This is not the job for the Power Rangers anymore.
The average Eldritch Abomination is a terrifying, god-like alien entity. Getting them to manifest in our world, whether awakening from their slumber, freeing them from their prison, or whatever else, is usually a highly involved process that, should it succeed, means the end of the world. And if they can be defeated, doing so is an event so momentous that it makes people ask Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?
But just as not all animals are apex predators, not all abominations can be reality-shattering nightmares. In fiction where such entities are a major threat, it's common for the protagonists to face lesser, mook-grade horrors first, both demonstrating on a smaller scale the kind of enemies they deal with and teasing at the full power of whatever such creatures call master.
Their manifestation is easily justifiable: whatever metaphysical boundary prevents a full-scale abomination from crossing through/awakening/etcetera, these minor aberrations are small enough to slip through its cracks, whether because the stars are slowly coming right or they've been beckoned deliberately by some dark cult. Some might even have been present on our world all along, simply waiting for the signal to emerge. Inevitably, they will do so in numbers.
In some cases, Eldritch Mooks may be Elite Mooks while human cultists serve as the Cannon Fodder; in others, they might be chaff themselves; or both, forming an escalating hierarchy of power with Elite Mooks, Mook Lieutenants, and so forth with their world-breaking progenitor sitting at the top. Like any other Mook and any Eldritch Abomination, they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. However, Eldritch Mooks are still fundamentally mooks: that is, they exist to be cut down by the protagonists. Merely being a lesser abomination in thrall to a bigger one doesn't necessarily mean they're a mook, only that Humans are Insects compared to the vast powers beyond.
Compare The Legions of Hell. May be the offspring of a Mother of a Thousand Young or Monster Progenitor.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Boruto: Code is able to use his Claw Mark ability in conjunction with Ten-Tails Fission to forcibly create offshoots of Kara's Ten-Tails called Claw Grime, which are also able to use Claw Marks to teleport. During the time-skip leading up to Two Blue Vortex, several Claw Grime are able to assimilate victims, creating doppelgängers called Sentient God Trees that possess the Rinnegan and have the appearance and some personality traits of their victims, in addition to being fully sentient.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2016): The Shadow Beasts are Cthulhumanoid monsters that demonstrate their game counterparts' Informed Ability to transform other beings into more of themselves. Anyone who is turned into a Shadow Beast is trapped in an And I Must Scream zone of torment where there cannot be any deviation from Zant's will without further mutation... as shown when Midna's former librarian spontaneously gains a grossly elongated neck, a gaping mouth full of teeth, two extra arms, and an Overly Long Tongue just for recognizing her.
- Naruto:
- After summoning the desiccated husk of the Ten-Tails, Madara Uchiha used it to create an army of White Zetsu—humanoid entities later revealed to have been the result of humans having been assimilated and mutated by the Ten-Tails in its Divine Tree form. During the Fourth Shinobi World War, Obito Uchiha deployed the White Zetsu as foot soldiers to great effect, though Naruto was able to exploit their vulnerability to Natural Energy—which caused them to transform into inert trees—to nullify their threat.
- After the Ten-Tails is unleashed against the Allied Shinobi Forces by Obito and Madara, it uses its "Ten-Tails Fission" ability to create a horde of monstrous offshoots of various shapes and sizes—some being smaller humanoids with axe or scythe blades for arms, some being hulking humanoid colossi wielding yawara, and some of which are quadrupedal beasts resembling wolves.
- Princess Resurrection: Hime and her allies journey to her lake house, where they are attacked by a group of Deep Ones. They succeed in pulling Hime's house into the lake, and demand that she give them the semi-immortality that she is known to be capable of granting. When she explains that they have to die to receive the gift, they hesitate until a member of the group, standing as tall as the cliffs, accuses her of lying. Unfortunately for him, Liza offers to be Hime's proxy in the proposed fight, and it's a full moon, meaning she's unstoppable. However, Hime dismisses her grievance with the Deep Ones, and they vow to be her allies in battle.
Comic Books
- The DCU:
- Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Big Bad of the event, the Anti-Monitor, was flanked by legions of Shadow Demons, living shadows with a Death Touch and able to fuse into larger Shadow Demons. They Shadow Demons used to be Weaponers of Qward (enemies of the Green Lantern Corps) who seemingly willingly accepted being turned into Shadow Demons by the Anti-Monitor as a reward for their service.
- Doom Patrol (1987): The Cult of the Unwritten Book, worshippers of The Anti-God, used as agents diverse surreal entities like the Fear the Sky assassination squad (a group of Humanoid Abominations with celestial bodies as faces), the Dry Bachellors (zombies/golems created from dead skin and thrown out love letters), the Mystery Kites (the souls of murder victims trapped inside the secret geomtry of kites made of their own stretched skin that track down heartbeats), and the Hiroshima Shadows (who manifested as flying voids surrounded by darkness).
- Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.: During Rotworld, Victor Frankenstein's mooks are the Collosi, a race of eldritch giants so massive that civilizations live on their spine, and that look like deformed, skinned animals.
- Green Lantern: During Blackest Night, the Big Bad Nekron launches millions of Black Lantern rings that latch onto the corpses of heroes and villains and turn them into macabre Undead Abominations who feed on the light of emotions and are nearly impossible to kill, as any wound they suffer is instantly regenerated. It's clarified that they're not actual zombies wielding Black Lantern rings, but instead, the ring controls the corpse like a Puppeteer Parasite.
- Justice League United: Infinitus' minions were known as the "Infinite Wraiths", and were expansions of the Physical God's near infinite power who managed to overpower the Legion of Super-Heroes.
- Kid Eternity: The Lord of Order's mooks are the Shichiriron, named after one of the paths of the Qlippoth. They manifest through Picasso paintings as abstract Body Horror beings full of mouths, hair, and teeths.
- Titans (2008): The sons of Trigon are the offsprings of Trigon the Terrible, the Big Bad of the Teen Titans comics. While only holding a fraction of their father's power, and looking like regular humans initially, they were each a personification of a deadly sin and could override people's feelings under their Mind Control.
- Grimm Fairy Tales: During the Eldritch-arc, the followers of the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos periodically receive smaller Eldritch Abominations, all around the size of an average human, as Mooks to hasten the release of the Elder Gods. They come in different shapes, some looking more human while others look more like their Eldritch makers, but are all bipedal and have hideous faces befitting an Eldritch Abomination. While some have supernatural abilities, such as Invisibility, not all do. There are also Elite Mooks called "Starspawn", which are taller and more muscular than the rest, have wings, and have telepathic and Mind Control powers.
- Marvel Universe:
- Chthon, a corrupted Elder God sometimes listed as one of the Great Old Ones, spawned and is served by a number of species of lesser eldritch beings; chief among them the N'Garai—a horde of Gigeresque demons ruled over by a sentient elite caste called the Mabdhara.
- The Mindless Ones are unintelligent, violent and destructive beings from another dimension, and look like lumpy stone humanoids whose only facial feature is a single horizontal slit eye, from which they can fire energy blasts. They are most often the minions of Doctor Strange villain The Dread Dormammu, who is an Eldritch Abomination himself, but are sometimes conjured up by other magical bad guys.
- Galactus has his assorted Heralds, any one of whom is a monstrously powerful opponent for anyone, and a few rungs below that, he has powerful fighting robots called Punishers (no relation to the vigilante character of the same name).
Films — Animation
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: The "average" Phantom is a humanoid with a snout and three tentacles on the right hand. They are invisible to the naked eye, can pass through solid objects, can kill any human they encounter with a single touch, and cannot be killed by anything except bio-etheric weapons... and even then, they will continuously respawn. They are later accompanied by dragon-like and insectoid kaiju-sized Phantoms, and all of them are spawned from the Gaia hiding in the Leonid Meteor.
Literature
- The City We Became: The Woman in White's minions include strange frond-like tentacles, hordes of two-dimensional spiders, and Starbucks stores transformed into bizarre animalistic monsters, none of which can be perceived by regular people. The protagonists are able to fight or at least evade all of these; the Woman in White, who is merely an avatar of R'lyeh, is much harder to pin down.
- Fate/Zero: Caster (Gilles de Rais) is a fallen French knight turned serial killer and Lovecraftian cultist, and is in possession of François Prelati's grimoire—also called the R'lyeh Text. Using it, he can summon hordes of octopus-like tentacled terrors called Horrors or Sea Fiends, offshoots of the malevolent ancient Outer God that rules over the Spiral Sunken Castle.
- Harry Potter: At the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Dementors join forces with the Big Bad Lord Voldemort. When Voldemort takes control of Wizarding Britain in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, they are used in the Muggle-Born Registration Commission courtroom to take away convicted Muggle-borns after interrogation and to terrorise them during interrogation, and later take part in the Battle of Hogwarts.
- The Laundry Files: Eldritch Abominations are classified on a logarithmic scale, and on the lowest end are "feeders in the night", the series' take on zombies — unintelligent, low-grade infovores summoned into human bodies. They're easily commanded by magicians (the Laundry uses them as janitors and security guards), but not especially dangerous. The main threat they pose is that they're essentially a viral and irreversible Demonic Possession, turning other people into feeders instantaneously through the slightest skin contact, so they can spread with alarming speed.
Tabletop Games
Examples by creator:
- Games Workshop:
- The Daemons of Chaos are a recurring element between the various Warhammer franchises (Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar), being The Legions of Hell given an eldritch twist. The bulk of their armies is made up of lesser daemons — irreal manifestations of the worst thoughts and emotions produced by sapient minds. While a significant threat, they can be fought and destroyed by mortal soldiers on a fairly consistent basis, unlike greater daemons and daemon princes, who are generally only slain by legendary heroes and the like.
- Warhammer 40,000: The Exorcists chapter of Space Marines adds an extra step to its Training from Hell: The neophyte is possessed by a minor Warp entity for twelve hours before being exorcized under heavy security. Despite the extreme potential for things to go wrong, the survivors become essentially invisible to most daemons.
- Call of Cthulhu: Cohors Cthulhu, set in the time of the Roman Empire, has various creatures in the Mythos encroaching at the edges of the empire, leading to a rise in cultists, Ghouls, and Mi-Go infestations that reanimate dead humans with their alien technologies into mindless but tireless servants with protruding tentacles.
- Eldritch Horror: A great deal of Cthulhu Mythos creatures are the basic mooks the players will be facing. On their own, they are rarely truly dangerous and there is also a clear "tier" system: basic Monster creatures spawning on a regular basis (most of which can be defeated even by starting characters with scant gear), Epic Monsters with different-shaped tokens (that are usually very hard to put down) and the actual Ancient Ones that the players are trying to prevent from arriving to the world (and, if their sole arrival won't be an instant game over, the resulting Boss Fight is virtually impossible to win). In such a setup, having to deal with a single Byakhee is nothing.
- Magic: The Gathering: Each of the three world-devouring Eldrazi Titans is a Mother of a Thousand Young, producing innumerable swarms of spawn. Their brood all possess the same ability to suck the world dry around them as their progenitors (and are described as mere extensions of the Titans, like fingers), but are a problem the people of Zendikar are actually capable of fighting, unlike the colossal Titans.
- La Notte Eterna: Soul Hunters are demonic winged summoned creatures that usually serve as mooks for necromancers — they are essentially the local version of Lovecraft's night gaunts.
Video Games
- Age of Wonders 4: The Eldritch Realms expansion brought with it the Umbral Demons, servants of God of Evil Urrath. The tier 1 and 2 Umbral Demons are betentacled, mutated human-sized (or smaller) things that are decidedly Mook-like in stats if not in form.
- Darkest Dungeon: "Eldritch" is a specific kind of enemy type, usually made in reference to beings connected with strange or unspeakable powers. Most of the enemies in the Cove have this designation, regardless of how strong they are (such as the very bog-standard Pelagic Grouper), but it also shows up as a designation for other enemies, like the warped Cultists encountered in the Darkest Dungeon and the fleshy growths that occupy the area.
- Darkest Dungeon II: The Cultists are much more transformed than they were in the previous game, less resembling humans than they do tentacled monstrosities. As such, they have the "Cosmic Horror" enemy type, which is usually reserved for Confession bosses (nightmarish entities borne of the Iron Crown) and the Shambler (a tentacled Living Shadow monster).
- Destiny: The Taken are enemies from each of the game's other factions that have been transformed by the Darkness, stripping them of their previous identities and enhancing them with new powers. In the original game the Taken serve Oryx, the titular Taken King of the third DLC, but after his defeat the Taken are leaderless and desperately searching for someone or something to take the reins. By Destiny 2 they eventually come to serve The Witness directly, and then The Echo of Navigation, which is based on an ancient version of Oryx.
- Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth: The Purebreed form of the Eaters act as mooks compared to the other stronger forms due to how it hasn't assimilates any humans and Digimon.
- Digimon Survive: The Kenzoku are purple eldritch lifeforms different from Kemonogami connected to and under the command of the Master.
- Divinity: Original Sin II: The Voidwoken are an ancient spiritual corruption from beyond The Multiverse, bent on overrunning the physical world to consume its Soul Power. The player character's first Voidwoken encounter is a colossal kraken that effortlessly destroys their ship in a cutscene. Their second is a few Void-infected Level 1 bugs. These "Voidlings" show up again at higher levels, but always at the bottom of the power range for the region.
- Dominions: A feature of Middle and Late Age R'lyeh is the Void Gate, which astral mages can enter to summon monsters to serve them, which can range from weak cannon fodder like the Vile Things to the powerful Vastness, which can reflect any damage back onto attackers should they get unlucky. Summoning up units from the gate carries risks, as the mage can be driven insane or be attacked by the monsters they summon.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Hermaeus Mora is attended by his Lurkers and Seekers, powerful mooks who are modeled after classic eldritch archetypes (Deep Ones and Mindflayers, respectively.)
- Eternal Darkness: Your average mook is a zombie mutated in some way by contact with an Ancient's power. Beneath those are the nearly-harmless salamander-like Trappers, who teleport foes to a (surprisingly helpful) pocket dimension. The next tier up from zombies are Bonethieves, bird-like eldritch parasites that hollow out and puppeteer human corpses. They're often encountered as a character kills the bonethief's zombie host. The Smash Mook of the game is a three-headed ogre called a Horror, which relies on its immense strength and lightning magic. Bosses consist of an Ancient's Lesser and Greater guardians; reflections of the Ancient itself. Even the vampire, sent as an assassin in one chapter, is a much more Lovecraftian take on the classic; a hunchbacked giant with Monstrous Mandibles that feeds exclusively by exsanguinating its prey through Blood Magic.
- Fate/Grand Order: The Horrors from Fate/Zero—called Sea Fiends in the English localization—appear as enemies in the "Fate/Accel Zero Order" event. It's revealed that the famous 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai encountered them—inspiring "Dream of the Fisherman's Wife"—and became connected to the Outer God of the Spiral Sunken Castle as a result, manifesting as an octopus-like creature himself when summoned as a Foreigner-class Servant alongside his daughter.
- Fate/Samurai Remnant: Sea Fiends are among the supernatural creatures that Iori and Saber face as enemies in the coastal districts of Edo, though they resemble upside-down octopi rather than monstrous starfish/octopus hybrids like in Fate/Zero and Fate/Grand Order; the logbook's bestiary describing them as otherworldly sea monsters drawn to Edo by the Waxing Moon Ritual.
- Felvidek: The longer the cultists are active, the more monstrous are their rank-and-file troops — at first, it's just human mercenaries, then a token presence of possessed individuals, but eventually, it's all kinds and sorts of Body Horror and things that aren't even humanoid anymore via Forced Transformation. Within two days, by the time Pavol, Matej, and Adam locate and decide to storm the cultists' headquarters, there are no humans left in the cult's ranks. And yet, none of the monsters are some kind of all-powerful beings, just what passes as mooks by this point in the game.
- Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era: Schism is a faction of dark elves who uncovered forbidden rituals from the ruins of their ancestors, which allow them to summon horrors from the edge that separates the Plane of Water from the Plane Between Planes. Given the gameplay, you can field hundreds of these creatures in your army, particularly since their weakest and most plentiful creature is a minor abomination called a ra'shoth.
- Kantai Collection: If Lovecraft's rogues' gallery tried its hand at modern naval warfare, the result might be something like the Abyssal Fleet. All of them are bio-mechanical horrors that rise from the sea to menace humanity and its shipgirl defenders, but the great majority of them are grunt soldiers. Their most obviously monstrous members are actually their weakest, the patrol boats and destroyers. Elite Mooks like battleships and aircraft carriers are more humanoid, but still noticeably off. Their commanders, the Princesses, loop around to full Eldritch Abomination status.
- Kingdom Hearts: The Heartless and the Nobodies are the remnants of those who die or fall to darkness (their hearts and physical bodies, respectively). The base form for both is relatively humanoid, but their shape and powers can vary widely among the many variants one may find across the various worlds. They also tend to follow someone who's "stronger" than them in some way — the Heartless obey the one with the strongest Darkness (usually Xehanort) while Nobodies simply follow the strongest Nobody (e.g., members of Organization XIII).
- The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: The Tecuums are shadowy entities from the Still World that can assume the shape of monsters in Hyrule and even assume near perfect glamours of important figures in Hyrule, allowing them to sow confusion and chaos amongst the populace. The Tecuums are revealed to be offshoots and extensions of the true Big Bad, Null, who is fittingly an Eldritch Abomination that seeks to consume all until there is nothing left but itself.
- Sea Salt:
- Dagon can summon a broad array of monsters that initially consist of more mundane horrors like giant blade-limbed arthropods and cultists. Some of the more nightmarish mooks able to be summoned are Fishmen—said to be the spawn of Dagon himself, the Flesh—a semi-amorphous mass of flesh and tendrils, the Hermit—cultists imbued with so much of Dagon's power they're transforming into mollusk-like creatures, and the Spitter—acid-spewing extraterrestrial creatures that serve as emissaries for the Old Gods.
- The Apostle Traeton can sacrifice four Cultists at an altar to summon one of three Elite Mooks—a flying eyeball that shoots lasers, a fire-spewing demon, and an acid-spewing Cthulhumanoid.
- Shantae: The Tinkerbats are a legion of small humanoid creatures with spindly limbs and shadowy bodies, who can be summoned and commanded by the dark magic of the Pirate Master. Since that power was claimed by Risky Boots, they serve as her inexhaustible crew of minions.
- Sundered: Eschaton was a civilization that worshiped entities from the Cthulhu Mythos. Facing genocide at the hands of the Valkyrie Private Military Contractors, they attempted to perform a ritual to summon one of their gods to their defense, but the ritual was interrupted, and the magical backlash transformed them all into the bestial, tentacled hordes Eshe fights constantly throughout the game.
- Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening: The town of Daybreak is facing a invasion by a group of beings from another dimension that can consume and/or manipulate human bodies, but as an RPG where said town has been basically depopulated, the only things that can be fought to grow stronger, are the weakest of the eldritch beings, which are therefore mooks in forms such as animate items, like computer mice and puppets.
- Wuthering Waves: Tacet Discords are entities made up of living sound frequencies that feed off of other frequencies to survive. However, they are not Always Chaotic Evil, as some Tacet Discords will avoid humans wherever possible. The most powerful Tacet Discords are called Threnodians, which are formed out of humanity’s negative thoughts.
Web Animation
- Animator vs. Animation: In the vs. Minecraft spin-off, many of the titular video game's eldritch horrors are used as minions by bigger antagonists. In Season 3, the Stick Gang itself uses many mobs — including an Enderman and the Warden — to fight against King Orange, Herobrine runs an All-Ghouls School with the likes of the Wither as his students, and even King himself starts creating Evil Knockoffs of the gang's mob friends, culminating in a titanic Mix-and-Match Critter.
Western Animation
- Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: Dagon is a Multiversal Conqueror and Cthu-Lookalike with overwhelming power. His minions are the Lucubra, horrific beasts that feed on the thoughts of their victims, eventually reducing them to lifeless husks.
- The Real Ghostbusters: In "The Collect Call of Cathulhu" note , a cult of "Cathulhu" steals a copy of The Necronomicon from the museum and when the Ghostbusters try to track it, they're attacked by creatures identified as the "spawn of Cathulhu", who regenerate as quickly as they're hit by the proton beams, as well as shoggoths. The cult eventually manages to summon "Cathulhu" himself, and his power and size make it clear that the other creatures were pale imitations by comparison.
- Superman: The Animated Series: In "The Hand of Fate", the demon, Karkull, takes over the Daily Planet building. While there, he surrounds himself with lesser demons, most of which resemble some combination of wings, tentacles, and teeth.
- Gravity Falls: In the finale, Weirdmageddon, Bill Cipher is joined by his "gang of interdimensional criminals and nightmares" from the Nightmare Realm, as well as the eyeball bats. None of them have Bill's power, and all of them are banished back across the interdimensional portal when Bill is erased. However, the eyeball bats do have the ability to turn the people of Gravity Falls into stone statues, which makes them the most dangerous of Bill's minions during Weirdmageddon.
