I have always loved monsters. Growing up, I was a dinosaur kid, who evolved into a dragons kid, who evolved into a Godzilla kid, a pipeline largely indistinguishable from any given Pokémon evolution line. And yet, as I stand today, there's a new key element that has since flavored my taste in creatures: somewhere over the course of spending hours on end making up my own extensive universe of original kaiju and doodling Nintendo fanart on schoolwork, I picked up a defining fascination with body horror.
It was only years later in hindsight that I realized there was an extremely probable, very obvious single thing that I could trace it all back to.
For a bit of context: while I've always been about creatures, video games are a relatively younger love of mine. Growing up, I wasn't too into them, as I had no real understanding of what made a good game stand out; I had a Gameboy Advance and a Wii, my libraries for both largely populated by a smattering of underwhelming licensed games for properties I happened to like, and other than that most of my gaming experience fell to a reliable handful of Windows games no one's heard of.
Thanks to the photo feature on the system, I can perfectly date exactly when the shift happened: Christmas of 2010, roughly half of my life ago, when I got a Nintendo DSi with a pack-in copy of Mario Party DS. I became instantly obsessed. For a few years my brain was replaced with a question block.
But over time, I became curious about all those other guys they talked about on the Smash Bros. pages of Mario Wiki. And so, I eventually took the plunge and started branching out, grabbing a few of the hot new games for the 3DS, including one The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. It happened again. My brain was about Zelda now.
Such as it was, I spent ages poring over the wiki and all of its details, and (as I was going through the game at a pretty glacial pace) built up a sense of mythological reverence for the pieces of Ocarina that I had yet to see firsthand. One of the most prominent of those pieces was a miniboss by the name of Dead Hand.
Dead Hand appears twice: the first time, it's in a catacomb underneath the cozy little town of Kakariko accessible after draining the local well, implied to have once been a bloody torture dungeon used by Hyrule's royal family at the darkest point in their history; the second is in the game's horror-themed dungeon that is also hidden near Kakariko and uses the same aesthetics. Both times, Dead Hand is in its own room with a unique aesthetic to it, being comparatively large and spacious, and its walls and floor are literally made entirely out of skulls. (In the 3D remake, the skulls are replaced with a more varied but equally troubling assortment of bones.) It's almost cartoonishly macabre.
Inside of Dead Hand's room, you aren't immediately presented with an attacking monster like any other kill-the-enemies room in the game. Instead, you just get locked in to find four pale, way-too-long arms sticking up through the floor, swaying gently, like a flower in the wind if a flower had fingers with sharp red claws and was covered in patches of blood. And so, since there's nothing else for you to do down here, you walk towards the weirdly serene arms...
And then as soon as you're in reach they snap down and grab you by the head. And suddenly, erupting from the pile of bones on the ground, there's this awful thing wiggling towards you as dreadfully as anything could possibly wiggle. It's this weird, legless blob of the same pale bloodied flesh, with two nubby arms ending in reddened points and a long, long neck, its head pointing straight up at the ceiling as it jerks awkwardly in your direction. And then when it gets close it lowers its head to look at you, this awful man-face with hollow black eyesockets and too-tall teeth and a jaw that stretches open far too wide as it takes a bite out of your poor, restrained little boy.
Kid me was horrified. Kid me also became completely obsessed with it. I romanticized the hell out of my image of this thing being The Scariest Thing Ever In Video Games.
Eventually, I made it to the Bottom of the Well in my playthrough, and I got to the point where I was making shorter and shorter pieces of progress at a time out of fear for encountering The Ultimate Most Scary Guy Ever. Eventually I made it to The Room.
Taking advantage of the ability to close my 3DS to pause it indefinitely, I spent like a month in The Room. Whenever I was brave enough to open it again, I would sometimes creep forward a couple steps, but mostly I would just get scared standing there and close it again.
I distinctly remember the moment one of the hands finally grabbed me. I was wandering the aisles of a hobby shop I visited with my dad, finding a way to occupy my time while he was off playing his own games there. I may have screamed a little.
I instantly shut the 3DS in a panic. But it was too late. It had already happened. I had to commit.
I worked up the courage to open up the game again and began the boss fight. In a minute it was done. I had successfully overcome the Top Scariest Video Game Monster Of All Time Ever. I had to take a moment to calm down. What even was there to do next?
I don't really remember how the rest of that first playthrough went, including the second encounter in the Shadow Temple, but that particular experience stuck with me ever since. ...Most likely because I dragged it out for weeks on end. The buildup! The payoff! It makes that sort of thing stand out.
At the same time though, the impact of seeing the thing was lessened a little; the 3D remake, for its fully redone, higher-quality visuals, does tone down Dead Hand's design a little bit (presumably to avoid going over the top and getting a higher age rating, as the low polygon count of the original abstracted the details of its design somewhat). Gone are the pronounced red splotches of heavily-implied blood; instead, the whole thing is a more uniform sickly gray, with its hands (now with added thumbs) ending in a dull pink. The design is still overall disturbing, but it didn't quite live up to the image I had of it in my head.
Perhaps it only fit that one surprisingly alarming thing in a kids' game was toned down to balance the horrifying new detail they could add to the similarly distressing ReDeads, which I was also obsessed with: freaky, emaciated zombie-things wearing simple wooden masks with round black eyeholes and a third hole for its mouth, which could now in enhanced resolution be rendered with the awful human teeth they were always intended to have. They just stand in place staring at the ground and moaning loudly (or in some cases crouching low to the ground), and shriek as soon as they hear you running, freezing you in place as they slowly walk towards you and then throw themselves around your back to bite your neck. The first thing you see when you step into a desolate future (that you accidentally created yourself) is that the previously-bustling town just outside is now barren and filled with these things! Cool!!!!!! Awesome!!!!!!!
I didn't put it together until years later, but looking at these two guys, it is absolutely and completely unsurprising that my aesthetic sensibilities for monster art evolved to be the way they are now. The too-tall teeth that are practically my default, that bony emaciated humanoid body, the indistinct piles of uncomfortable fleshy folds, filling texture space with ambiguous sinew and veins. These things were some of my most formative influences! They're the reason I'm like this! You can blame them for me not wanting to draw anything normal and approachable anymore!
I guess, in the end, the lesson we can all learn from this is that it's wild what they could get away with in an E-rated game in 1998.
