The Worm That Walks: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Sometimes, when you want a [[Grotesque Gallery|really scary]] monster, a [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever|giant insect]] just won't do. They've been done to death and look really [[Special Effects Failure|cheesy]] to boot. But you still want a bug monster - what do you do?

 

 

== [[Advertising]] ==

* An ad for [[The BBC]] had a head made of disembodied heads. People complained.

* This [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OHY-2bv0vk Duracell Ultra commercial] accidentally evokes this trope. Anyone else thinks that these little pink Duracell Bunnies look like...a mass of squirming maggots?

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

** {{spoiler|Orochimaru's ''true'' true form (yeah, he seems to have a lot of those) is that he's made of snakes, while being a giant snake himself. What do the snakes look like? Well, they certainly don't do anything to take away his reputation as a creepy boy watcher.}} Even before that was revealed, it was evident he was made of {{spoiler|snakes}} when he got cut in half and had them spring out of his halves to pull them together.

** Tsunade's Summon, Katsuya the Slug, could dissolve into many smaller slugs, each of which talks and behaves like the original.

* Arachne from ''[[Soul Eater]]'' hid herself by turning her body into 3000 spiders that spread across the world, and then hid her soul inside a giant Golem.

* In ''[[King of Thorn]]'', the Medusa manifestation of {{spoiler|Peter Stevens}}'s psyche takes on this form.

* In chapter 24 of ''[[Franken Fran]]'', {{spoiler|The [[Wandering Jew]]}} shows up. Despite being immortal, his original body except for his skeletal structure has long since rotted away. His curse of immortality solved the problem by constantly summoning ''[[Body Horror|insects to replace his body]]''. He's essentially an undying skeleton with bugs for muscles and organs. {{spoiler|Amazingly enough, this chapter actually has a happy ending for the poor guy.}}

* Zazie the Beast from the manga version of ''[[Trigun]]''.

* Benisato in ''[[Ninja Scroll]]'' does have a normal body, but she can use a writhing mass of snakes to hide or [[Combat Tentacles|fight with]].

* Dokubachi in ''[[GetBackers]]'' is the Bee that Walks (and flies and philosophizes and [[Overly Long Gag|uses ki attacks . . .]]) whose body is a bizarre, super-specialized honey comb that gives him all manner of bee-related abilities. Unusually for this trope, though, his final form looks [[Bishounen Line|completely human.]]

* Borgir Bor from the ''[[Bastard!!]]'' anime/manga series.

* ''[[Berserk]]'' the Godhand do not have bodies that exist [[Layered World|in the material realm]], so when they want to effect things they need to take pre-existing materials to make bodies from: Slan once made a body from troll guts and Conrad made one from a mass of rats.

 

** So was Ms. Arrow, "The Other."

* She-Hulk also fought a similar villain, [http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/cockrchs.htm Cockroaches!]

** And The Swarm, a [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler|Nazi]] scientist made of [[Bee-Bee Gun|bees]].

* The ''[[Birds of Prey]]'' foe Entity was a nanobot swarm that consumed an industrial spy and maintained his basic humanoid shape.

* [[Bone]]: {{spoiler|The Hooded One turned out to be a woman who was [[Half the Man He Used To Be|cut in half]] then had her body put put back and held together by the Lord of the Locust's insects.}}

* The second [[X-Force]] once met a "spectre of death" who looked like a giant monster made up of worms and maggots, with some skulls and bones thrown in as well.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* The Ra'azac in the [[The Film of the Book|movie version]] of ''[[Eragon (film)|Eragon]]'' are composed of a variety of vermin and one eyeball.

* A character in the film ''[[Prince of Darkness]]'' delivers an unpleasant message to the protagonists before literally falling apart and collapsing into a heap of large black beetles.

* In ''[[Constantine]]'', the titular character is attacked by a demon made entirely out of various bugs (and at least 1 crab). Even its face, with nose and mouth and eyes. In a bit of hilarity, it's killed by being run over and splattered all over a car. Let's hope that driver has good windshield wipers...

* When the [[Candyman]] opens his coat, he's revealed to be little more than a skeleton wreathed in the many thousands of bees that killed him.

* Played in a hilarious fashion in the Disney sequel, ''[[Halloweentown (film)|Halloweentown: Kalabar's Revenge]]''. Sophie and Dylan realize that Alex, believed to be Carl's father, is in fact a golem created from the villain Kalabar to distract Gwen. The golem (wearing a frog costume) eats a fly Sophie conjures with her magic, breaking the illusion. An angry Gwen then blasts him with magic, turning him back into a pile of frogs.

* [[Godzilla vs. Destoroyah|Destroyah]] is a truly massive example, although as its component creatures are microbes, it appears solid to the naked eye.

* In ''[[Fright Night]] Part II'' the undead . . . thing . . . Bozworth spends most of the film catching, identifying and then ingesting insects. When finally killed, he bursts open to reveal he's pretty much skin, skeleton, and lots of squirming little bugs.

* Inverted in ''[[The Human Centipede]]''. There, you have a large borderline insectoid made up of three humans.

* [[Played for Laughs]] in ''[[Finding Nemo]]'' with the school of fish that forms itself into various shapes. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le13by2WM70 Here it is.]

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svOlz2ei4Yk This] Kollywood film, starts out as your standard Terminator robot with Matrix effects, then becomes a macro-nanobot snake made of guys

* In Peter Jckson's ''[[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]'': The Fellowship of The Ring, the Ringwraith that searches for the four hobbits after they leave the Shire and hide in a small cave beside the forest road is (probably) not made from worms, but worms, maggots, spiders and other unpleasant things crawl from his robes.

 

* In Book 14 of [[Lone Wolf]], one boss is an [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|armored, fire-breathing, demonic monkey]]. After it is killed, its corpse turns into a swarm of man-eating insects for you to contend with.

** Notably, the insects are an illusion. At that point, Lone Wolf has achieved a level of mental discipline that allows him to simply ignore them.

* In Jim Butcher's ''[[The Dresden Files|Small Favor]]'', while the [[Voluntary Shapeshifter|shapeshifted form]] of Tessa isn't actually made of bugs, she is a giant preying mantis with little praying mantises instead of blood that fly out when she gets shot.

* The flying nanobot swarms in the [[Michael Crichton]] novel ''Prey'' act like a computerized version of these - they even eat carrion, as per standard maggot behavior. As their intelligence develops through the course of the book, they learn to mimic human shapes, colors, and eventually ''speech''.

* Ygramul the Many of ''[[The Neverending Story (novel)|The Neverending Story]]'' by [[Michael Ende]], is a gestalt collective of toxic flying... "things" that clumps together in whatever arrangement suits their purpose best, from a giant spider-thing to a massive disembodied hand. Her deadly poison grants the dying victim the ability to teleport.

* Some D'ivers [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|shapeshifters]] from Steven Erikson's ''[[Malazan Book of the Fallen]]''. For example, Gryllen (turns into a huge swarm of rats) and Mogora (turns into lots of spiders).

* In [[Neil Gaiman]]'s ''[[Coraline (novel)|Coraline]]'', Mr. Bobo is a trainer of mice. In the Other Mother's world, The Other Bobo is a being made of rats.

** In [[The Film of the Book]], the Other Bobinsky ends up turning into this as [[Glamour Failure]] sets in:

'''The Other Bobinsky:''' Not even that, anymore... }}

* In ''The Green Brain'' by Frank Herbert, humanity has reduced nature to just a few zones in the Brazilian rainforest. Nature fights back by evolving a race of bugs that can, in large quantities, imitate human beings. The story opens with one such Worm That Walks managing to con its way past the border guards so that it can enter and attempt to infest a clean zone.

** He also gives us the 'throng-bear', an unintelligent variant from ''[[Iron Council]]''.

** Don't forget {{spoiler|Skool, who is a bunch of fish inside a wetsuit. He's also a rare heroic version of this.}}

** A more comical example from ''A Hat Full of Sky'', reappearing in the subsequent book ''Wintersmith'', is [[Totem Pole Trench|the Nac Mac Feegles disguising themselves as a human (singular) by stacking themselves up inside several stolen items of clothing]].

** A minor version of this occurs in the character of Hex in the Unseen University... a 'computer' controlled by the ant colony living inside it... a similar type of machine can be seen in the Glooper in "Making Money", although that one is controlled by water and tides and the economy...

* The Vermiform in Steph Swainston's ''Castle Circle'' series is one of these.

* An assassination attempt in ''Mordant's Need'' by Stephen Donaldson features human skins full-to-bursting with cockroach-like insects that puppet the skins and then break out of their husks in order to devour their new victims.

* One common interpretation of the ending of [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s "The Festival." (It says a great deal about Lovecraft's "issues" that this is explicitly a ''Christmas'' story.)

** Though it could merely refer to a decomposing undead corpse infested - and possibly controlled by - maggots, or perhaps a single huge worm. We'll never know.

* One of the heroes of the grail in Eric Nylund's ''[[A Game of Universe]]'' is a colony of insects which walks around in humanoid form, relatively.

* A benign example from a children's book featured fish being eaten by a larger fish. They formed their school into the shape of an [[Always a Bigger Fish|even bigger fish]] and chased it off.

* The ''Ravnica'' cycle of ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' novels feature the Lupul, a shapeshifter. Its true form is a writhing mass of worms that devours people in order to steal their forms.

* In Niven and Barnes' ''The Barsoom Project'', the sins of humanity make an appearance in the Fimbulwinter Game as a swarm of monstrous insect-like vermin, which assemble themselves into four giant humanoid figures to put [[Humanity on Trial]].

 

* Norman Pfister from the ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' episodes "What's My Line, Part One" and "What's My Line, Part Two." He's a group of maggots that can appear like a man (but not for very long, as he starts to go all [[Uncanny Valley]]). Xander and Cordelia manage to kill him with [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|a bucket of glue]].

* ''[[Reaper]]'' had an episode with a woman made of bugs.

* In ''[[Andromeda]]'', a guest turned out to be composed of nanobots.

* In ''[[Smallville]]'', Clark Kent battles a [[Spider-Man]]-esque villain named Greg Arkin in episode 2. When Greg gets crushed by falling debris, his body breaks up into dozens of beetles.

 

 

* Partial example: Azhi Dahaka, a three-headed dragon associated with the Zoroastrian apocalypse, has scorpions instead of blood.

 

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

** It was based on a creature that appeared in the [[H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft]] story "The Festival":

** In the [[Epic Level Handbook]]'', and [[Pathfinder]] Bestiary (part II), there is a monster called "Worm That Walks", a dead spellcaster that has become the [[Hive Mind]] for an army of worms - gaining insect-related powers and a great deal of additional resilience. Usually it's the evil ones that choose this method of life after death.

*** As the chance of success is the number of spells the player has memorized as a percentage, savvy players elect to use ''Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer'', usually a [[Useless Useful Spell]] that lets them trade out each of their better spells for six useless cantrips to get over 100% chance of success.

** 3.5 also, in its ''Elder Evils'' sourcebook, featured a unique Worm That Walks, a really ''big'' one: Kyuss, the evil god of "green <s>leeches</s> worms that eat you from the inside out, then turn you into a super-powerful zombie under their control." And he is made of those worms. There is also a whole 20-levels long campaign outline in that book called Age of Worms. Guess who's the ''[[Big Bad|Big Bad Boss]]'' of that one.

** What's worse than a druid who can turn into a giant bear and eat you? A druid who can turn into a swarm of 10,000 flesh-eating scarabs and eat you. Plus as a druid with the swarm ability you gain heavy resistance to melee and basic ranged attacks. Worse, there are some feats and magic items that turn you into a magic, resistant-to-all-damage walking colony of flesh-eating insects.

** The Worm That Walks shows up again in 4th Edition as the "Larva Mage." Not quite as evocative...

** A rare Good-aligned version appears in, of all places, the [[Eldritch Abomination]]-filled ''Lords of Madness'' 3.5 sourcebook, with the silthilar—sentient swarms with just a touch of the [[Mad Scientist]] when they fuse into their solid form.

** Roach thralls in ''D20 Modern''.

* ''[[Werewolf: The Apocalypse]]'' includes the Ananasi, werespiders who, in their animal form, turn into their weight in spiders. Since they can eventually regenerate their entire bodies from even one of those spiders, it makes for a great escape technique.

** Also in ''Werewolf'' are the Hollow Men, a breed of fomori (humans under the thrall of [[Demonic Possession]]). The Hollow Men specifically are humans who were killed and whose bodies were mostly emptied out (hence the name), the insides replaced by a swarm of small animals controlled by the demonic spirit in question. Doesn't have to be insects/arachnids; reptiles and rodents are also popular choices. They're capable of speech and can ''try'' to pass themselves off as fully human, but generally, even other fomori find them creepy as hell.

** The Azlu in ''[[Werewolf: The Forsaken]]'' are spirit-like creatures that can do something similar. In their case, only one of the spiders is really "them", so they escape by using the weight of numbers - the odds of the real one getting killed are incredibly small. The Beshilu of the same game were similar. They were rats, not bugs, but could hollow out human bodies and control them like the Fomori mentioned above.

* One of the kinds of monsters in ''[[Little Fears]]'' is worms. They gather into groups and mimic the forms of children. The problem is that they can't mimic eyes, so they have to actually kill children and steal their eyes to pull it off convincingly.

* The ''[[Mutants and Masterminds]]'' setting Freedom City features a villain called The Collective, which follows this trope. As every other character in that entire setting, he is a [[Captain Ersatz]] of an existing comic book character. Probably Marvel's Swarm (see comic section above)

* Wyld mutants with the "Hive" abomination in [[Exalted]]. One rank in "hive" and they have a beehive or snake nest somewhere on their bodies. Two ranks in "Hive" and the nest expands to include the rest of them.

* In [[Eclipse Phase]] one of the many Synth bodies resembles a swarm of robotic bees. They can move as a regular swarm, or combine into a roughly human-shaped mass. They're also fully playable, and far more affordable then those based around [[Organic Technology]].

* One of the possible character origins in ''[[Gamma World]]''. Depending on your primary origin and your secondary origin, you could be anything from a horde of cockroaches, to a [[Grey Goo|mass of nanomachines]], to a ''[[Cute Kitten|horde of sentient, hive-minded kittens]]''.

* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' has Mindleech Mass from the ''Ravnica: City of Guilds'' expansion. It's hard to see the individual leeches at card size, but [http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/arcana/914 when you look closer...]

* The D20 campaign book ''[[Grimm]]'' gave us this trope in the form of Rapunzel. Yes, that Rapunzel. Only this time around, her prince has passed away, her children are grown and she had nothing to do but return to the tower where she lived out the rest of her days. The tower, though, had developed intelligence and gotten lonely in her long absence and took measures to keep her there even after she died. Namely, having her corpse infested with a swarm of spiders that will kill and eat any who climb her hair to the tower. Keep in mind that the rules of the game are built specifically around children and boys are particularly drawn to the silky locks that still hang out the window.

** She's also one of the sample NPCs that made the transition when the game was converted to its own rules system.

* [[Scarred Lands]]: One of the monsters described in the "Creature Collection II: Dark Menagerie" are vermin hosts, former human vagrants who were cursed by one of the evil gods who was angry that they happened to pray to another god other than him to let them live another day in their dismal squalor. From this [[Disproportionate Retribution]] he had various vermin (rats, roaches, leeches, spiders) burrow into their skin, giving them [[Cursed with Awesome]] powers as they are able to use their new abilities to control their own swarm of vermin, turn into giant anthropomorphic versions of those vermin, and disintegrate into swarms to help escape enemies or commit espionage (which the spider vermin hosts do most of the time). As a side note, they're able to reproduce [[The Virus]] style by allowing one of their vermin to infect a person, whose whispers of power and whatnot usually cause them to accept them thereby summoning a larger swarm of that vermin which turns them into new vermin hosts while inheriting some of the memories of the previous ones. This is also [[Squick]] because, mind you, the vermin are always moving under the host's skin to find more comfortable areas to rest. Remember one of those vermin are large rats!

 

== [[Toys]] ==

** The series also has enemies known as " {{spoiler|Marcus}} clones" or "Leech Zombies". These are swarms of mutated leeches which take on the shape of their creator.

** This also shows up in ''[[Resident Evil]] 5'' to a lesser extent. {{spoiler|Excella and at least two men become worm-people for a few moments... then they just go straight to being masses of worms.}}

* The Guy Made Of Bees from the ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'', which is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|exactly what it sounds like.]]

** When you beat him, he drops a Guy Made Of Bee Pollen.

* The boss of the [[Nostalgia Level]] in ''[[Castlevania]]: Dawn of Sorrow'' is Bat Company, a pack of red bats that assumes various forms as one. [[Dracula]] himself is often shown moving around as a pack of bats.

** Also the reoccurring Boss Legion is a giant Sphere of Zombies covering a giant monster.

* Beelzebub from both versions of the ''[[Mega Ten]]'' games Raidou Kuzonoha is a massive fly concocted from a swarm of other flies. And incidentally, one of the best demon summons in the second game.

* [[Big Bad|Death Adder]] in the arcade version of ''[[Golden Axe]]'' merges together from maggots in a pile of corpses. [[Nausea Fuel|Eeeuuugh.]]

** Actually, according to the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX7WoSRHt3U CD version of Golden Ax] Death Adder is an amalgam of hundreds of '''snakes'''.

* The Pain from ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 3''. While the real one is not composed of bees, he is able to control bees by having them sting him until the bees think that he is one of them. To make matters worse, he grows, within him, [[Bee-Bee Gun|Bullet Bees]]. These ones fly to your body and gnaw at your flesh slowly. And yes, I did say he grows it within his body, and he launches it from his mouth. Oh, and to keep this true like the trope, he can make his bees do an impersonation of himself by making, yes, a human sized clone made of bees.

* ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'': ''[[Twilight Princess]]'':

** Armogohma, a truly spectacular and terrifying [[Giant Spider]]. After you beat her the first time, she disintegrates into an eye with legs and a swarm of smaller spiders, which you have to fight off while [[Go for the Eye|going for the eye.]]

** In the spinoff ''Link's Crossbow Training'', the Dark Nut miniboss at the end of level 8 breaks apart into a swarm of Keese when his body is damaged.

* While it isn't entirely clear, one of the [[Big Bad]]'s lackeys in ''[[Dead of Summer]]'' may be one of these. He summons a swarm of insects seemingly out of nowhere (the art suggests they either come from around him or ''inside'' him) to attack {{spoiler|[[The Protomen|Commander]]}}. He's swarmed and bitten so much his movements are slowed, and he screams that they're eating him alive.

* Gavotte, the head of the''[[Skin Horse]]'' department, is a sentient swarm of bees. She (?) is surprisingly congenial and enjoys having a cup of tea with her employees, but they're often somewhat unnerved by the disembodied voice and the offers of free honey.

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

** In the Nanobots episode, the bots coalesce into a Monobot.

* In ''[[Invader Zim]]'' [[Wave of Babies|a bunch of baby-like aliens]] combine into a giant bipedal monster.

* ''[[Codename: Kids Next Door]]'' had a villainous [[Crazy Cat Lady]] who surrounded herself with her thousands of cats and basically made a cat-shaped [[Humongous Mecha]] out of them.

* In ''[[Max Steel]]'', the villain Bio Constrictor was made of dozens of snakes.

* Similarly to the above example, in an episode of ''[[Family Guy]]'' an angry mob of wheelchair users joined together to form "Crippletron".

* In ''[[The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron]]'', Jimmy meets some [[Ridiculously Cute Critter|ridiculously cute aliens]] who hate good music and love bad music. Whenever they hear good music, they morph into nasty little goblin creatures. If they hear ''more'' good music, they fuse together into one huge alien monster.

* One episode of ''[[Mucha Lucha]]'' was about Ricochet, Buena Girl, and the Flea confronting a giant spider-themed wrestler named Black Widower, who has been beating several insect-themed wrestlers all over town, and is threatening to do the same to the Flea. At the end of the episode, the Black Widower is defeated, and as a result his costume comes off to reveal... ...the aforementioned insect wrestlers.

 

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Invertebrate Index]]

[[Category:Evil Is Visceral]]

[[Category:Villains]]

[[Category:Horror Tropes]]