The Flesh Demon Files, Part 1: From Lovecraft to Stranger Things (A Taxonomy of the Modern Monster)
My attempt to classify a modern trope and lay the groundwork for developing a theological reflection on the topic
Content warning: this article discusses monsters made from gore and flesh. I do not go deep into grotesque details and I tried to pick images that wouldn’t be too disturbing. But I figured a general notice was necessary, especially given some of the paintings and media shown might not be suitable for younger audiences or those who are quite sensitive to such topics.
There is a particular type of monster, a certain type of archetype or trope, that I’ve noticed frequently in media written in the 20th century. From what I’ve been able to find, this particular type of creature does not have a standardized name, which makes my efforts at researching it quite frustrating. In an attempt to understand something about it—or, at the very least, to generate conversation about the topic—I’ll try to find a name for them today. The only working names I have right now are “flesh demon” or “flesh monsters.” Since H.P. Lovecraft, these creatures have popped up in media like The Thing (1982), The Void (2016), and Stranger Things (season 3). Hopefully, by the end of this series of articles, we’ll have started a path toward figuring out what these creatures are.
Personal Background
Admittedly, it can be somewhat scary to start with something slightly more vulnerable, such as my own personal experiences. But given how scarce information is about these creatures, I figured I’d share a personal anecdote, which can hopefully provide context—and maybe even help anyone who has experienced this phenomenon.
For the last two years or so, I have had intrusive mental images filled with these creatures. It comes and goes in different periods, so it’s not necessarily an everyday occurrence (though sometimes it is), but it has been regular. Intrusive mental images are not uncommon for me because I have both OCD (intrusive thoughts) and a quite vivid imagination, especially visually (for example, I can almost replay entire movies in my head). Though these intrusive thoughts have ended up causing quite a bit of distress.
Usually, the context is when I’m encountering something about the topic of dead animals or something pertaining to the topic of butchering (including the topic of surgery, which is archetypally a type of butchering). For context, I have been a vegetarian for over 10 years, and I love non-human animals deeply. I even led a 4-week class about the topic of animal theology for a church I used to work for. Because I love animals, their deaths deeply grieve me, regardless of intention, context, or manner.
So how does this connect to flesh monsters? Well, for me, when I’m confronted deeply with the subject of animal death—such as seeing road kill or something like that—these images of flesh monsters often come to my mind, and it feels quite oppressive. The situation was quite bad a few years ago when, every time I attempted to meditate, a flesh monster would break into my imagination and cause distress. Picture something like an amalgamation of mounds of gory flesh with a snapping, predator mouth breaking through the door and attempting to get me.
Hopefully, this does not make me sound too crazy. I’m not claiming that there was “really” a flesh monster “in the flesh” (drum roll please!) in the room with me. For all I know, these are just intrusive mental imagery, like getting a song stuck in your head. But as I went down a rabbit hole trying to find an answer to what these creatures were, so I could start understanding them and perhaps come to a sense of closure, I found next to nothing. The only other time I found something that matched my experience was another person who said he had seen them several times as well, also during meditation. He linked it to his former life growing up on a farm and having to butcher animals.
So in what follows over the next few posts, I’ll attempt to face my monsters, drawing upon a variety of sources, but primarily Christian theology. In this article, I’ll attempt to create a brief taxonomy of various media portrayals and perhaps bring together some common themes.
Origins of the Archetype
Although this archetype seems to be distinctly modern, some form of the trope exists in pre-modern history. Perhaps the closest examples would be the chimera of medieval manuscripts and the artwork of painters like Hieronymus Bosch. This was especially elevated in the Renaissance period, in which artists depicted hell and purgatory with creatures that cobbled together various animals.
Another parallel in pre-modern history is the Native American folklore of the Wendigo. The Wendigo is a type of malevolent spirit that is wont to possess humans, turning them toward cannibalistic and destructive tendencies. Depictions vary according to tribe and tradition, but some instances portray wendigos with decaying flesh and bones protruding from their bodies. The classic wendigo differs from the flesh monster in that it retains a more corpse-like humanoid form. The contemporary depictions, which are probably more familiar to readers, often portray the wendigo as a long-limbed, humanoid creature with a snarling, predatory version of a deer skull for a head. Although not quite the same as a flesh demon in the modern sense, the wendigo is similar to the flesh monster in that they both possess an insatiable hunger. They are creatures of violent gluttony, holding no empathy or concern for that which they devour.
Another slightly related ancient parallel is the Mṛtyu-māra, a demon in the Buddhist tradition. This entity represents death and the forces that hinder enlightenment, often depicted as a tempter or destroyer who attacks those seeking spiritual awakening. While not physically described as an amalgamation of flesh, Mṛtyu-māra embodies the same themes of spiritual corruption and predatory consumption of life force that we see in modern flesh monsters. In Buddhist iconography, Māra sometimes appears with multiple forms or manifestations, representing the many ways in which suffering and attachment can trap sentient beings.
I will also note that, in the Buddhist stories, these creatures will attack those seeking spiritual enlightenment, and are often depicted as attacking those in meditation. Interestingly enough, this parallels the personal experience I mentioned above and that of my colleague, who relayed a similar story of encountering flesh monsters in meditation.
However, the flesh demon as a specific trope is found most fully in the modern era. Some of the earliest forms of these flesh monsters in this sense can be found in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. For instance, in The Dunwich Horror, there are themes of dark rituals involving cattle sacrifice as well as body horror in which one of the main characters is killed, and his corpse transforms into grotesque, inhuman monsters. Lovecraft describes the incident as follows:
The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualised by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very man-like hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.
Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.
If you’re new to Lovecraft, reading those paragraphs probably felt like an avalanche of adjectives, and perhaps your eyes started to glaze over. English teachers would certainly be more horrified by Lovecraft breaking the ultimate rule of “show, don’t tell” than any of the monsters he imagined. But as Alan Moore has pointed out, Lovecraft is not simply a lazy writer. His adjective avalanche and unabashed “tell, don’t show” strategy is a deliberate literary tool. The swirling sea of descriptions is meant to make our brains feel lost. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all of these descriptions. Our brains can’t hold them, and even if they could, the descriptions contradict one another. We have no idea what we should be seeing with our mind's eye, similar to how the characters have no idea what they should be seeing in the story. It’s like a literary form of atonal music, in which there is no established ‘home key’ for our minds to hold onto.
These description contradictions represent something of a blasphemous boundary-breaking, an assault against harmony and balance. Or more precisely, it is a type of failed integration—a pure engulfing rather than a harmonious integrating.
This feeling of discord and disharmony—boundary-breaking, blasphemy, and sacrilege—relates to the plot of the story in which cultists are attempting to open a gate to another dimension to bring the arrival of a monstrous deity named “Yog-Sothoth.”
It sounds like I have gotten off on a rabbit trail, and you might be wondering: what does this have to do with flesh monsters? Well, I think this is a great encapsulation of several themes that will be key to understanding the archetype:
Boundary breaking and blasphemy: These entities transgress biological boundaries, creating unsettling amalgamations of forms that fundamentally challenge our understanding of natural categories and forms—usually with some sort of assault upon the sacred or divine will.
Failed integration: Rather than harmoniously integrating different parts, they represent a violent engulfing or consumption.
Dimensional transgression: Often, these monsters emerge from "beyond" our reality, representing intrusions from realms that operate on different rules.
When taken together, these elements create a sense of spiritual warfare (i.e., hostile spiritual or extra-dimensional entities acting in ways that harm humans and non-human creatures on earth), resulting in feelings of multi-dimensional predation and vampiric or parasitical degradation of bodily integrity.
We see these themes pop up in other examples of media from the 20th century until the present, especially in film.
Note: I am not necessarily promoting these films, as some of them were so disturbing I wish I hadn’t seen them (I have no idea what my 22-year-old self was thinking watching Hellraiser!). But I’m citing them here as illustrations of this point.
One of the most famous is John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing. In the film, an alien organism can perfectly mimic any living creature it encounters, leading to scenes of grotesque transformation as human and animal bodies violently reshape into masses of writhing flesh, multiple mouths, and distorted limbs. These transformations represent a complete violation of bodily integrity, where the bodily form becomes merely raw material for the alien entity's parasitic invasion.
Though not perfectly identical to “flesh monsters” as such, one can see similar themes in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. In this film series, humans are transformed into grotesque parodies of their former selves when exposed to interdimensional entities called Cenobites. These transformations represent a perversion of flesh and spirit, where the body becomes an instrument of eternal torment rather than a vessel of life. The visual language of these films often depicts flesh torn apart and rearranged in ways that violate natural bodily integrity, resulting in grotesque creatures of wounded flesh and gore.
The 2016 film The Void is another entry into this genre, with deliberate homages to Lovecraftian fiction. In The Void (2016), a rural hospital becomes an altar of de-creation, where a mad doctor and his cult seek transcendence through the mutilation and reconfiguration of living bodies (note again the archetypal pairing between butchering and surgery, as mentioned above). As the walls between worlds thin, the building becomes a liminal wound opening into a dimension of flesh-warping entities—parasitic inversions of life-giving processes, such as giving birth. The doctor attempts to achieve a certain apotheosis through his own creation, but instead only intensifies and strengthens what I will call “weaponized nothingness” (fuller explanation below).
Perhaps the flesh demon with the most mainstream reach would be the creatures from Stranger Things season 3. In this season, the threat of the Upside Down (an alternate dimension, like a shadow of our own) takes on a grotesque new form as the Mind Flayer (main villain) possesses and dissolves human and animal hosts, absorbing their flesh into a single massive abomination. This “flesh monster” is born out of parasitic consumption, reducing individuality into raw material for a greater, mindless whole. There are even homages in the season to Carpenter’s The Thing. The season stages its climax inside the newly built shopping mall, where the monster becomes a literal embodiment of consumer capitalism—an all-devouring force that mocks community and harmony by weaponizing bodies into a single organism of consumption.
Beyond the realm of film, some of the tropes described above can be found in tabletop gaming. Examples include tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40k. In Dungeons and Dragons, the gibbering mouther is said to be what happens when mortal flesh and mind are consumed and remade by alien, chaotic forces. Some legends claim they were once people who delved too far into forbidden magic, resulting in their bodies being melted into writhing flesh while their minds fractured into countless screaming voices (callback to The Void or Hellraiser). Others say they are a spawn of the Far Realm (a place completely outside the multiverse), born of chaos, and thus they are something like living fragments of madness given shape (callback to Lovecraft). Wherever they come from, they are abominations that wander ruined places and caverns, endlessly muttering in a chorus of half-remembered words and meaningless babble. As they consume another living creature, that creature becomes (dis)integrated into the amalgamation of its body.
In Warhammer 40k, a sci-fi tabletop war game (think Risk on steroids) set in the year 40,000, there is the famous “Blood god,” Khorne. Though he is perhaps not depicted as an amalgamation of flesh, the lore of his ontology/metaphysics fits quite well. Khorne is the Chaos God of violence, bloodshed, rage, and unending slaughter. He embodies the raw, consuming impulse toward violence, where individuality and purpose are dissolved in the endless rhythm of killing. His daemonic legions and mortal followers chant “Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne,” reducing all flesh to fuel for his ever-hungry throne. Regardless of intention or context, killing other beings provides fuel for his unending blood thirst. Unlike more subtle Chaos powers, Khorne’s domain is brutally direct: he is the apotheosis of weaponized aggression, parasitic on life itself, where vitality is not cultivated but spent in an endless economy of destruction.
Over the past year or two, a new tabletop war game has sprung onto the scene, which has gained a considerable amount of traction. The game is called Trench Crusade, and it is set in an alternative timeline of our history. According to this alternate history, during the First Crusade, the Knights Templar committed an extremely blasphemous act in Jerusalem that opened a gate to hell and enabled demonic creatures to pour onto earth in droves. The current time of the game is 1914, and the church is now fighting off the forces of hell with dieselpunk-style holy weapons.
The connection point to my essay topic is seen in the various nefarious factions of hell. I won’t go through all of the examples, but one that especially stands out to me is the “Court of the Seven Headed Serpent.” This faction is often composed of monstrous flesh monsters—imagine if Bosch had painted depictions of hell using the types of characters from the other media described above. One of their particular abilities is a type of blood magic: “Powers and Spells which use the suffering of mortals as spiritual energy to unleash the reality-bending powers of the Demons. As God’s plan for the universe is disrupted and perverted, the infernal sorcerers and other demonic creatures can use the released primordial energy of Creation to alter reality” (quote from the Trench Crusade rulebook). These creatures subvert the logic of sacrament, and instead opt for an inverse-sacramental power that is a privation and distortion of grace. It is fueled not by love but rather through suffering and death. In a way, the Court feeds on the violence and bloodshed carried out against God’s creation.
As an honorable mention, one could perhaps throw the Spider-Man villain, Carnage, into this discussion. Visually, Carnage—with his fleshy red appearance, amorphous bodily movements, and hideous snarling teeth—fits the description quite well. Though he is not an amalgamation of flesh, Carnage is something called a symbiote, which is a type of alien, parasitic entity that merges identities with its host. In the comics, Carnage merges with a serial killer, and together they go on to wreak havoc. Thus, as a parasitic entity from beyond our world who feeds upon violence, there is some resonance here, even though the Carnage is not a perfect fit for a “flesh demon” like in Stranger Things.
These examples in media create a form of bodily horror when witnessing our own flesh or the flesh of other creatures, but not in a way that leads to a deeper sense of embodiment (or even incarnation). Instead, flesh itself becomes a place of horror, as the finitude of bodily existence—its fragility and frailty—is transformed into a distorted, weaponized vulnerability.
The term “weaponized” comes from the theologian and philosopher, Sergei Bulgakov, who described the Fall (when sin entered the world) as a point in the meta-history of the cosmos in which finitude—which is, in itself, good and part of the contingency of being a creature dependent upon the Supreme Creator (God)—moves from simple contingency and dependency into a more nefarious weaponized nothingness (Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, 163). Finitude takes on a new modality as the threat of oblivion, and we now live as “beings unto death” to borrow a Heideggerian phrase.
This is a thought that I will spend time developing in the next post. Stay tuned, and let me know in the comments if you’ve come across this archetype/trope in another area that I haven’t mentioned or if you have come across these creatures in other ways.
Gibbering Mouther Reminds me of No Face in Spirited Away (Japanese Anime).