Grotesque Gallery: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Film]] ==

* 1985's ''[[Return to Oz]]'' has the Wheelers and Jack Pumpkinhead, who then calls Dorothy "Mom"!

* Also all of ''[[The Dark Crystal]]'' by Jim Henson... though this may have been intentional.

** The better to make that intro scene in the garage [[Nightmare Fuel|pants-wettingly]] [[Jump Scare|frightening with]].

** As such, a lot of the [[Pod People|imitators]] that [[Follow the Leader|Followed the Leader]] make ''their'' aliens even uglier, like in ''Mac and Me'' or the Turkish ones "Badi" and "Homodi", which throw convincing special effects out for sheer horror.

== [[Literature]] ==

* The picture book ''Hair in Funny Places'' is intended to reassure kids about to go through puberty. With pictures of a young girl's insides being taken over by grotesque furry monsters representing hormones.

* ''The Nursery Alice,'' apparently illustrated by a morbid Impressionist having a very bad acid trip. How it came to be in the children's section is beyond comprehension.

* Tim Burton's ''The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories'' has a whole array of weird characters who are kids with strange abilities or deformities, such as Stain Boy (whose only superpower is to leave a nasty stain), the girl who turned into a bed, the pincushion queen and Jimmy the hideous penguin boy. (It's telling that Burton showed Danny DeVito his illustration of Jimmy to give the actor an idea of how they would be approaching the character of The Penguin in ''Batman Returns''.)

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* Those (un)lucky enough to grow up in Chicagoland (and various syndication markets) in the late '70s may have been "treated" to ''Gigglesnort Hotel'', which featured a number of rather grotesquely modelled puppet characters; most notable was Blob, a literal blob of (apparently living) clay "statuary" who would regularly have his facial features remolded by the human host as he moaned and bellowed in a rather ghastly wordless voice.

* Most of the characters on ''[[The League of Gentlemen]]'' are played by the same three actors, so they need to use various prosthetics to differentiate between roles. Some of them (Tubbs and Edward, in particular) are quite hideous.

 

== Misc. ==

* Nutcrackers are not festive symbols of holiday cheer. They are terrible, grimacing figures of rage with toothy, lipless mouths that open into their chests. That they are generally dressed in military garb and carry weapons does not help. And since they're made to, you know, crack nuts, it's easy for a child's mind to seize onto the idea of them crushing other things, such as the bones in one's fingers. Overexposure may numb the terror, but won't remove the underlying wrongness of the malevolent, garish things. How something so ghastly became a symbol of yuletide festivities is absolutely baffling.

* Boglins are incredibly gross looking.

* Bobbleheads are weird looking because of their abnormally large heads.

== Web ==

* The Anthrosauri in ''[[Poharex]]''.

 

== [[Western Animation]] and [[Anime]] ==

*** "Is it... scrumptious? Will it taste... delicious?" ...It wiiiiill.

** The wood elves.

* Lots of stuff in ''[[The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack]]'', like the ''plague victims'' in the episode where Flapjack gets a pet rat, and the sea monster things from "How the West Was Fun"!

* A few in ''[[Invader Zim]]'' were especially ugly. Bloaty comes to mind. There were also a lot of grotesque background characters who ranged from unpleasantly greasy to clearly disfigured.