Our Monsters Are Weird



"The rabbit is not just sitting there. The rabbit is part of the monster. So you're looking at an evil tree stump that has a cute bunny on the end of its tentacles so that it can lure people or other animals near it. While I understand the parallel to animals in the real world, I'm still stuck here looking at a googly-eyed tree stump with a rabbit glued to its head. Wow."

- Head Injury Theater

These are the most unusual, insane and bizarre monsters around—but not because they're Eldritch Abominations. No, they're just "What the heck is that?" weird.

They don't have to be lame or have a Weaksauce Weakness. They just have to be too strange to fit in any of the other categories. In fact, these can be some of the most popular monsters. Can be a result of the work in question going for Attack of the Killer Whatever. Very often a subtrope of Surreal Horror... or at times, Surreal Humor.

See also Starfish Aliens.

Anime and Manga

 * Most Shinigami of Death Note are designed in such a fashion. Ryuk and Rem are the most human looking and resemble a winged vampire and a mummy whose arms are vertebrae, respectively, but the others are downright freaky, like Shidoh, who looks like a mummified owl/moth hybrid, or Gelus, who looks like a Frankensteinian puppet made from... other monsters.
 * Armonia is a skeleton thing either covered or made of gold and gemstones.
 * Midora is a hominid salamander-y thing.
 * Nu is a giant rock covered with eyes.
 * The King of Death is a spherical Eldritch Abomination chained to various surfaces and covered in tree roots made of bone that lead to a skull-shaped structure whose "mouth" contains his actual head... also a skull, but with three eyes.
 * A lot of the Apostles' true forms in Berserk, especially Irvine's true form. Seriously, what apostle has their torso on their monster's half's butt?
 * Archduke Gorgon of Mazinger Z was built along the same lines.
 * The ogres probably qualify as well: Bulbous torsos, spindly limbs, and a head that looks like a cross between a sperm whale and a vampire bat with creepily human eyes and a mouth that opens to the collarbones...
 * Add the fact that they procreate with human women....
 * None of them can hold a candle to some of the stuff created/revealed when
 * This was based on the works of Hieronymus Bosch (see below under Mythology and Religion).
 * Aratama Tribe: Most of the Oni (former human spirits who mutated into demons that eat negative emotions and produce even more malice) look like their mythological Japanese counterpart: horned heads, sharp teeth, muscled bodies, the usual. The Oni Otoshi, unlike the typical Oni, looks more human and is a pure blood oni that turns living humans into other Oni. One of those humans happened to be a pair of bullied high school students who, under the power of the Oni Otoshi, fused back to back into a bizarre two headed creature with two pairs of hands and legs: http://www.mangafox.com/manga/aratama_tribe/v01/c002/15.html.
 * Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion. One of them takes a human form and a few of the others are vaguely humanoid; most of the others are as bizarre as they come. Examples range from giant hovering phallus with laser tentacles to a living sea of negatively charged particles with a three-dimensional shadow. One of them is a giant octahedron (that changes shape in mind-bending and physically impossible ways in Rebuild). The designs were presumably supposed to evoke the Biblical descriptions of Angels mentioned below.
 * On a similar note, the Heterodyne from Dai-Guard are similarly bizarre, but have some commonalities. No two are quite alike in design, shape and abilities, but are all based on the same basic composition which is equal parts fungus and octagon-shaped crystal. They then form a body out of surrounding matter, making no two quite alike. They can move freely (some even fly), are usually attracted to EM waves and often have odd powers to defend themselves. That's it. Everything else is up for grabs.
 * The witches from Madoka Magica. On the normal end of the scale you have a human-shaped silhouette that attacks by growing a tree at it's target. On the weird end there's a giant monster made of skirts and arms. The others fall somewhere between.
 * The hat of Ushio and Tora.
 * Many of the creatures and plants in Toriko. Especially the ones based on normal foods.
 * Pick any yokai of the week in Inuyasha—readers are bound to find this trope, including bird monsters with upper human bodies attached to giant furry balls of teeth with wings, a sickle armed white...thing with a Bishonen head that is an offshoot of the Big Bad's body and lives inside the intestines of its human-looking younger brother like a parasite, a spider demon who masquerades as a kindly monk but whose form is actually a GIANT FLESHY SPIDER WEB, a hair demon whose true form was a red comb covered with hair entangled with skulls, two conjoined-at-the-waist yokai who fight for control of their body, and a giant dragon that would look indistinguishable from any other dragon if it were not for the talking mask on its forehead which is it's real face.

Comic Books

 * Grant Morrison's tenure for Doom Patrol thoroughly exemplifies this trope. For evidence, just take a quick gander at John Dandy, The Candlemaker, or any member of The Cult Of The Unwritten Book
 * Come to think about it, Grant Morrison is in love with this trope...

Fan Fiction

 * In With Strings Attached, Brox develops a spell that turns random bits of inorganic trash into living creatures (which the four dub Nasty Bits). They encounter such delights as a boulder with tentacles, a spidery glass-thing, an animated statue of a god with a penis as long as its leg (and using it like a sword), and feet (broken off statues) that hop around, prompting George to mutter “ Monty Python, Monty Python.” Also, Ringo's pair of black opaque glasses comes alive and scuttles out of his beltpouch.
 * Paul later learns how to actually make these things himself. He loathes the spell, but it comes in handy once.

Films -- Live-Action

 * Ghostbusters, in all media. Alhough the trope doesn't really kick in until The Real Ghostbusters, signs of this still creep through in the original movie—the Squid Ghost is one, and there was another idea in which the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would become something truly monstrous in the final battle.
 * The popular consciousness' conception of Mothra fits. As Big Creepy-Crawlies go, Butterflies are pretty tame. Then you find out that she's a god or other supernatural being related to protective goodness, things make a whole lot more sense—or get even more confusing. Either / or? Not weird. Together: Weird. The fact that she's the only monster to have a consistent string of victories against Godzilla says volumes for her prowess. A lot of Japanese monsters tend to fit into the "weird" category.
 * Gabara, however, certainly falls under this. He's an oni-like (Oni are essentially a Japanese equivalent to ogres) monster who basically exists to bully Minya, and it's implied that he's nothing more than the result of some kid's overactive imagination. Also... he looks like a cross between a cat and a toad.
 * To an American, King Caesar makes no sense whatsoever. The trick: it's actually "King Shisa", a Shisa; an Okinawan variant of the temple-guarding Chinese Fu-dog. Why it has scales is anyone's guess, though other parts such as the crystal, energy-beam-reflecting eyes hint at its golem-like nature.
 * Baragon, who is some sort of ancient reptile...thing with big floppy ears. Awww. Oh, and he's also the smallest monster in the Toho Universe. AND he's possibly the inspiration for the Nidoran line! Made even stranger in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack where he's a freakin' god.
 * The Dorats. Cute foot-tall lizard-bat-cat things that are basically genetically engineered...things...created to be the "perfect pet". That is, and become . It's a case of three weird-looking small monsters.
 * Gigan AKA The Cyborg "Space Chicken". With hooks for hands (chainsaws in one film) and a buzzsaw on his stomach.
 * Megalon certainly counts. He's a giant bipedal beetle god-monster with Chrysler buildings for arms! drills for hands! Not to mention that he spits napalm and shoots beams from his antennae.
 * There's Destoroyah who happens to be a giant demonic-looking creature who's also billions of tiny crab-like monsters merged into one entity of pure evil. Its like Hedorah, but made of little crabs instead of sludge.
 * Spacegodzilla, a giant alien clone of Godzilla with huge crystals growing out of his shoulders.
 * Troma Films is the filmic king of this trope, with the Killer Condom, Zombie Chickens (of Poultrygeist) and Harry Balls the Penis Monster (of Tromeo and Juliet) just three examples of their madness.
 * The Freudian Mom Monster at the end of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive definitely.
 * If you can believe it, there is such thing as a killer piñata movie, called Pinata Survival Island. Unfortunately, it does not contain candy, only murder.
 * The Gingerdead Man, who gives a new meaning to Just Eat Him.
 * Then there is Tabonga, the s-l-o-w-l-y walking killer tree-stump of From Hell It Came.
 * Better yet are the monsters from the Filipino "Blood Island" series, plant/human hybrid that take forms varying from a recognizably human "chlorophyll man" to a giant man-faced running tree who dismembers women out of frustration because...well, he's a tree now, so he can't do what he really wants to do with them.
 * Maybe he needs to watch Evil Dead for a primer.
 * It's a surprise we've gone this far and have yet to mention a certain flying turtle.
 * Guiron, as well. For Pete's sake, he's got a huge freakin' knife growing out of his head!
 * Growing out his head? Hell, he's got a huge freakin' knife for a head!
 * Zigra is a giant goblin-shark monster from another planet. Oh, and he's one of the few monsters in the Gamera films that can talk.
 * The Silicates from Island of Terror are some of the most bizarre monsters of all. Small, starfish-like creatures with mouth on the end of along tube. They are covered in a thick calcium based shell which makes them well armored. They feed on calcium by injecting a dissolving fluid into a victim and sucking up the liquid goo. Leaving behind the flesh and organs untouched. Even better? They divide every 6 hours.
 * The Masters of Horror episode "Deer Woman", about a vengeful Native American spirit who seduces men in the guise of a beautiful woman, then tramples them to death with her powerful deer legs.
 * Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
 * The Golgothan from Dogma, a for real shit elemental. But what's truly weird is that they came up with a theologically sound reason for it!
 * Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.
 * The Green Slime: Alien monsters with rounded heads, no shoulders. Cyclopean, they have tentacle arms that end in pinchers and 2 feet ending in tridactyle claws. They are Psycho Electro and eat energy. If cut, their blood can grow into new ones. Their touch is lethally electric and they can use that energy in their claws to seal any wounds. Strangly, regular fire kills them fine.

Literature

 * Stephen King is the king of the literary version of this trope, with killer cymbal-monkeys, killer chattering teeth, killer laundry presses, killer toy soldiers, killer word processors, the guy can come up with some really, really stupid creepy monsters. And don't forget the shit-weasels.
 * Parodied in Family Guy when King pitches a lamp monster as the latest scary thing.
 * And in Full Frontal Nerdity, with a bloodsucking radio.
 * In the book The Taking by Dean Koontz, is portrayed as a colossal organic spaceship with control over enormous storms tearing up the entire planet. There are also walking fungus monsters, and other, unseen monsters that seem pretty strange.
 * Walter Moers's Zamonia books are filled with strange monsters. These include giant insectoids with a kazillion suckers, crystal scorpions, an army of cyborg robots and cyclops with spines in their tongues.
 * In Chris Evans The Iron Elves trilogy among the Big Bad's minions are black, blood-sucking trees. In the third book a few of them feed from buried dragon eggs. Some of them learn to walk, grow arms and become explosive when shot. They also can throw fireballs. A pair grow wooden wiings and claws and essentially become tree-dragons. that's right folks, flying trees.
 * Discworld has the occasional one-off joke about some of the weird monsters that have evolved on the Disc, like the shadowing lemma, a two-dimensional creature that eats mathematicians, and the .303 bookworm, which is designed to burrow very quickly through magical tomes.
 * Deltora Quest. Dear GOD, Deltora Quest. Where to begin? Lilies that eat your flesh, game-playing finger-biting mini-Yetis, giant snakes, the Kobb, a giant slug-thing, and worse... far, far worse.

Live-Action TV

 * A good deal of Tokusatsu monsters fall into this category. Many fit standard tropes, but every now and them something really WEIRD shows up.
 * Ultraman and many other entrants in the Ultra Series have a good deal of weird ones. The ones that stand out include: Prisma (a giant crystal monster); Buluton/bulton---extra dimensional coral head which warps reality around it with TV antennae and egg-beaters that sprout from its polyps; the parakeet-headed Gutz; Lunatyx the rabbit-headed lizard with a fluffy tail and explosive eyeball launchers; The backwards upright fish alien Metron; and Dada—a monster based on the art movement (No, really!). I am not making this up!
 * I forget which series it was, but one specialized in turning objects into monsters—a pachinko machine, a hair-dryer, a drink machine—and the next season combined them randomly with animals, creating things like "Spotlight Armadillo" and "Hammer Chameleon."
 * A lot of Doctor Who monsters probably qualify, but the Kandyman deserves special mention—a psychopathic torture robot literally made of candy.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel use this trope more an more as time goes on. It gets to the point where you have demons that make you just want to yell "Why can they do that!?" or "Why do they look like that!?". Clem is a perfect example. Why does he have dog ears? Why the weird skin? What is his true form that we never really see? Does it have any real uses at all? Is there a point to his continued existence? Or, to sum it up, "Why?"
 * Some creatures appearing on The Muppet Show qualify, like these dancing U-shaped thingies.
 * Farscape managed quite a few of these as one of its goals was to showcase the work of the Jim Hensen Creature Shop.
 * Special Unit 2 was all about this trope. Besides the basic creatures (gnomes for example), just about every Link is some weird, unconventional monster. Like the Barney the Dinosaur expy who was the inspiration for The Pied Piper (his plush felt "costume" is actually his body) and the creature made entirely of human fat.

Mythology and Religion

 * Well, wouldn't the tanuki qualify for this, seeing as one of their defining characteristics is their massive nutsacks? Which I believe have been shown as bludgeoning weapons in the movie Pom Poko.
 * Incidentally, the massive scrotums are an exaggeration of a property of actual tanuki.
 * Angels. When they did not appear as ordinary humans they had 4 wings and the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle (Cherubim); 6 wings and are covered in fire (Seraphim) or are giant glowing wheels covered in eyes (Thrones). Even when human in appearance the first thing someone did upon discovering they were with an angel was to freak out. When they showed up in one of the aforementioned appearances the greeting was usually "fear not".
 * Of course, demons could also get pretty weird too. Try looking up Bael, Asmodeus (Not the D&D version) and Decarabia, who appears as just a floating pentagram.
 * Or look at any of Hieronymus Bosch's work dealing with demons, such as The Temptation of St.Anthony or the The Garden of Earthly Delights. Little red chappies with pitchforks they ain't.
 * Keep in mind that these creatures have no corporeal/earthly forms - what with being beyond the physical world and all - though angels did have the ability to appear in human form in the Bible, and demons had methods as well.
 * For many westerners, the Kappa (imp with a hollow space filled with water in its head) fits into this category, if just for the really dumb weakness (if the water falls out, it loses its powers; it bows if you do). Also, Kasa Obake, the one-eyed, long-tongued umbrella spirits.
 * The Japanese were all over this: women with insatiable hungry mouths hidden on the backs of their heads; tapirs that eat dreams; invisible walls; giant feet that crash through ceilings; even gianter skeletons made of regular-sized skeletons; the angry little dude assembled out of a ceramic tea-set; and my personal favorite, inanimate objects, if not taken care of, become animate after a hundred years or so, with popular examples being the umbrella, the paper lantern, the straw sandal, the koto...
 * Aztec Mythology. All of it.
 * Rabbit crossbreeds seem to be popular in world mythology, for some reason. A few examples:
 * The Jackalope, an alcoholic jackrabbit with antlers that can mimic human voices.
 * The Wolpertinger, a winged jackalope with duck feet that faints when it sees breasts.
 * Al-mir'aj, a harmless-looking gold bunny with a unicorn horn... that kills and eats cattle. And cowherds.
 * And suddenly Anya's fear of bunnies makes perfect sense.
 * In the Hindu epic Ramayana, one of the level bosses—come on, it might as well be a video game—was Kabanda ("Barrel"), a huge torso with a mouth on one end, ringed with sword-wielding arms. It turned out to just be a good-guy demigod that had been punched in the head so hard it got mushed into his torso and turned him evil; once the heroes defeat it, it returns to normal and joins their party. (See? Video game.)
 * The Jersey Devil. It's a type of kangaroo... bat... horse... cow... human... demon... thing... it's kind of hard to describe, as you can see.

New Media

 * Mortasheen takes this trope and it runs with it for pretty much every monster in there.
 * The quasi-Eldritch Abomination and meme Zalgo.

Tabletop Games

 * D&D, hoo boy, D&D has a lot of them.
 * The flumph is infamous in Dungeons & Dragons circles.
 * The 1988 module Castle Greyhawk had the Plane of Silly and Unused Monsters, a dimension filled with all of the bizarre and stupid monsters that TSR had created up to that point. It included the flumphs and modrons already mentioned, and many more.
 * The duckbunny. Its original Monster Manual explains that if you are going to be an evil wizard that makes bizarre hybrid monsters, you had best start out with something that is utterly harmless, lest it turn on you.
 * Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons classics, Gelatinous Cube (yes, it's a moving cube of transparent gel), Cloaker (cloak that bites... with its face).
 * And don't forget about the Acosmoid, a gigantic fungal ball covered in holes that attacks by ramming you.
 * Forgotten Realms has its share of weirdoes, and not just dwarven druids with dyslexia and randomly nice drow: how you'd like lichling (Immune to Bullets undead skull-headed cockroach)?
 * Also, we hit 4e and standard monsters are suddenly breaking their own rules, like Dryads not having that tree dependency thing any more. Also, redesign [[media:Dryad 2.jpg|Dryad from D&D 3.5e]] and then the [[media:Dryad 1.jpg|D&D 4e version]]; less pretty, more mobile.
 * Then, there are Lava Children from 1E who were "immune" to metal (it just went right through them), sported chimpanzee-length arms with scything claws, and sported a permanent cheerful grin.
 * Nearly the entire monstrous cast of the classic "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" adventure was Gygax deliberately messing around with this trope. For an example, see the quote at the top of this page.
 * "Well, we've got five lion legs and two lion heads left... how about we make them into a wheel with a head on either side?"
 * Then there's RuneQuest, with its intentionally unorthodox setting taking out most of the "normal" monsters you'd expect to find in a fantasy setting and going beyond DND stupidity levels instead. Highlights include: the Duruluz (duck-people), the Gorp (which amounts to an giant acidic living booger), the Jack-O-Bear (a bear...with a jack-o-lantern on its head), and the Walktapus (an octopus with legs).
 * Even their version of the Five Races is weird: elves are a type of plant, dwarves are machine-like, trolls are an ancient and dying culture, and some humans are non-sapient and hunted for food by the tapir-like Morokanth.
 * The "monster the DM made up himself" from Munchkin. It gets + 2 on a Saturday, among others.
 * In Low Life, most of the monsters fit into this category, but a special note goes to the Cremefillians who are basically freaking Twinkie-men brought to life by the pollution from the Apocalypse and bitter towards the long-dead hyoomanrace for eating them back when they were non-sentient. And the best part? They're a PC race!
 * Mage: The Awakening applies this tendency to creatures of the Abyss, on the general principle that if you think "monsters from outside reality" are just "squamous things with too many tentacles," you're not thinking big enough. A formula that represents the physical laws of hell and rewrites reality around it! A contagious form of aphasia that takes the hallucinatory form of an angel! An alternate history aborted by reality itself that has twisted inward and turned cannibalistic!
 * In fact, when the New World of Darkness wants to do wandering monsters, it does this a fair amount of the time. Some good examples include the things lurking in the Hedge (one piece of fiction has a changeling pursued by a ventriloquist's dummy with a few human parts, armed with a camping hatchet) and the entities of the Underworld (it says a lot that the Geist core book makes mention of one of the few Kerberoi that have anything approaching a humanoid shape, and even then it looks like something out of Hellraiser).
 * Gamma World has this trope nailed for most of its monsters, like the winged mandibled lion who has laser eyes and eats fabric, or the bunny-men who turn stuff to rubber. And let's not forget about the Pineto, AKA the cactus horse!
 * Magic: The Gathering has many strange creatures, but the elementals of Lorwyn are probably the most bizarre.
 * Reign has giant fleas made of earthen materials with hot mud for blood, that can destroy entire cities by landing on them, suck minerals out of the ground, and are full of precious metals, gems, and demons—as here, demons are natural and earthly magical creatures that hatch out of eggs that form in the soil.
 * Genius: The Transgression: leaving aside the ones you can grow in vats, the things a moderately inquisitive Genius can find include stuff like culturally Hispanic goblins made out of paper, and pixies spawned from failed equations. Then things get weirder
 * The Splinter: Monster in The Splinter are one part traditional fantasy creatures put through a weirdness filter (Living Avalanches instead of Earth Elementals), one part creatures that would make sense in other genres but are shockingly strange in a fantasy dungeon crawl (Cats of Ulthar, Robotic Attack Drones), and one part truly bizarre (humanoid, chitin-covered bio-weapons that can integrate found technology directly with their bodies; clockwork, parasitic hummingbirds.)

Toys

 * Bionicle's wildlife. Just a few examples: Tarakava are said to be water-lizards, but they stand upright, have huge tusks, enormously long punching fists, and tank-threads for legs. Muaka and Kane-Ra are a tiger and a bull respectively, but they have dinosaur-heads, extending necks and also have threads. Nui-Rama are gigantic insects with large teeth and clawed arms. Manas are crabs that resemble tanks with pincers. The Rahi-Nui is made up of all of these, plus a scorpion. Gukko are large birds with four flipper-like wings and no legs. Just click through the galleries. Some are fairly familiar-looking, others are near indescribable.

Video Games
""The Forgotten Beast Bisek Nirurnokgol has come! A towering feathered leech. It has wings and it has a gaunt appearance. Its scarlet feathers are patchy. Beware its noxious secretions!""
 * The Guardian Legend for NES has some pretty strange enemies, especially for a sci-fi shooter-hybrid. Giant lobsters, eyeballs that shoot sea-weed walls, color changing spiders that multiply exponentially if you don't kill them quick enough, and don't forget the three-eyed final boss!
 * Or the multi-eyed boss who shoots his eyes out at you.
 * A proud tradition of the Shin Megami Tensei meta-series, thanks to the fertile (and twisted) imagination of artist Kazuma Kaneko. The fact that all the monsters are drawn from real-world mythologies - which, as you can see above, have thought up plenty of truly bizarre creatures - helps too, but Kaneko manages to make even mundane-sounding deities weird and creepy.
 * Mara, just...Mara.
 * Morrowind's silt striders (giant walking flea things) and netches (giant insectoid jellyfish creatures that drift around the sky looking menacingly beautiful). It has some other weird monsters too.
 * Silt Striders are not monsters. They are kinda like living stagecoaches. But the game is really chock full of weird monsters, the only non-weird one is the rat.
 * Even - or especially- big fans of the games will admit that Pokémon has a few of these.
 * Garchomp is a torpedo/shark/dragon hybrid. Its head is torpedoes.
 * Shuckle is a barnacle. However, this is still fairly bizarre, because it's a barnacle that has evolved to live on land and feed by allowing fruit to ferment in its shell.
 * What is Sableye supposed to be anyway? A ghost that lives underground and... eats rocks. Because its eyes are made of diamonds and it wishes them to remain so. Also, it has no weaknesses.
 * Also, Deoxys. It has tentacles and it shapeshifts. And is a space virus mutated by cosmic rays. And its three original formes (Defense, Normal, Attack) anagram to DNA.
 * Pokémon includes a walking tree with multiple psychic heads, a haunted cicada exoskeleton, explosive balloon-like smog creatures which fuse together, giant magnetic moai heads, snails made of hardened magma, psychic punching bag creatures, water-mammals who share brains with parasitic seashell creatures, and whatever Swalot is supposed to be.
 * And with the new Generation V Pokémon, it just gets even weirder. Like the ice cream cone Pokémon, the coffin Pokémon, the embryo Pokémon, and a mushroom that looks like a Pokéball for no reason. Also, have fun guessing whatever Sigilyph is supposed to be. To complement the toxic waste and stomach Pokémon, there's now a trash bag Pokémon.
 * And that's not even getting into the countless Fakemon thought up by fans essentially on a daily basis.
 * Wario Land has a few of these, although the King Bubble thing from Wario Land 2 (which is a giant, evil water bubble) and Cuckoo Condor somewhat come to mind here.
 * And Wario World has some really, really weird bosses. How about a clown that tosses his detachable heads at you, and whose real face is on his stomach? Or what about a giant-headed ice spirit-child thing that breathes ice? Or a giant chess piece? Or the giant green dinosaur that wears a bikini, lipstick and jewelry, as well as having long, blond, wavy hair?
 * Well really, most of the Mario series is pretty bizarre. Goombas are evil mushrooms; there are turtle-goblin ninjas that throw hammers, and at one point a giant toad that burps bubbles, defeated by force-feeding him vegetables.
 * EarthBound has a snot-ton of enemies that don't make sense. They have a blob of vomit, a man made of balls, a ball Made of Explodium that keeps smiling, and let's not even get started on the aliens!
 * Then there's Giygas, a red, swirly, skull-fetus... thingy...
 * JRPGs are full of really, really weird monsters. While western RPGs usually try to just give you gritty gray monsters covered in blood or with fangs that look scary, Japanese RPGs will usually try and throw REALLY weird monsters at you. They can be even worse than Dungeons and Dragons.
 * You will be finding a hidden monster that was a watermelon elemental, fighting a giant block, and being attacked by a sentient pair of gigantic scissors in Tales of Legendia. This YouTube link shows an example of some of those crazy monsters.
 * The final boss of Persona 2: Innocent Sin. It is literally a tentacle monster made from the fathers of the protagonists in bondage gear.
 * The final boss of Eternal Punishment is obviously Lovecraftian with a crapton.
 * On the subject of Persona... the true forms of the shadows in Persona 4. Other than Naoto... FREAKY.
 * A lot of stuff drawn by Tetsuya Nomura is rather quirky. Even some of the monsters in the games where he was a debugger or minor monster designer.
 * Some stuff done by Amano is pretty interesting but it isn't quite as freaky compared to Nomura's almost mind screwy Noise and Heartless. Or Ultimecia. ('Course, he didn't design 'everything).
 * The Heartless from Kingdom Hearts tend to be weird, such as the Trickmaster boss from the first game, anthropomorphic cartoon cars, demon dogs, the Rare Capsule enemy (or whatever the hell its name is)... the list goes on. Possibly the strangest is the Final Boss, who starts off human(oid), but has a bizarre One-Winged Angel form.
 * Shadow Hearts loves these. The most notable are the Police Dog and Mailman, dogs with human arms coming out of their faces (which they balance on). Then there are the ones that, in any sane world, would be arrested for sexual predation...
 * Pyramid head. Even if he isn't as weird as others, I'm sure Freud would like to have a word with him...
 * All of the monsters from the Silent Hill series fit this trope, except for . There are, among other things that are all horrific, monsters wearing straight jackets made of their own skin, a woman in a cage with her mouth locked in a perpetual scream, and a nine foot tall doll with porcelain armor and soft, bloody insides. None of these fit normal monster categories very well, but they are all absolutely freaking disturbing, and all of them are out to kill you.
 * In general, abominations made from the twisted psyches of highly disturbed individuals (e.g. Alessa,, Claudia, Walter) will result in this trope.
 * One boss in Ape Escape 2 is Yellow Monkey, a member of the freaky monkey five. While the other four members look like monkeys in the game universe, Yellow Monkey looks more like a gigantic rubber duck crossed with a sumo wrestler than an actual monkey.
 * Yume Nikki. Justified (as far as this can be justified) in that it's a dream, so of course it's weird.
 * The Dragon Quest series has some (intentionally) silly (but still dangerous) creatures, including shish-kebob monsters!
 * The eponymous Metroids are floating jellyfish with teeth that will suck out your life. If left alone, these jellyfish turn into flying dinosaurs that spit fire/lightning (no ice). From the same series comes the X, which are floating piles of viral stem cells.
 * Other enemies in the games are often weird, weird things. From super-fast sea serpents to walking tree monsters that can Spindash to plants that shoot plasma and who-knows what else.
 * La-Mulana has not only "Catball" (a cat balancing on a rolling ball), but a Mini Boss which resembles a ball with lots of holes in it with snakes coming out, and a monster which keeps throwing its innumerable eyeballs at you and appears to be made of nothing else.
 * The new version of Dwarf Fortress has randomly generated titans. A titan generated during testing had the body of a giant shrimp, covered in bright purple fur, with a long elephantine trunk. Another was a giant lime-green crow with huge mandibles and three eyes. Once the version was released, it just got weirder from there. They can even have features of animals that don't currently exist in any other capacity of the game.
 * The weirdness is increased by the way the game announces the monster's full physical description to you when it appears. You get a box appearing in the middle of the screen to tell you, for example,


 * Angband and other roguelikes, given that they don't depict creatures visually, are free to have all kinds of bizarre monstrosities. Browsing through the monster files of those can be quite an experience for someone with a vivid imagination.
 * Castlevania got into this territory after it moved into Metroidvania games. A lot of the monsters are very accurately modeled after demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon... which, as noted above, means they're going to be odd by default. But that doesn't quite justify the bird-riding fleamen, Ninja Maid squads, or skeletons with Kamehamehas.
 * Or the Kamen Rider skeleton, skeleton farmers, skeletons playing kickball with their own heads...
 * The Legend of Zelda has featured some utterly bizarre boss monsters throughout the series:
 * Arrghus, the giant eyeball in a floating jellyfish surrounded by little cloud monsters with eyes.
 * Barinade, the hideous flesh-pile covered in electrified jellyfish topped with three tentacles that end in rayguns.
 * Bellum, some kind of flying fish/eyeball/tentacle thing.
 * Blizzeta, giant flying Russian doll made of ice, and a funny, fuzzy blanket-ball in the middle.
 * Bongo Bongo, huge phantom monster that looks like an upside down armless torso with a red eye where the head should be, that has a pair of massive floating hands that constantly play a huge bongo drum (which is also the fighting arena).
 * Digdogger, a giant bouncing blob with with a massive eye in the middle.
 * Facade, which is both the boss and the floor of its own boss room.
 * Goht, a robot bull with an old man's face which fires lightning from its horns.
 * Kholdstare, the pink fluffy cloud with a single eye (Zelda likes its boss monsters with huge, singular eyes) that starts the fight encased in ice.
 * Manhandla, the... uh, "large, spinning, man-eating flower".
 * Vitreous, which is yet another giant eyeball, this time in a pool of corrosive... stuff, surrounded by other, tiny eyes which fly at you.
 * There are MANY more (peahats, Majora, etc.), but the above list should be enough to give you an idea.
 * Molgera, a giant Sand Worm with a head that looks like a manta ray, but with a mouth that opens down the middle, that can fly and also brays like a donkey when damaged.
 * The Legendof Zelda CDI Games have Harlequin, an anthromorphic pig gambler; Omfak,a... demon? that shapeshifts heads between a wolf, a fire breathing lion, and a shoop da woop wannabe; Glutko, an obese gluttonous cyclops; Hectad, a blue wizard guy who melts upon death. Oh and don't get me started on their portryal of Ganon' a ghost-demon-ogre-pig-bulldog-wizard thing.
 * Super Mario Bros. has a few. Okay, the sun's trying to kill you, but some pretty weird other examples exist in the RPGs. Giant wedding cake of doom? Giant cloud thing of doom? Monster made of SODA? A few other possible examples:
 * Count Down, the killer robot clock.
 * Junker, which is a robot made from rubbish bins.
 * Sea Pipe Statue, which is a killer water fountain (mechanized by Fawful).
 * Bogmire from Luigis Mansion. Enough said.
 * Six Face Sal from Yoshi's Island DS. A killer... wheel?
 * How are we forgetting the main Mooks of the game? Freaking WALKING MUSHROOMS and turtles who are really hermit crabs.
 * The Smorg, a borderline-Eldritch Abomination made up of buzzing balls of black lint.
 * The X-Nauts in the second game also engineered the Yux family, floating X-shaped monsters with weird faces that shoot rings of energy from their mouths and spawn "Mini-Yuxes" that will form shields around the main body as long as it's there.
 * The Pigarithim from Super Paper Mario is a giant piggy bank that shrinks when it takes damage and starts moving faster.
 * Everything in Banjo-Kazooie. Everything. No exceptions.
 * For specifics, let's take a look at the weirder bosses of the second game, Banjo Tooie. They are as follows: A murderous dart-shooting Aztec totem-pole, a murderous giant made out of coal that works very similarly to the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a killer parade float whom you have to shoot in its many patches to kill, a giant killer welding torch, and a terminator based on your skull-headed shaman friend.
 * Keep in mind that the above troper said weirder. Discounting Klungo—who is questionable at best—and his multiple appearances throughout the game, the bosses listed make up more than half the roster. The others are a vaguely Genre Savvy anglerfish, a father pterodactyl whose main attack is spitting wads of phlegm, a pair of dragons from the trope namer of Hailfire Peaks (read: one's fire oriented, the other's ice themed) and Gruntilda (who has been reduced to a skeleton, on top of being a witch) in a tank. And she spouts trivia questions mid-battle. Yeah.
 * The Nihilanth, the Final Boss of the first Half-Life. A giant bio-mechanical psychic fetus with Energy Ball attacks and an exposed brain that has to be hit For Massive Damage. Uh...
 * Rayman. One of the earlier monsters you meet is a tall yellow blob with lips, that spits out other monsters.
 * Baroque contains some pretty award-winningly strange monsters. Like the Bubugel, the Soconpo, and the Johanna Kyon, just to name a few.
 * In VVVVVV, we have random numbers, buses, glitched-out blocks, lies, and other such enemies. Apparently, all these ideas came from a dream journal the developer kept, which makes them all the weirder.
 * Many early Resident Evil monsters were necessarily unusual, but they at least looked like products of genetic engineering or bizarre medical experiments. Lately, though, it seems like the design team has just been phoning it in. in Umbrella Chronicles is probably the most relevant example.
 * Dragon Age: Origins has a fair number of conventional fantasy creatures, but some of the "unique" monsters created for the setting qualify for this trope. At the top of this list are the deepstalkers. Essentially, they're dog-sized, pale-skinned dinosaurs that have lamphrey-like mouths and live underground. They attack in huge packs and can spit acid.
 * Dragon Age 2 features the Profane, also referred to as rock wraiths. They appear as floating "skeletons" composed of glowing energy and surrounded by chunks of solid stone.
 * Albion's wildlife is teeming with strange creatures. The least weird being the Skrinn (carnivorous horned kangaroos), and the Krondir (bipedal lions). Then we get the Varniaks (a cross between a dragonfly and a scorpion), the Rinrii (giant grasshoppers with four eyes) or the Brogg (horned pigs with an arm instead of a tail), and that's not even mentioning the various demons.
 * With monsters like the Paramite, Fleech and Scrab, it's pretty obvious why the games are called Oddworld.
 * Creepers from Minecraft. Most of the other monsters are relatively normal, but creepers are just wrong. It's said that they came about from a failed attempt to make pigs.
 * There are also Ghasts, giant floating jellyfish-like creatures that spit fireballs.
 * All of the monsters in The Void probably qualify.
 * The monsters of Alice: Madness Returns that don't come straight from the books (and naturally even many of those) are utterly bizzare by default: black ooze with mechanical components and broken doll parts sticking out of them, flies made out of iron bolts or ink, predatory fish that live inside ice, wasps in full Samurai gear, crabs that smoke cigars with cannon in place of a claw, doll-heads that fly with four legs attached to them like a propeller that vomit on the played, called 'B Babies', etc. etc.
 * The Classic Mega Man series certainly seems to have their share of these, even though they are robots (the Mets, for example, are essentially living hard hats). The Robot Masters, in particular, tend to be notable in that respect (a robot made out of wood, a robotic centaur, a military camo robot with two heads, a baseball robot (as in, shaped like one), etc). Given that some are made by sane and respected genius inventors, it makes you wonder.
 * Numerous, numerous enemies in the Parasite Eve series are weird even by JRPG standards. Mostly, in the first game they largely consisted of at least semi-recognizable mutated versions of animals (with exceptions, such as the composite body-part centaur-like creatures in the Hospital) but the sequel took this to new lengths with the ANMC's. Most of those are very animal-like, but with human-like faces and features and studded with visible cybernetic implants. Others, such as Stalkers and Scavengers, one can only guess at the origins. . 3rd Birthday took that step across the line right into Eldritch Abomination territory with enemies which can only be described as impossible.
 * While most of the shades of Nie R are basically expies of Heartless from Kingdom Hearts, larger more tentacle-y versions of said heartless, or monstrous animal-looking things, the giant shades named Hook (named after the villain Hook from Peter Pan, since all boss shades have some form of fairy tale motif to them) and Wendy are notable exceptions. Hook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGXQ Qmf O Ke Q is basically a hideously lumpy misshapen lizard-thing with numerous breast shaped growths with vague eye-like markings growing under its chin (earning the nickname "chin testicles" by some players), a hand at the end of its tail, and a shark-like head with numerous teeth and Monochromatic Eyes, while Wendy is an Eldritch Abomination made up of a stone sphere surrounded by a swirling mass of pulsating darkness with a great big menacing eye at its center making it look like a closed lotus flower that eats up the local inhabitants of the town, essentially becoming a confused Mind Hive. It's name also makes this a case of Fluffy the Terrible).
 * Kid Icarus is full of these. Flying eyeballs? Check. Flying noses? Check. One-eyed toad things? Check. Eggplant Wizard? Double check.
 * Cry of Fear has weird monsters. In fact, they just get weirder as you go along. Chicken-things who's heads explode to stab you with knives, scissor-throwing enemies tied to beds that are floating upside down and female ghosts who's bellies explode, so the fetus can take a stab at you. Literally.
 * Dofus, a MMORPG... Half the jokes and puns revolved around making bizarro version of common animals and traditional monsters. E.g., the Mopy King is the king of all mop-related monsters... Other examples include the Dragon Pig, the samurai-like Fungi Master, the martial artist known as the Tanukoui-san who needs stilts not to walk on his huge scrotum, strawberry- and mint-flavored jellies, etc..

Web Comics

 * Speaking of old Dungeons & Dragons monsters, The Order of the Stick features a full dungeon of them. The flumphs later become a recurrent Chew Toy.
 * After meeting an owlbear, Vaarsuvius mocks this trope in this strip by postulating the bunnywolf, the ducksnake, and the dreaded penguilion—all of which show up as actual monsters in the first expansion to the OOTS board game.
 * Sluggy Freelance is proud to present the Gworg. And the dancing Gworg.
 * Mountain Time is full of this, from ninja onions who only care about killing condors to Karzizar (who is Jesus Christ plus 3 extra heads containing 2 giant eyes and a huge mouth), wasps as big as your head that recite muffin recipes, the pelican cello (who is Exactly What It Says on the Tin plus superpowers), and most of the things the astronauts run into.
 * Silent Hill: Promise inherits its necessity for weird monsters from Silent Hill.

Web Originals

 * Picture a Pop Tart with the head, legs, and tail of a cat, flying through space while shitting rainbows...Okay, you probably already know where I'm going with this. Admittedly, Nyan Cat isn't monstrous, but it's still pretty bizarre, and this is almost certainly the main reason why it's gained so much popularity on the Internet. Lots of other memetic critters, such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster (who, incidentally, has his own TV Tropes page) and the Retarded Running Horse, fall under this trope as well.
 * Pretty much everything that isn't a human in the Whateley Universe story "I Looked into the Abyss and It Winked" since Josie gets dragged into inter-dimensional nightmares and Lovecraft Country. Come to think of it, even some of the humans (like Ecila Mason) are pretty monstrous and freaky. And don't forget Josie's backpack or her so-called 'cat'.

Western Animation

 * The old Bugs Bunny cartoon with Gossamer, the monster that looks like a giant furry tooth.
 * That wore tennis shoes!
 * The Secret Saturdays - The Rakshasa, a giant, purple feline-like cryptid that is able to copy its head and arms on its back to fend off enemies that try to get on top of it..
 * Adventure Time is full of monsters that would not be out of place in the furthest corners of a Dungeons & Dragons monster manual. Examples include a Wall of Flesh, a Snake-Armed Ruby Brainbeast, a Crystal Guardian that copies your every action, and an unnamed monster that appears to be 2/3rds giant heart and 1/3rd electrified skeleton.
 * Aaahh Real Monsters had plenty of these. For the main Power Trio alone, you had:
 * A small, red, long-eared Ugly Cute Killer Rabbit who could balloon to horrifying heights as a sort of One-Winged Angel mode.
 * A squat, hairy Cephalothorax with blue lips and free-rolling eyes he normally carried in his hands who scared people with his overwhelming stench.
 * A black and white candy cane with spindly limbs, slit-pupil eyes on eyestalks and big, bloated lips whose primary method of scaring humans was ripping out her guts and showing them to her victims.
 * The series also revolved around how these three were students learning how to scare humans as part of finding their place in monster society.
 * Ugly Americans is this taken to an extreme extent, where weird miscellaneous creatures outnumber the "normal" monsters.
 * The Disgustoids from Secret Mountain Fort Awesome: A purple monster wearing nothing but underwear, a monster made of nothing but butt cheeks, a hairy one with a huge nose, a giant pus ball and blue dog-ish monster.

Other

 * Wayne Barlowe is an artist who specializes in drawing the weirdest monsters possible.

Real Life

 * The Platypus is this trope personified, to the point that when it was first discovered, it was thought to be an elaborate sideshow hoax.
 * Giraffes were thought to be crosses between camels and leopards. They called it a Cameleopard.
 * Camels, of course, are infamously described as "the animal designed by a committee" for their many different seemingly mismatched parts. Leopards were also considered hybrids back in the day, their name reflects the belief that they were the result of cross breeding between lions (leo) and panthers (pard).
 * Picture a boar. Blow it up to the size of a shed and remove all the bristly hair. Give it enormous ears and replace its nose with a hollow tentacle with fingers. Yeah, it's amazing that people rarely think of when they think "bizarre animals." Probably because we've interacted with them throughout history and are so used to them.
 * There is a proverb from somewhere in Africa that goes "When God had created all the animals, he took the leftovers and made the Gnu." The Gnu is better known in the west as the Wildebeest.
 * The naked mole rat. Hairless, wrinkled, pink as a five-year-old-girl's bike, nearly blind, move as fast backward as they can forward and weirdest of all, are one of only two mammals that are considered eusocial. In fact, the idea of mammals being lead by a queen with "drones" is so weird that zoologists still argue about it.
 * The Cambrian Explosion. You can show people images of these and they will assume they are something from science fiction. But rest assured, they're real. Even the one with 5 eyes and a trunk.
 * One of them is named "Hallucigenia". I wonder why...
 * Its name means "unreal". For quite a while, our reconstructions of the creature had it upside-down, and we still don't know which end was the front.
 * Likewise, anything that lives in the deep sea. If it's never seen the light of day, it's gonna be freaky. Props to Praya dubia for being a jellyfish snake Made of Explodium.
 * The Barreleyes fish has a transparent cranium, those green glowing orbs are not its brain...
 * Blobfish anyone?
 * There are a few dinosaurs that were quite weird looking. A few examples are Therizinosaurus, Oviraptor, Erketu and Agustinia. And these are just a few.
 * The assassin spider, with its freaky legs and jaws as long as its neck. Yes... neck. A troper who downright adores spiders might go "what what what is that thing what is going on with its BODY".