Taxidermy Is Creepy

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"You can't just fall into taxidermy, you've really got to want it. 'I wanna be a taxidermist! I wanna fill animals with sand! I wanna get more sand into an animal than anyone's ever got, I wanna fill a rat with the entire Gobi desert!'" —Eddie Izzard, Glorious

So you're moving into a new place, taking a break between boxes to meet the neighbors. The guy from Apartment 4 down the hall seems nice enough, but for some reason you can't quite put your finger on, you feel there's something off about him. Maybe it's the glassy-eyed menagerie of stuffed animals he keeps in his study. Or the fact that he prepared all of them himself, including his late dog.

This trope is when taxidermy is portrayed as an innocuous yet somehow sinister hobby that provides a handy shortcut for writers looking to establish a character as strange or unnerving. The taxidermy-enthusiast isn't necessarily evil, per se, but this hobby doesn't help to assuage anyone's fears.

Subtrope of Pastimes Prove Personality. See also Taxidermy Terror. See Uncanny Valley for one of the main reasons many people find taxidermy creepy.

Examples of Taxidermy Is Creepy include:

Comic Books

• In one issue of Tales from the Crypt, an old woman's husband decides to take up taxidermy as a hobby. Because this is Tales from the Crypt, you just know this is going to go horribly. After he stuffs and mounts her pet cat, she stuffs and mounts him.

Films -- Animation

• Coraline had Spink and Forcible and their wall of stuffed Scotty dogs. Every time one of their many Scotty dogs died, they'd have them stuffed and dressed in angel garb.

Films -- Live-Action

• The killer protagionist in the Joe D'Amato (The Anthropophagus Beast) film, Beyond the Darkness, uses his taxidermy skill in preserving his dead girlfriend. The corpses is excavated in grisly detail.
• In Psycho, taxidermy is one of Norman Bates' hobbies.
• The landlady in Amelie keeps her cheating husband's loyal dog stuff and mounted on a table, staring at a picture of its old master. This is meant to show how pathetic the woman is. (It works.)
• Brad Wesley in Road House, so much so that Roger Ebert commented, "This guy went hunting in the zoo."
• Grampa in The Lost Boys.
• The B-movie Bloodlust, featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, combines this with The Most Dangerous Game. Although it is the rich villain's lackeys who perform the actual taxidermy.)

Gamebooks

• In Book 6 of the Lone Wolf series, the hero can meet with Chanda, a taxidermist quite proud of his creations. He wants to test a new taxidermy technique with a subject worth of his talent: the last of the Kai lords. As he explains to Lone Wolf while serving him drugged wine.

Literature

• The landlady in Roald Dahl's short story "The Landlady".
• In Monday Begins on Saturday played for Black Comedy as Cristobal Junta mixes this with Taxidermy Terror.
• In Harry Potter, Sirius Black's aunt Elladora started the family tradition of beheading the family's house elves when they got old, and put their heads on walls like hunting trophies. This is one of the many ways the Black family is shown to be deranged and seriously creepy.
• In Animorphs, the Nartecs kill and stuff shipwrecked humans, preserving them in a disturbing facsimile of their previous existence.

Live-Action TV

• Randy Mann on Pushing Daisies ("Frescorts"). He was actually a pretty nice guy though.
• Scrubs
  • The Janitor. "Anyway, in my spare time I also enjoy stuffing animals. Usually with other animals." He's apparently responsible for converting all the squirrels that lived around the hospital into a stuffed squirrel army.
  • Rowdy—Turk and J.D.'s stuffed dog whom they play around with. Other characters are occasionally unnerved by the dog, but for the most part J.D. and Turk's antics with Rowdy are Played for Laughs. It should be noted that J.D. and Turk didnt stuff Rowdy themselves, they bought him at a yard sale.
• An episode of NCIS has a taxidermist who was part of a plot to get revenge on Ducky.
• There's also Sylar's dad from Heroes.
• One of the Ice Truck Killer suspects in Dexter is into xeno-taxidermy.
• In the The Twilight Zone episode "Elegy", three shipwrecked astronauts encounter a mausoleum where anyone willing to pay its exorbitant fees could have their corpse "eternified" and put on display, "living out" their fondest dreams posthumously. It eventually turns out that Wickwire, the automaton caretaker, has taken the attitude that Humans Are the Real Monsters, and ultimately he poisons the three with eternifying fluid and gives them their own diorama set up to look as though they'd finally fixed their ship and were about to take off for home.

Wickwire: Because you are men, and while there are men, there can be no peace!

• One of the killers in Criminal Minds was a crazy taxidermist who was killing his victims in order to use their eyes in place of the eyes of the animals he was stuffing.
• Victor Rodenmaar in House of Anubis keeps various stuffed creatures, including his raven Corbierre. Every one of them is creepy as heck.

Music

• Professor Elemental is a "mad taxidermist", who experiments with sewing parts of different animals together to create new ones (while they are living) in his song, "Animal Magic". The animals get their comeuppance in the end.
• Russel from the Gorillaz band has taxidermy as a a hobby. Specifically, sewing different animal parts together. Even Murdoc finds the results unsettling.

Russel: Since I got into taxidermy I find it's a great way to pass the time and also gives the animals a real dignified ending. Murdoc: Are you in some sort of K-hole? There's nothing really dignified about the poses you set them in, Russel. They look really... startled. Russel: I just wanted to break new grounds in that area, advance the tradition and bring a whole hip hop attitude to the taxidermy world. I've been cutting and pasting different animal styles together. Yaks with lizards, hogs and zebras... it keeps the whole thing fresh, y'know? Once they're done you can customize the animals with bass-bins, under-lighting, alloy wheels... a kinda "Pimp-My-Rhino" thing.

Video Games

• In the point-and-click adventure game The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, the taxidermist turns out to be the one who was hired to kill the victim, and is said to have frequently done odd-jobs of dubious morality in addition to his public profession.
• There is a DLC stand-alone adventure for Heavy Rain called "The Taxidermist", where Madison has to infiltrate the house of a man who stuffs the bodies of murdered women. It's probably scarier than anything in the actual game.
• In Resident Evil 2, Police Chief Irons has taxidermy as a hobby, and was planning on stuffing the mayor's daughter before his death.

Web Comics

• In Homestuck, Jade's grandfather was an adventurer and big game hunter. His hunting trophy room is her least favorite in the house, and she finds Grandpa Harley more difficult to face now that he himself is stuffed and mounted in the living room.

Web Original

• The Youtube user Vicious516 uses this trope in one of his own Creepypastas very effectively.

Western Animation

• In Family Guy, Brian the family dog is unnerved to discover the owners of his late mother (who seemed quite nice up until that point) had her stuffed and converted into a coffee table.