. This is a plot point as Otto has to team up with Doctor Strange, whose medical expertise coupled with a borrowed spider-harness allows him to perform a surgical extraction of Pandemonium.
Fan Works
- The Night Unfurls: Paying homage to The One Reborn, the being that drops from the skies of Rad is depicted as a "deformed, ungodly amalgamation of mortal and eldritch minds" that is half-corpse, half-stone. What makes it different from The One Reborn is that the many faces glued together that forms the creature's vessel are alive somehow, eyes missing, letting out bloodcurdling shrieks of pain all the while. And then the reader realises where the rest of Rad's citizenry have gone, aside from being turned into statues and husks.
- In Touhou Ibunshu, Mokou is able to produce undead monstrosities called the Kashoyo from regular fairies. The undeath these things have been inflicted with is so awful that after Patchouli tears apart a swarm with a spellcard invoking the power of an assault rifle, the leftover gore pulls itself into a single humanoid mass and would have still advanced on Patchouli and Koakuma had Remilia not seen it and targeted with a more powerful spellcard that damaged it to the point it was unable to repeat the trick due to material capacity restrictions. The abomination was still alive until Mokou's defeat.
Film — Animation
- A Nightmare Sequence in Felidae has a giant, insane Gregor Mandel formed from a massive number of dead cats.
- In Ralph Breaks the Internet, the Ralph Viruses all pile onto each other to make a giant version of themselves in the climax.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: In the third act, Superfly becomes a huge collection of mutated animal bodies.
Film — Live-Action
- The climax of The Church has the protagonist facing off against an enormous demon-head made of the writhing, filthy corpses of the "witches", on whose mass grave the titular church was built.
- In John Dies at the End, a supernatural entity with a grudge against Marconi manifests as a hulking humanoid figure made out of all the meat, fish, and poultry in a basement freezer.
- The ending of Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends; the last kaiju to show up is Beryudora, a mega-kaiju whose body is made from fusing together more than 300 different kaiju...
- Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street is sometimes revealed to have the screaming faces of his past victims embedded in his torso.
- In The Thing (1982), the Blair-Thing absorbs several people and gathers all its biomass into a twisted amalgam as a last-ditch survival effort.
Literature
- Xakhaz, the main villain of Beneath Nightmare Castle, is an evil wizard who delights in using the dark arts in fusing himself with the bodies of his victims. In his final appearance, he's a towering mass of limbs, legs, and various faces all fused together, which he considers is the most "perfect" form one can achieve.
- The Colossus of Ylourngne by Clark Ashton Smith features a giant zombie created out of hundreds of corpses by a mad necromancer in the Middle Ages to serve as a sort of undead Humongous Mecha.
- Graham Masterton's horror story Death Trance concerns Indonesian folklore, and the feared vampire/voudou spirits, the Leyaks. The Death Goddess, the Mistress of the Leyaks, takes the form of a huge distorted human figure which is made up of millions upon millions of souls she has captured and ensnared. The hero of the story thinks he sees faces he has known, billowing and writhing and screaming in her "hair", among untold others....the Death Trance of the title allows Balinese monks to physically enter the other world, at the price of possible capture by Leyaks and their mistress.
- Daniel Arenson seems to have a fascination with this trope and uses it several times in the Dragons of Requiem. Demonic creatures appear regularly in the series and often are described as hideous amalgamations of body parts. Light of Requiem book 3 of the Song of Dragons trilogy is the most straight forward with Mimics, creatures stitched together from body parts harvested from the living and the dead and reanimated through magic stones. All made with human body parts, but not limited to human forms. Some are gigantic monstrosities and others are shaped as hideous zombie dragons with giant wings of human skin.
- The Dresden Files: Rawheads and Bloody Bones are wyldfae that are formed from the remains of animals killed in slaughterhouses. One of them appears in the comic Welcome to the Jungle and larger members of its kin are in Cold Days and Battle Ground.
- In Feet of Clay, Lord Vetinari, his mind clouded by poison, draws a sketch of a human figure which on closer examination turns out to be composed of hundreds and hundreds of smaller individual figures. It is left to the imagination as to what this represents, but a good guess, based on the similarity to the cover of Leviathan, is that this is his conception of the city of Ankh-Morpork, where millions of individual "cells" more or less function as a united whole - with Vetinari running the brain.
- Clive Barker's short story "In the Hills, the Cities" features the citizenry of two towns strapping themselves to form giants made of naked people to fight each other. It works as well as you'd expect for a story found in Books Of Blood.
- The cover◊ for Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan may be one of the oldest examples (after Arcimboldo's paintings). In it, a crowned giant made of hundreds of people acts as an allegory of government.
- The prologue of Leviathan Wakes shows the first Protomolecule construct seen by a non-Mega-Corp employee as a Blob Monster, but when it's examined closer by the crew of the Rocinante, it's seen to have the bones and insides of several people in it as well, making it a bit more soupy version of this.
- William F. Nolan's short story "The Pool" has a Blob Monster with a Body Of Bodies dwelling in the eponymous pool of the story. Its form is made up of bits of everything it consumed in the past, including a few unfortunate people. The ending has two children approach the pool...
- Used in Revival by Stephen King. Mother, a monstrous godlike ant-thing, is made up of the bodies/souls of the dead, including the wife and son of the book's antagonist.
- The Fykos beast created by the mad god Grizraz Hearteater in Tad Williams's Tailchaser's Song is molded from the dead and dying bodies of hundreds of small animals.
- Second Apocalypse: Bashrags are one of the Inchoroi's weapon races made using tekne. They have the appearance of three human bodies twisted into a single, hulking brute.
Live-Action TV
- In Doctor Who, the Colony of Sarff consists of a group of smaller snakes which form Sarff, which interacts with the Doctor as a single entity.
- One episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers had a large group of Putties piling up and forming a gigantic one, worthy of the Zords.
- Stranger Things: In season three, the Mind Flayer gets fed up with having to attack the normal world through proxies, so it uses the fragment of itself that got trapped in the real world to gather and liquefy a bunch of rats, melding the remains together into a crude avatar for it to inhabit and work through. And when it figures out where the Party is located, it liquefies and absorbs all of its human proxies in order to make said avatar bigger and stronger, then tries to kill them all personally.
- One episode of Grimm featured some very inbred Reinigen (rat Wesen) who could join together to make one of these if they so chose.
Mythology
- The Gashadokuro from Japanese myth is a giant skeleton formed from an entire village worth of starved townspeople or the fallen soldiers whose bodies were left to rot where they fell. In general the Gashadokuro is formed from the collective misery and hatred of the people it was complied from and fueled by their souls. The worst part of it is cannot be defeated; the only way to kill it is to keep running and hope it burns itself out (Cracked.com jokingly suggests offering to buy it a cheeseburger might work as well).
- In the Hellenistic period, it was commonly said that Achilles had ordered his ashes put into the same jar as Patroclus' so that they would be together forever (obviously, this went along with the idea-commonly held at that time-that they were lovers). The cult of Alexander the Great held this as a point of doctrine, and furthermore claimed that Alexander and his close companion Hephaistion were reincarnations of the Homeric heroes. There is a nonzero chance that Alexander and Hephaistion believed this about themselves, although saying what exactly they thought is difficult given the lack of sources. This is in the mythology section because it is a belief about these historical persons, not a statement about what they did or didn't do.
- The Heavenly Host and the Demons of Hell are sometimes treated this way in artwork or medieval folk tales (rather than as a group of individuals they are seen as a single entity).
- Hindu gods and demons are sometimes portrayed and/or described this way. Most commonly, the deity is portrayed with one body and many arms which are holding symbols or making significant gestures. Sometimes though, this can extend to multiple heads, or even multiple entire bodies. The reason for doing it is the same no matter which style is chosen: to represent the idea that the deity includes multiple aspects (which may have their own names and often be represented separately).
Others
- BIONICLE: In the Kingdom Alternate Dimension, Teridax first takes over Icarax's body and then absorbs the bodies of every Makuta that died afterwards, gaining their knowledge and mass and becoming an unrecognizable colossus.
Tabletop Games
- In the Deadlands adventure The Unity, players face a psychically-charged, undead mass composed of several syker corpses.
- The sourcebook "Rascals, Varmints & Critters" introduces the undead 'Glom, which is literally a mass of corpses fused together and made ambulatory, as well as capable of absorbing more bodies into itself.
- Dungeons & Dragons
- A corpse gatherer is basically an entire graveyard animated into a gigantic humanoid shape, bodies, dirt and all. It seeks to become bigger and more powerful by adding more corpses to its body, even if it has to make the corpses from the living.
- The page image is of the charnel hound, which is, unsurprisingly, a huge hound made out of corpses. This creature kills living creatures and adds them to its body.
- Necronauts, while its description states that it seems to be made out of a pile of bones and corpses. Considering it is an undead that grows by adding bones and corpses to its body, it might be safe to assume that it is indeed made up of what it seems.
- Ravenloft: Zombie golems and bone golems are created using the destroyed remains of several different (slain) zombies or animated skeletons as raw materials. There are also living walls, which are made of the jumbled undead flesh of any creatures that died within 100 yards, include those that die fighting them.
- Mystara: Multiple non-animated skeletons are needed to produce the four-armed bone golems.
- Module X2 Castle Amber. While the PCs are in Averoigne they must defeat a hundred foot tall zombie colossus created out of hundreds of dead bodies. The creature was directly based on "The Colossus of Ylournge" by Clark Ashton Smith (see the Literature section above).
- The Epic Level Handbook reimagines the hecatoncheires of Classical Mythology as something◊ very evocative of this trope.
- The carcass crabs of Eberron look like piles of corpses in a crab shape, but they're actually Giant Enemy Crabs that scavenge battlefields for bodies to attach to their spiny, sticky shells. This gives them morbid camouflage, as well as an additional layer of protection from all the weapons and armor stuck to them with the corpses.
- Exalted:
- The Lookshy Rebel is the result of a magical backfire fusing the bodies (and minds?) of several people into a Body Horror mess that wanders the streets of the city of Lookshy, impotently trying to start a rebellion. It has Resurrective Immortality.
- Alongside the many hideous necrotech and Flesh Golem creations of the Deathlords and their Abyssal knights are the Spine Chains: legless torsos of many human skeletons fused together by shoving the head of each into the next one's ribcage. They crawl around like giant centipedes on their hands, wielding numerous weapons with their front "segments."
- Magic: The Gathering:
- Phyrexian Rebirth destroys every (destroyable) creature and gives you a new one, with power/toughness equal to however many things it destroyed. The illustration is a huge, six-limbed skeleton made of more skeletons, towering over a field of yet more skeletons.
- Diregraf Colossus is a hulking humanoid mass made out of reanimated corpses, wood and dirt. It gains a slight power boost for every Zombie in its controlling player's graveyard when it's put into play, symbolizing multiple corpses being fused together into a stronger abomination.
- Phyrexian Rebirth
- Pathfinder:
- There's an undead called the Charnel Colossus, which is basically a huge undead monstrosity that was meant to be used as an un-living library, and is composed of an entire graveyards worth of "like-minded individuals". Imagine the Legion boss from Castlevania crossed with a centipede.
- The Pathfinder-compatible sourcebook Naat: Realm of Necromancers introduces a spell that can create this from a large number of humanoid corpses. The more corpses available, the larger and stronger the resulting creature will be.
- The Skybourne campaign setting has the bone ship, a colossal undead monstrosity in the shape of a sailing ship made of bones and flesh and manned by a crew of enslaved souls. Not only does it repair itself by collecting the remains of anything that died in the sea, it also traps the souls of all unfortunate sailors who die in its vicinity, preventing any form of resurrection and adding them to its crew.
- Vampire: The Masquerade gives us the Vohzd, a favorite creation of the Tzimisce whenever a lot of their enemies need to die. It's a war-ghoul made up of parts from at least twenty different individuals, human and animal, and basically directed towards the nearest cluster of enemies like a guided missile made of angry meat.
- Warhammer Fantasy: The Vampire Counts faction has this unit called the Corpse Cart, a cart carrying plague victims that have been re-animated by dark magic, and which are now fused together in a mass. It roams around adding dead bodies to itself. If that wasn't creepy enough, it can also Mind Rape people, giving them nightmares, driving wizards temporarily insane and in some extreme cases brainwashing people into adding themselves to it.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Evilswarm/Verz Azazaoth. "Worm Apocalypse", "Worm Dimikles", "Worm Falco", "Worm King", "Worm Rakuyeh", "Worm Tentacles", "Worm Warlord" and "Worm Victory" can be identified as being parts of the whole monster. While the merge of "Worms" to fuse "Worm Zero" is "clean," the "Worms" merged to make this monster are just jumbled up in a large group of mangled biomass.
Video Games
- Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II: Lluvia Bllodmire created several freaking monsters like those and kept them in her manor. Some of them (the humanoid ones) seems to be zombies (they can be damaged by Alissa's Turn Undead), while others seems to be "living beings".
- The Bard's Tale: This trope is parodied, along with many others more, when you reach the end of Hatcher's Farm: This being a Celtic/Scottish setting, the boss is a Haggis Monster which can actually restore his health if you let the zombified animals reach the grinding pit from which it spawned.
- Bloodborne:
- The One Reborn is an eldritch amalgamation of corpses in a centaur-like shape that seemingly drops from the Paleblood Moon.
- The Cramped Casket enemy is basically the coffin of a Clown-Car Grave that hasn't even been buried yet. It's a family's worth of Scourge-infected corpses all crammed into the same coffin and left rotting in the street. It attacks with its claws and by spitting blood clots. It's probably one of the best inducators that Yharnham's werewolf epidemic is worse than it seems (provided you get to Yahar'Gul before The Reveal)...
- The "brains" of the Winter Lanterns look like a large wad of Messenger corpses.
- Bloody Zombies have giant zombie bosses, and all of them except the first are made from stitching multiple bodies together to create zombie behemoths towering over the players.
- Castlevania
- The recurring boss Legion in the series is almost always depicted as a colossal being made from human corpses that form its shell. Sometimes still screaming.
- Flesh Golems are described as being made of several bodies. They're dripping blood in some cases too.
- The final boss of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, Menace: a giant made out of body parts. Even the battlefield you fight it on is made out of corpses.
- Clive Barker's Jericho: The Behemoths are apparently made from countless corpses sewn together in a vague, beastly form.
- Clock Tower: According to the manual, Dan's giant baby form is actually a shell of corpses and dead bodies.
- Darkest Dungeon: The Collector is a body of severed, still living human heads.
- Dark Souls:
- Dark Souls: Gravelord Nito is a giant skeleton made of skeletons who carries a giant sword that is also made of skeletons (except for the blade). If you join his covenant you get a smaller version of the sword for yourself, made of less skeletons. Slightly subverted in that the actual Nito model is simply a giant skeleton wearing a cape made of interwined skeletons around its body, giving this impression. The New Londo Ruins also hosts gigantic, misshapen horrors that can produce explosive ghost heads from their mass.
- Dark Souls II: The Rotten is made up of the Undead who were tossed into the Gutter and found their way to the Black Gulch. The Undead that make up the Rotten are still writhing and moaning in pain. In New Game Plus, the Rotten drops the Soul of the Old Dead One, heavily implied to be Gravelord Nito's soul.
- Devil May Cry 2: Argosax is this combined with Blob Monster, taking the form of a gigantic pile of brown flesh with the heads of most of the previous bosses in the game (and Griffon from DMC1) jutting out of it.
- Alkenide from Demolish Fist is an experimental monster who's a blob of flesh, blimbs, legs, organs and half a doctor's body grafted to its front, and the boss of the first area in the Methuselah Corp entrance after you're done dealing with the lesser mutant enemies.
- Diablo III: The Unburied are undead abominations composed of the bodies of humans thrown into mass graves without a proper burial which decomposed together into one hideous being bound by foul magic.
- Dragon Age has Harvesters, golems that are made out of corpses merged together.
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has Bonelords, a favored form of undead in the region. They are a pair of skeletal humanoid torsos glued one on top of the other, with a single skull and four arms. They hover around ominously draped in brown robes and are capable spellcasters.
- Eastern Exorcist has more than one of the bosses. The Shura, for instance, is a cluster of ghosts formed into one gigantic spirit-entity, while the Three-Faced Rakshasha is made of three different bodies joined together.
- Endless Nightmare: Prison sees you fighting the Human Blob, a monstrous ball of flesh fused from plenty of human bodies, with a dozen faces adorning it's surface. It can perform a Rolling Attack as well, flattening you with folds and folds of human meat.
- Eternal Darkness: The Gatekeepers of Xel'latoth, Ancient of Madness, are a pair of headless torsos fused at the waist.
- The Evil Within: Amalgam Alpha is a huge, grotesque, amorphous mass of horribly twisted corpses. See here.
- The Evil Within 2: The Guardian is a ghastly humanoid golem made from the mutilated bodies and severed heads of numerous women who were victims of Stefano Valentini's twisted "art".
- Final Fantasy:
- Neo-Exdeath from Final Fantasy V. The boss looks like a mixture of several beings and/or creatures.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the first form of the last boss of the Puppets' Bunker raid is the Compound, a swarm of naked androids that have merged to form a giant sphere. Once you defeat its first form, the sphere breaks apart, and the androids recombine into Compound 2P, a giant replica of 2B, complete with a sword made out of yet more androids.
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location has Ennard, a combination of the endoskeletons from all the members of Circus Baby's Pizza World.
- Genji has Kuyo summoning a huge monster made of human corpses merged together in one single being during her boss battle.
- Grim Dawn:
- The Skeletal Monstrosity and Skeletal Gargantuan are Elite Mooks among the Arkovian undead, being towering monsters composed of the bones of dozens of skeletons. Three separate boss variants (Karnath Chillblood, Moosilauke the Chillwind, and Ilgorr the Eternal) can reconstruct themselves after being killed to enter a second phase.
- Not satisfied with possessing corpses or living beings, the Aetherials are trying to twist bodies together to form horrors to use in combat. One of such fine examples is the Amalgam boss fought at the very end of the Gruesome Harvest, a quadrupedal abomination made by combining together humans and cattle into a giant war machine.
- Ashes of Malmouth adds the Aetherial horrors dwelling in the titular city, where even the weakest mook is a misshapen grotesquery made by merging several people into a hulking, spiky humanoid of twisted flesh.
- Halo: The Flood is a space-borne Zombie Apocalypse, with many of their more advanced forms made up of numerous corpses combined into powerful monstrosities. The most powerful of these are the living nodes for their central intelligence, called Graveminds, which are made up of thousands of corpses and often speak in Gratuitous Trochaic Septameter. There's also Key Minds, which are Graveminds that have grown so large that they take up entire planets. According to The Forerunner Saga, particularly Halo: Silentium, this is taken even further: the Flood themselves are formed of the ashes of the Precursors, and the Gravemind (referring to the Flood Hive Mind as a whole) has the memory of every single being that has been part of it, including every Flood form it speaks through. This means that the Gravemind is a body of trillions of bodies throughout the ages.
- HEPH: The enemy monsters are made up of the corpses of one-or-more of the crew.
- House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn: The Moon is a colossal, demonic-looking entity with wings whose body is actually shaped during the boss battle himself, using whole hordes of zombies to grow bigger and bigger.
- Infinity Wars: The Zombie Abomination◊ is a colossal zombie made from every dead character in your graveyard. If your opponent manages to remove it, it apparently falls apart into all the characters that comprised it, reanimated again.
- INSIDE (2016): In the normal ending, the playable character frees and merges into what appears to be a fleshy blob made of multiple bodies. You proceed to rampage through the facility to escape.
- Kingdom of Loathing: Parodied with the Zombie Home-Owner's Association clan dungeon boss. It's a horrific, undead abomination, sure, but it's still an HOA and more concerned with telling people what to do on their own property than anything else.
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land has Fecto Forgo, comprised of the incomplete Fecto Elfilis after absorbing the bodies of Leon and various Beast Pack enemies, forming a large, vaguely amorphous mass of slime with bodies and eyes protruding from it.
- The Last of Us Part II: The Rat King is a super-organism consisting of the fusion of multiple Stalkers, Clickers, and a Bloater, connected together by the Cordyceps fungus.
- Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver: Melchiah and his spawn need to absorb flesh and corpses to survive. As a result, he's a massive, slug-like behemoth made from thousands of dead bodies.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: One enemy that was Dummied Out but still found in the game's files is a golem made of rolled-up Gorons that assemble together. Footage here.
- Luigi's Mansion: Boolossus is a cartoony ghost variation: a gigantic Boo composed of about thirteen smaller Boos
- Mass Effect: The Scion and Praetorian enemies are the result of multiple Husks being fused together — three to make a Scion, and a whopping thirty to make a Praetorian. The Brutes from 3 are this as well, the result of a a Krogan Husk having it's head replaced by that of a Turian Husk. It isn't quite as obvious (nor spelled out in the in-game Codex), but the Cannibals are mostly batarian, with a human body serving as the gun arm. The Reapers are technically this as well, being massive ships constructed using the liquefied remains of entire populations of a species.
- The final form of King Zao in Mystic Defender is a pillar made of assorted body parts, as result of the evil wizard Zareth's numerous sacrifices, stitched together by various eldritch magic. To complicate things further, your Love Interest Alexandra is fused to it's tip.
- The Lich from Nexus Clash can build a giant Fossil Monstrosity stitched together from multiple already-reanimated human skeletons.
- Pypes' Beasts in Nightmare Creatures are hulking brute apparently made from this trope, judging from the extra arms and heads.
- Nioh 2 has the Mitsume Yatsura (Three-Eyed Eight Faces), prowling horrors made of eight heads mashed together with limbs giving them a spider-like gait. The last DLC introduces the Itsumaden, monstrous crow-like demons whose feathers and wings are made of intercoiled skeletal remains and cadavers.
- One Night at Flumpty's 2 has the Eyesaur, an Eldritch Abomination, revealed after Hard-Boiled Mode is finished to be made up of all those who Flumpty kidnapped and killed.
- Operation: Matriarchy have several of the Dirod-class enemies, formerly humans whose bodies are fused together into gigantic entities. The Dirod-Ballhand in particular notably has "="13 - 20 hearts, 8 brains and duplicate critical organs".
- Onimusha: The floating, soul-sucking Genma are composed of various skulls merged together.
- Pokémon: Wishiwashi are individually rather wimpy-looking fish, but a hundred or so gathered together create a ginormous Sea Monster that can scare a Gyarados.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 0: The Leech Zombies/Mimicry Marcus are vaguely humanoid horrors made of infected leeches clustered together. The Final Boss is, essentially, a King Mook version of them.
- Resident Evil: Outbreak: The boss Nyx takes advantage of his amoeba-like body to add prey to his mass: by the time you face it, it has absorbed several soldiers and a Tyrant.
- Resident Evil 4: Ramon Salazar lets the Plaga Queen absorb him and his Verdugo to produce a disgusting abomination which sports bodyparts of all three components. It's also implied that the U3 Boss was made with a similar process of merging different living creatures together, as the parasite will keep attacking even after the humanoid torso has been killed.
- Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles: the Final Boss is the grotesque V-Complex, a massive plant-based B.O.W. which has absorbed several other zombies and B.O.W. in its mass, including the Big Bad. Traits from previously-slain monsters can be seen emerging from the V-Complex' body.
- Resident Evil 5: Ouroboros B.O.W. are monsters made of writhing black tentacles trying to absorb other people or corpses to grow larger. The boss Ouroboros Aheri spawned by Excella grows to Kaiju size after incorporating several corpses in its mass.
- Resident Evil 6: C-Virus B.O.W. form from cocoons, but the Final Boss of Chris' campaign, HAOS, is seemingly the result of having hundreds of cocooned bodies merged into one being.
- Resident Evil: Revelations 2: Ouroboros-infected B.O.W. make a return, with Revenants looking like they've been made by merging together two people and nailing them with rusty metal blades, and the Durgas, whose heads are a bush-like amalgam of fused skulls and faces towering on a massive tree-like humanoid body.
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein: The first boss of the game, Olaric, is a giant undead colosssus made of rotting flesh
- RuneScape: The artificial god created in the quest Nomad's Elegy, "Gielinor", resembles a grotesque version of Guthix, a deceased god, formed from countless souls with their faces and limbs visible emerging from its body.
- Paper Mario: The Origami King: Due to being made out of scraps of paper, all of the Paper Macho enemies count as this to a degree, but the most explicit example is the Paper Mistake Buzzy Beetle, which is covered in the cut-out faces of Bowser's troops. Kamek's face is stuck right in the middle of its head, allowing it to fire powerful blasts of magic and create Dry Bones skulls made of faces to attack Mario. Once Kamek's face is peeled off, the other faces fall off and reduce it to a regular (but still dangerous) Paper Macho Buzzy Beetle.
- Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: The hostile inhabitants of Mud Bog Island include humanoid monsters seemingly made of a tar-like substance which can merge in the ceiling/floors at will. A land-bound variation include a mass composed of female bodies clustered in a dogpile which attacks by clawing Shantae (if she's next to them) or by turning into large jaws to bite her (if she's above).
- The non-human enemies in Shadow Guardian are abominations consisting of multiple decomposing human bodies all fused together, with two skulls for heads and multiple limbs fused into their torso. They're among the largest enemies in-game, expectedly.
- Shin Megami Tensei:
- The recurring demon Legion is made of multiple faces with a few more body parts sticking out.
- In Persona 2 Innocent Sin, Nyarlathotep appears as the party's fathers merged into a single body, the Great Father.
- Persona 5 has the penultimate boss Masayoshi Shido riding atop the Beast of Human Sacrifice, a golden mass of bodies, during the initial phases of their boss battle. For each phase, the bodies take on the form of a giant lion, gryphon, and pyramid, that the party has to defeat before they can damage the boss. The bodies represent the Apathetic Citizens who blindly follow them and ignore all their flaws.
- Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor: Belberith's body is made of several other monsters such as Belphegor. There are also the heads of an old man, a cat and a frog sticking out of him, as well as spider legs.
- Splatter House: The Final Boss from the second game is one. The remake uses one too, with a variation: as it slowly moves towards you and your girlfriend, corpses fall from him, come back to life and attack you.
- Spinal Breakers's Final Boss is a mass of bodies, from humans, animals, and assorted unknown lifeforms all fused into a living blob, and each part needs to be destroyed one at a time.
- Super Meat Boy: Little Horn is a giant monster made up of bodies. The resulting body interestingly resembles the player character, while the bodies it is made up of also resemble the protagonist.
- TimeSplitters Future Perfect: The Creature or "Princess" is a colossal undead monster seemingly made from different body parts glued together.
- Total War: Warhammer III: In one of the nurglings' moving animations, the members of one of the distinct swarms that make up a single unit will stack themselves on each other's shoulders and grab each other's limbs to form a facsimile of a humanoid body and then run forwards in this arrangement.
- World of Warcraft: Thaddius, the fourth and final boss of the Construct Quarter in Naxxramas, was made from the corpses of women and children harvested by the Scourge.
- The last boss of Zombie Massacre is a giant zombie made of multiple zombie bodies stitched together. With three heads on its shoulders.
Visual Novels
- When Keira activates her Kyudan in Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen Hachimyoujin she will merge with the Steel Fang Army that is serving her to become a huge monstrosity composed of the armies numerous bodies. They are also all still conscious while in this state allowing them to keep on fighting and helping Keira, making her effectively covered in defensive turrets.
- As an amalgamation of multiple spirits, the Demon Tsukuyomi from Spirit Hunter: NG appears as a giant clump of flesh littered with grotesquely deformed faces. Akira and his companion are both disgusted by its appearance.
Web Animation
- The rabbits in Cyriak's 7 billion build larger and larger rabbits out of their own bodies. By the end of the video, they're four layers deep - that is, they've built a rabbit of rabbits of rabbits of rabbits.
- Likewise, Beastenders has the cast of EastEnders fuse into a 50-foot tall abomination.
Webcomics
- In Charby the Vampirate changelings look like a mass of different body parts mid-change as the absorb the next unfortunate whose form and memories they will take at the end of the transformation.
- In Drowtales, there is a variant of Demon known as the Glutton which absorbs the body of its victims into its mass. The end result is rather Squicky.
- ReBoot: Code of Honor: Gnosis's face is made up of the bodies of several sprites.
- From Stand Still, Stay Silent we have the rarer Giants in the Silent World, a conglomerate of warped, post-Plague people (a.k.a. "Trolls") and animals (a.k.a. "Beasts") in very large, nightmarish, organy-Meat Moss-beast-things that can change their configurations to a horrifically great degree, depending on what the mass as a whole is trying to do. On your head be it if you think they don't use their networked intelligence and instincts, too.
- Unsounded: The Silver Weapon creates its body using the slaves the First Silver was being smuggled in, as well as its unfortunate victims from the Deadly Nevergreen.
Web Original
- Gemini Home Entertainment's take on skinwalkers is more akin to this than its original source. They are giant horrors (even though we never see one in full, they're clearly around the size of a multi-story building) that absorb humans and animals within itself. The end result is a visceral amalgamation of countless bodies surrounding a monstrous core. It is not something that walks in skins, it is a walker made of skins.
- The "ghoul" from The Horror from the Vault is able to assimilate living tissue by drowning people and animals in its nest-pool. It also produces "mounds" of flesh-covered organs, seamlessly fused together and completely functional despite being from several different species. One of the nightmares it induces is about a creature not unlike the Legion from Castlevania replacing the sun. The monster itself looks like a Giant Enemy Crab made of fused, still-living bodies.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-625 ("Anklebiters"): Each SCP-625 is a rat-like creature that is apparently made up of parts of at least seven different species of rodents seamlessly merged together.
- SCP-1227 ("The Family Man") is nine Russians and a dog welded together by some unknown pathogen. The whole mass thinks it's a man and his family. Most of the bodies aren't even whole; portions of a man are used as the digestive tract and is fed via hole in the stomach while another is used as the ass end of it and another is used to process urine.
- SCP-625 ("Anklebiters")
Western Animation
- In the Adventure Time episode "Freak City", all the freaks combined into one body look like this.
- Castlevania (2017): Isaac has his army of monsters attack a village that has been conquered by a wizard known only as the Magician, primarily so he can use the villagers' bodies as resources for his upcoming war against Carmilla. Of course the Magician forms all of the villagers into one huge ball to form Legion, making Isaac give a non-verbal Oh, Crap!.
- Played for humor in Family Guy: Joe gathers his handicapped friends and together form a huge, mecha-like entity called "Crippletron''.
- In The Grim Adventures of The KND Crossover, Billy and the Delightful Children from Down the Lane wind up fusing together due to Grim's scythe being stuck to Billy's Dad's lucky pants (due to Billy being stupid) and turn into the Delightful Reaper. They begin to assimilate any and all kids they can find, growing larger and more powerful with every one until they grow into a giant Grim with tacky pants until Mandy takes over. They assimilate with various kids form other shows like Squirrel Boy and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. It should be stated that Billy is so stupid that he has a degree of independence and even control over the body.
- In the Invader Zim episode "Plague of Babies", the title aliens are creatures that resemble human newborns, but have all sorts of freaky powers - among them, the ability to merge together to form a giant baby warrior (with some weird screen...thing for a face.)
- Legend of the Three Caballeros: In the Underworld, the ghosts of Sheldgoose's ancestors combine into one giant creature after each of them inflate a different body part.
- Over the Garden Wall: The Beast, when he is briefly illuminated◊ by the Woodsman's lantern.
- In the The Owl House episode "Hollow Mind", Luz and Hunter are chased around Belos's mind by a shambling monster seemingly made of rotting necrotic goo, which they assume to be Belos's inner self. By the end of the episode it's revealed that the monster is an amalgamation of all of the Palisman souls Belos has consumed over the centuries, who are still conscious enough to form animal heads on the creature's skin, and yell at Luz and Hunter to get away from the actual Inner Belos. The Inner Belos later plucks a single bird from the creature's mass and crushes it in front of Hunter.
- In Steven Universe, it turns out Gems don't actually die when they're shattered; the shards continue to hold some fragment of the original Gem's consciousness. If the shards are forcibly melded together and allowed to try reforming, the result is a mass of confused limbs which constantly moans and shrieks in pain and horror as it shambles around.
- The Docent in Infinity Train, when it eventually emerges from the walls (initially appearing as a Living Shadow), is a vaguely-humanoid creature formed entirely of arms and hands. Worse still, many of the hands have passengers' 'numbers' on them, implying it's a Hero Killer that has built its body out of passers by.
Real Life
- From the perspective of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, all multicellular organisms are this.
- The Portuguese man o' war is a jellyfish-like organism whose body is actually a group of multiple colonial organisms that are fused together and function cohesively as if they were a single animal.
- Slime molds straddle the line between multicellular and single cell organisms. They can live independently as single cells but also form groups during their reproductive phases which move as a single entity. During this collective phase, they move as a single unit and to an outside observer seem to be a single animal (well, ambulatory fungus).
- Invoked by the assassin bug. They invade ant nests, and glue the empty carapaces of their victims to their own. Ants, due to their community recycling program, see this as a pile of food and try to collect it, becoming another tiny shocked bug face in the crowd. The assassin bug will eventually moult and move on, leaving a fused pile of dead bodies behind.
- The phenomenon of "rat kings". Rarely, a group of rats will get their tails stuck together by the various kinds of filth they live in, forced to move as a single unit. Highly disgusting and disturbing for anything that encounters one. A similar thing has also been seen to happen with squirrels.
