Botanical Abomination (2024)

"There's always been a god-shaped hole in man's head. Trees were the first to fill it. Mr. Wood was the trees. Mr. Wood was the forest. Well, he was a very old god who saw something very new: he saw a god-fearing society turn towards complete industrialization. So what did he do? He sacrificed his trees. He sacrificed his forest. And he became something else."

— Mr. Wednesday, American Gods (2017), "A Murder of Gods"

Much like Animalistic Abominations, these foul blights on everything bear a strong resemblance to commonplace life-forms, in this case that of natural flora.

Half the time these creatures are only plant-like superficially, kind of like Proterozoic Era life, blurring the lines between plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and the other things. They may plant their feet (or whatever passes for such) in the ground, attracting vermin like bees and flies, exhaling toxic spores and hypnotic pollen and sucking out the water and nitrogen and fertilizer from its surroundings. You can usually find these abominations in a Garden of Evil.

These creatures often possess a taste for flesh, human or otherwise. In other cases, all they care about is laying down their roots, overgrowing and infesting the land and starving the ecosystem of its own resources. If it grows fruit, it probably imbues those that eat it with supernatural abilities before they explode from the alien parasites that germinated in their intestines.

Combine this with Humanoid Abomination and you get a Plant Person, with an Animalistic Abomination and you get a Planimal, a Mechanical Abomination you get Organic Technology covered in vines and flowers, though for all three of these to apply they would still need to have the same otherworldliness and mind-bending terror you would expect from an Eldritch Abomination of any category. See also Foul Flower and When Trees Attack.

Note: Fungi are not plants, and in fact are more closely related to animals, but fiction still treats the two groups as interchangeable often enough for them to fit here.

Examples[]

Anime & Manga

• The Big O: The titular Daemonseed of episode 11 is a genetically engineered giant Christmas tree that nearly destroys Paradigm City and is defeating Big O in battle before it suddenly stops growing, which it had been designed to do after a while. After it stops, it does look kind of pretty, though.
• Dragon Ball: The Tree of Might is a divine tree that drains the life energy out of wherever it's planted, producing mystical fruit that only gods like the Kai and Eternal Dragons are meant to eat. While not malevolent, if planted on an incompatible planet the tree will reduce it to a barren wasteland; and if the fruit is consumed by a mortal it grants an exponential but temporary boost in power. In the Xenoverse series, a Tree of Might planted in the Demon Realm becomes corrupted, with Towa using its fruit to induce the Villainous Mode and Supervillain State.
• In Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters and its two sequels, Godzilla — identified as "Godzilla Earth" — is not only a Kaiju but a "hyper-evolved plant-based organism," and as such can engage in asexual reproduction, has little to no body heat, and lacks a skeleton. It's taken over the planet's ecosystem and terraformed it, with almost every other organism having "submitted" to it and sharing 97% of its genetic code.
• After he took in Helena's Nail, Alexander Anderson of Hellsing became capable of manipulating thorns and vines, with even Alucard calling him a "monster of God" who, like himself, has surrendered his humanity.
• A benevolent version in the Great Witch Jennifer from Little Witch Academia (2017), whose spirit fused with a tree after death, turning her into a still-sapient Plant Person.
• In Mushishi, the eponymous Mushi are essentially this trope mixed with The Fair Folk. The protagonist, Ginko, describes them as being the closest to "the heart" of nature, a.k.a. the Kouki. While the Mushi have dangerous effects on the humans they interact with, they aren't malevolent, and simply want to survive like any other living thing.
• The God Tree in Naruto is a massive alien tree nourished by draining Natural Energy from the environment and said to absorb the blood of battlefields for a millennium. It is the source of all chakra, which can be imbued to anyone who devours the chakra fruit it bears every subsequent millennium. The Ōtsutsuki Clan travelled the cosmos to harvest the fruit in order to take its divine power for themselves, though Kaguya Ōtsutsuki betrayed the clan after arriving on Earth and merged with its God Tree to become the Planimal Ten-Tailed Beast.
• Lily Carnation, the secret antagonist of the infamous One Piece movie, Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, which is one of the franchise's more infamous Outside Genre Foes to boot.. Initially seen in the form of a cute little flower with a primitive face on it, Lily Carnation is actually a shapeshifting giant predatory plant that can control minds, create illusions, produce arrow-like homing projectiles, and spawn near-perfect replicants of the dead. Baron Omatsuri has a Deal with the Devil; he feeds Lily, and in return it creates clones of his dead crewmates so he can live in denial of their passing.
• Elsa Maria, the fourth major Witch in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, at first resembles a young woman, deep in prayer. But when Sayaka attacks her, she suddenly sprouts an enormous tree to encase her enemy.
• In Rosario + Vampire, Lady Oyakata (Ruby in the anime) uses her magic to merge her body with that of her hanabake plant monsters and becomes a giant plant monster with the intent of destroying Tsukune, his Unwanted Harem and every human being within the neighboring town.
• At the end of Sonic X, the Metarex generals Dark Oak, Pale Bayleaf, and Black Narcissus fused with a World Tree to form the Final Mova: a planet-engulfing three-headed draconic plant monster powered by the seven Chaos Emeralds, several stolen Planet Eggs, and an entire planet of water. Once the Final Mova absorbed all of the Chaos Emeralds' power, it then became a giant seed that summoned runaway plant growth all across the galaxy. In the end, Cosmo fused herself with the self-destructing Final Mova to save the world.

Comic Books

• B.P.R.D.: After being incinerated by Liz Sherman, the Ogdru Hem known as Sadu-Hem regenerates into a tiny speck of fungus, which is preserved in a laboratory and grows to be bigger than a man. It then infects a human host, turning him into — in the artist's words — a "fungus elephant-man".
• The DCU:
  • The Green is an elemental force that connects all forms of plant life on Earth. It is governed by a group of plant elementals known as the Parliament of Trees, and usually selects a specific individual with a connection to the Green as The Champion to maintain balance on their behalf, Swamp Thing being their most famous champion.
  • The Grey was an elemental force similar to the Green that formed on a far-off grey, alien planet. When said alien planet was destroyed, a fragmented meteor made from the remains of the planet landed on Earth, bringing what would later be known as the Fungal Kingdom with it. The plants and fungi would live in relative peace, until Mantango (a plant elemental and former member of the Parliament of Trees) defected to the Grey and tempted humanity with the Tree of Knowledge and fostered its potential to destroy, leading to hostility between the two forces of nature.
  • Batman:
    • Poison Ivy's "babies" often end up being this. One particular Man-Eating Plant was overfed so much by her that something went wrong, mutating it into "Harvest", a sentient Mind Hive composed of the souls of all the people it had eaten. It promptly decided that Ivy was pretty appetizing herself.
    • At her most powerful, Poison Ivy herself is this. She is a misanthropic Plant Person who lures in victims to feed to her pets, has a connection to The Green, the universe's Anthropomorphic Personification of plant life, and she is immune to any poison, able to come back from the dead in plant-human hybrid bodies, Green Thumb powers that even rival those of Swamp Thing or the Floronic Man, and can create her own pets that can fall under this trope.
  • In The Golden Age of Comic Books, Superman once fought an alien plant that could regenerate from all damage and even return to Earth after being thrown into space. It conveniently turned out that it could be killed by X-rays, just like the kind Superman can emit from his eyes.
• Judge Dredd: The Father Earth storyline ends when Father Earth and his mutants fall under the thrall of an alien man-eating giant plant with a hypnotic call, believing it to be their god. Father Earth himself is a mutant covered in plants who invaded Mega-City One to inflict Gaia's Vengeance on it.
• Morrigan Lugus from Supergod was the first of the superhumans the series was centered around. He was manifested when three astronauts with minimal radiation shielding were exposed to an unknown, extraterrestrial breed of fungus, fusing them into a massive, three-face being. Mentally it's an entity beyond human comprehension — its entire fungal physiology acting similar to an organic supercomputer — whose mere presence warps the human mind. It eventually succeeds in its revenge against the human race, still spiteful for its own creation due to mankind's willingness to sacrifice its human components, through the use of infecting everyone with its deadly spores.
• El Siniestro Doctor Mortis is a chilean horror comic with a villainous protagonist, Doctor Mortis, a mad scientist who, among other evil plans, has created a garden populated by gigantic carnivorous plants.

Fan Works

• Evergreen Heart has the main character, who dies and is reborn as a powerful and eldritch Nature Spirit.
• While Donnie and April are escorted to the EPF's headquarters in Sacrifice (Ravenshell), they are nearly killed by a monstrous creature that could only be described as being part tree, part t-rex. Mikey later names it "the Tree-Rex."
• Temporal Anomaly: This is the form the Flower takes without a proper host while still being able to cause The End of the World as We Know It along with having a very eerie Voice of the Legion.

Films — Live-Action

• Eden Log: The gargantuan tree that powers the city. Supposedly its sap is a superfuel, but actually it turns the migrant workers harvesting it into savage mutants, who are then used as the real power source.
• Godzilla:
  • Biollante from Godzilla vs. Biollante is a Godzilla, rose, and human tribrid created by Genshiro Shiragami. Shiragami originally created a human-and-rose hybrid in 1984 by splicing the DNA of his daughter, Erika Shiragami, who was killed in a Bio-Major-authorized bombing of his lab in Saradia, with that of a rosebush, as roses had been Erika's favorite flower. It was later suggested that as a result of the fusion, the plant developed a level of sentience that could only be detected by those with psychic abilities, like Miki Saegusa. Then, in 1990, Mount Mihara began to erupt, creating an earthquake that killed several roses. Panicking, Shiragami spliced samples of Godzilla's DNA (given to him by the Japanese Self-Defense Force in order for Shiragami to help create the Anti-Nuclear Energy Bacteria) that had been collected in 1984 with a single rose so that it could use Godzilla's advanced healing factor to become invincible. The fusion eventually further increased the plant's sentience and gave it the ability to move on its own, and it continued to mutate into a giant rose with a literal Flower Mouth, dubbed Biollante. After seemingly being destroyed by Godzilla, she reforms as an enormous nightmarish Planimal, and eventually disperses into a cloud of spores and retreated into space.
  • SpaceGodzilla from Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla is theorized to have originated when some of Biollante's spores were sucked into a black hole and merged with a crystalline alien entity — supported by him having tusks like Biollante's and the cores of his shoulder crystals resembling Biollante's stomach.
• In the Tall Grass: The grass field as a whole is implied to be some sort of incomprehensibly alien superorganism that has existed since the dawn of time. It actively messes with both time and space and wants to assimilate human travelers into itself. Also, at different points it manifests itself as humanoid monstrosities made of grass.
• Little Shop of Horrors: Audrey II may look like a giant Venus flytrap-like plant on the surface, but it's actually a sapient alien entity that grows larger by eating blood, and has a pod-like head that opens into a gaping fleshy maw lined with bony fangs. It and its kind travel the cosmos, devouring all life on planets they come across. After spending only a short time on Earth, it's able to not only talk but sing, and manipulates people into facilitating its plans.
• Nightbooks: The Shredders, which grow from eggs that developed when Yazmin used the wrong type of blood to water a magical plant.
• Once Upon a Time (2017): Bai Qian stumbles across a tree-like monster that attacks her with its roots and branches. It takes her and Ye Hua a lot of effort to defeat it.
• The Ruins: The man-eating vine growing on the Mayan ruins displays extraordinary intelligence and abilities, while its origins are pretty much unknown. It seems less like an ordinary Man-Eating Plant and more like some demonic or extraterrestrial entity willfully tormenting the humans that go near it.
• Slender Man from Slender Man is a walking, humanoid tree. He also has power over tree branches and the sounds of tree branches snapping and contorting accompanies him whenever he moves.
• The threat that appears in Splinter is a strange, parasitic mold that turns those infected by it into Parasite Zombies that can detect other victims through their body temperature. When it manifests, it grows spikes across the infected area as it breaks the bones of its host to increase its mobility. We never find out exactly where it came from and it is very likely that whatever it is, it is still out there, ready to cause a pandemic.
• Sam, the Physical God of Halloween in Trick 'r Treat is depicted as a Pumpkin Person with a skull-like face under his iconic burlap sack mask.

Literature

• The villain of the Aurora Cycle is the Ra'haam, a gestalt entity taking the form of plant life which spreads itself via pollen and wishes to assimilate all other life into itself, intending to spread itself from the 22 planets it's incubating on through the Fold to any world it can get to.
• "Carnivorine" is an early (1889) example in Western literature of the trope. Here, a Mad Scientist manages through some truly dubious biology to modify a naturally occurring carnivorous plant into a multi-tentacled horror the size of a small tree with lightning reflexes and eventually the power of locomotion.
• Cthulhu Mythos:
  • The Green God from the Ramsey Campbell short story The Horror Under Warrendown is a sentient plant-like entity dwelling within a series of subterranean caverns, where it is always served by mutant rabbit-like worshippers.
  • The Mi-Go are fungal monsters who have a base on Pluto from which they scout out exceptional minds on Earth. They're masters of Bio-Augmentation and come across as malevolent to humans, but are implied to have a Blue-and-Orange Morality system that doesn't recognize that most people don't want to be abducted as a Brain in a Jar to attend an off-world Fantastic Science symposium.
  • The Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath are a perverse amalgamation of leafless tree, fungus, and goat the size of a small house (at the least), with Combat Tentacles and sometimes Too Many Mouths.
  • Clark Ashton Smith's Mars-dwelling Great Old One Vulthoom, from the eponymous short story, may actually be one of these, if the hallucinogenic visions of one character can be trusted.
  • David Drake's early foray into the Mythos, Than Curse The Darkness, has Ahtu, an avatar/Mask of Nyarlathotep that manifests in the African rainforest as an enormous tree stump-like thing with crystaline tendrils that attack everything in a huge "Instant Death" Radius to feed its ravenous maws. And yet, it turns out to probably be the lesser evil when compared to the man-made atrocities of the Congo Free State...
• The titular creatures from The Day of the Triffids are a classic example of this trope, being carnivorous mobile plants that paralyze and devour any unfortunate prey in their path.
• The Thread from Dragonriders of Pern. An unknown alien fungus from the Red Star, it traverses space to reach Pern and, once it arrives, roots itself and starts draining the life from everything it lands on.
• The Lord of the Rings: Old Man Willow in the Old Forest. It's a sapient tree (maybe a very old huorn or, in some earlier drafts, an ancient earth-bound spirit imprisoned in a tree-form), whose influence expands to all trees around, imbued with telepathy, hypnotic powers, and an everlasting hatred for everything walking on two legs. Like his more benevolent foe Tom Bombadil, he falls squarely under the "squid" category of Angels, Devils and Squid within Tolkien's Legendarium.
• Lumbanico, the Cubic Planet: Downplayed. The Churinela Purpurata is not malicious (as far as it is known), but it is an artificially engineered vegetal specimen whose vision is unbearable to human eyes. Pirela and Mela feel dizzy and get sick when they see one, to the point they ate very little later when they met her friends for lunch, refusing to talk about what they witnessed.
• The Three-Eyed Crow, a.k.a. Bloodraven, from A Song of Ice and Fire, has merged with the Old Gods by letting a weirwood grow through him.
• The thing at the center of Area X in The Southern Reach Trilogy seems to be some sort of monstrous alien plant. The Crawler describes it as "the strangling fruit," and many of its extrusions take plant-like forms. It doubles as an Eldritch Abomination and Eldritch Location, and distorts space, time, and living things within its domain. It may also be an alien terraforming engine, though the books remain cagey about its precise nature.
• The Taking: The protagonists encounter a fast-growing cluster of spotted mushrooms in the local bar's restroom that Molly gets a feeling of malevolence from despite its innocuous (if very strange) appearance. They also encounter walking clusters of pale, pulsing fungi that eat souls around the increasingly empty town.
• Gahan Wilson's short story (The title is an ink blot) stars a rich man who discovers a tiny inkblot on his tablecloth. No matter what the butler tries, he can't clean the inkblot off. Then the inkblot starts moving around when no one is looking. As if that wasn't strange enough, it starts growing larger and forming into a bizarre, plantlike shape. Then it's implied that the inkblot consumes the butler offscreen, and is preparing to eat the rich man next.
• Uprooted: The Wood might best be described as a predatory ecosystem encroaching on the valley, incredibly magical by itself whose malign influence is nearly impossible to root out. The Wizard compares it to a long-running campaign because there is a dark intelligence there that deliberately strikes at opportune times and employs strategy that may well ruin entire nations. The climax shows that it is a cultivated variation of the clade made up of Heart-trees that are twisted remnants of an otherwise peaceful people. The intelligence is the race's former Queen bent on complete, frankly justified, revenge against an entire people and their descendants that now cover several nations.
• Wings of Fire gives us the Othermind. It's a plant intelligence with mind-control powers. Anyone exposed to it (eating it, breathing in smoke from burning it, injected with it as eggs) becomes subject to its control. It's been there for millennia — in the very oldest legends the dragons of Pantala have, of their ancestors' arrival on the continent, the Othermind was there and using the animals as its weapons. It still hates everything it doesn't have full control over. Long exposure has made it at least vaguely comprehensible to dragons, but it's still strange and terrifying.

Live-Action TV

• Mr. Wood from American Gods (2017) was originally an Old God worshiped by humanity when it began, having been a god associated with trees. When animistic belief dwindled and industrialization took hold, Mr. Wood foresaw that he would eventually cease to exist when he would be forgotten and, rather than dying, sacrificed his own trees and joined the New Gods. While only seen briefly in "Lemon Scented You", briefly disguised as a wooden desk at the police office with the knot opening to reveal a human eye. It soon comes to life and attacks Shadow, becoming a monstrous tree that implants a growing, parasitic plant into Shadow as a means of tracking him, only for Mr. Wednesday to remove it when they escape.
• The Avengers (1960s): In "Man-Eater of Surrey Green", a Man-Eating Plant from outer space lands in Middle England and takes several top horticulturists as its prisoners in an effort to germinate and spread across all of the Earth.
• Vulgyre's One-Winged Angel form in Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman is this. A massive monster covered in thorns, with gigantic petals along the back, masses of roots for legs, and additional root tentacles.
• Doctor Who has the Krynoids from "The Seeds of Doom", the seeds of which infect humans and transform them into monsters, ones that rapidly grow to the size of houses, with a rabid hunger for flesh. Left unchecked, they will continue to grow and take over all of the plant life on a planet.
• Sleepy Hollow features the Tree Monster, a humanoid tree/scarecrow demon summoned by Moloch left in a dormant state outside of the Fredricks Estate.
• The Gargoyle Vine from Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot is a lava-spewing, space plant that can grow large enough to destroy the Earth with its gigantic growing tendrils. Giant Robo has a very tough time defeating it on the two battles they had, getting ensnared in its crushing vines.

Music

• The music video for "Black Mold" by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion has the titular mold infecting people and turning them into Parasite Zombies in what looks to be the American backwoods.

Myths & Religion

• Scythian Mythology: Some Kurgan goddess figurines are monstrous women with plant feet. Some have suggested that these are depictions of Api, the Scythian earth goddess (equated with Gaia by Herodotus).

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Demon Lord Zuggtmoy, Lady of Rot and Decay, manifests as a gigantic fungal humanoid woman. She also rules over a layer of the Abyss that's overgrown with miles-high fungi and tries to spread her corruption to the Material Plane, with And I Must Scream results for anyone who gets interred in her "gardens" or infected with her spores.
  • Mu Spores (which also appear in Pathfinder) are gigantic fungal organisms whose capacity for devastation is about on par with that of the Tarrasque, with a strange and alien intelligence.
  • In the old Basic/Expert/etc system, an odic is a type of evil spirit that possesses large plants during the hours of darkness. It moves into a new host plant each night, turning it mobile, aggressive, and deadly poisonous, then moves on at dawn, killing the plant as it exits. Like other spirit-type undead, it's very powerful.
  • The Forgotten Realms setting has two: Moander, an evil god of plants and decay who manifests itself on Toril as a giant blob of rotting vegetation with multiple eyes and mouths; and Araumycos, an utterly titanic fungal colony/organism occupying the entirety of the Underdark between one and three miles deep beneath the High Forest in northwestern Faerun (to give an idea of just how big it is, the High Forest is about the size of Iowa), and is both sapient and psionic as well as virtually inscrutable beyond its desire to mentally dominate other beings to bind them to it in a sort of Hive Mind.
  • Eberron has the creations of Avassh, the Twister of Roots, a flesh-warping daelkyr with a particular affection for nightmarish plant creations, to the point of having its own dolgaunt variation that reproduces by implanting people with parasitic seeds. One in-universe theory is that the Barrens in Droaam were once the site of a verdant forest that became twisted by Avassh during the daelkyr invasion and had to be eradicated, root and branch, leaving nothing but a wasteland.
• Pathfinder:
  • Cyth-V'sug, the demon lord of fungus, parasites, and disease, takes the physical form of a house-sized, animated mass of fungi, vines, tubers, and rot. Depictions of him vary between showing him as a hulking, beast-like quadruped composed of rotting vegetable matter or as a flying mass of wooden claws, fangs, and horns dotted with bulbous fungal "eyes" and gnarled branches, but always shrouded in miasma and swarming vermin. He used to be a qlippoth, an ancient race of fiendish Eldritch Abominations that ruled the Abyss before demons arose, before he became a demon, and thus lacks any resemblance to mortal forms or sanity in his appearance. His realm, Jeharlu, is a planet-sized mass of living fungus that feeds parasitically on any world or plane it is able to contact, corrupting them and absorbing them into itself.
  • Zygominds are titanic fungal entities with devastating Psychic Powers that wander the depths of space. Upon finding an inhabited planet, a zygomind traps entire communities in a mental Lotus-Eater Machine, transforming their bodies into undead servants as they die of deprivation. Perversely, they're mindless Non-Malicious Monsters who are just instinctively seeking nutrients.
  • One of Paizo's original contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos, the Great Old One Xhamen-Dor, is a fungoid mass vaguely resembling a rotting reptile corpse. It's also a Planetary Parasite that spreads itself through a world and its inhabitants, and when the infestation is complete, brings the world through to be absorbed by the alien city of Carcosa, the abode of both it and its master, Hastur the Unspeakable.
• Turnip 28: The noxious, mutagenic plant that serves as primary foodstuff within the muddy hellscape that was once Europe is very weird. Per the lore in the Swollen Maglette, its tubers occasionally form rudimentary bones and organs as if the plant was trying to create its own animals, and its effects with frequent consumption - and remember, there's not much else to eat - include physical mutations and maddening visions. Its presence sucks the life from the soil so nothing else can grow, and many end up developing a perverse attachment to the horrible thing and working to spread and cultivate it.
• Various plant-type monsters from Yu-Gi-Oh! — like the "Predaplant", "Rose" and "Sylvan" archetypes — fall under the category of "abomination."

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • The Morbuzakh was a giant plant monster that terrorized the island of Metru Nui with its tendrils until the Toa Metru destroyed its root. It had a predecessor that was named Karzahni.
  • The Element Lord of Jungle fits into this category, as his mindset is more tied to Nature Is Not Nice than any other train of thought.

Visual Novels

• In the Nasuverse, the Forest of Einnashe. It began as a blood-drinking tree who Took a Level in Badass by drinking from Einnashe's body after Arcueid had killed him, back in the middle ages, and now manifests every fifty years to sate its voracious hunger. By the time of the present day, even the monster-slayers of the Church have unofficially given up trying to kill this thing, and not from lack of trying.

Web Comics

• "Captain Botanical" in Sluggy Freelance chapter 66 is a plant demon that creates twisted plant zombies. It appears as a giant humanoid made up of plant stuff, with a flower for a head.

Web Original

• The music video for "MopeMope" by LeaF and Optie starts off with some innocent-looking cartoon flowers...that soon transform into these things that have human hands for petals and human mouths in the center.
• Many of the plant-based SCPs captured by the SCP Foundation can qualify as this.
  • SCP 417 is an anomalous species of African baobab tree that grows fruit that are filled with a rather aggressive species of biting insects with venom that varies in severeness from person to person.
  • SCP-2517 is a memetic entity that manifests in the form of a recurring childhood memory of the non-existent theme-park known as "Cragglewood Park", with many of the characters associated with the park being a variety of Anthropomorphic trees of differing species. It's not a memetic entity. The park is real and it abducts children, seemingly erasing them completely from reality and very likely integrating them into itself.
  • SCP-097-01 is a giant pumpkin at the centre of an abandoned fairground. The pumpkin patch surrounding it is full of various anomalous species of pumpkins with human-like blood. It makes children sleepwalk to the fairground, then eats them.
  • SCP-6666 is an enormous tree-like being that grows into the ground instead of above the ground, and constantly emits a cloud of dangerous neurotoxin. It's actually the corpse of the fae god Titania, and it's keeping the Children of the Night contained.
  • Several of the SCP related to the Great Green God may fall into this category.
• The Slender Man Mythos: Given his strange appearance and his habit of appearing in forests, the Slender Man is sometimes implied to be some kind of plant creature — either a forest that evolved sentience and created an avatar to hunt humans or something born from the ghosts of criminals who were executed by hanging them from trees.
• Gemini Home Entertainment: Nature's Mockery, one of the recurring otherworldly entities in the setting, is categorized as a plant, anyway, in the Wilderness Survival Guide episode.
• THE MONUMENT MYTHOS: Special Trees seem to be flora of some kind, even if they're utterly leafless and branchless. They're normally entirely indestructible (blowing one up with dynamite barely even affected it, and a Mineral Macguffin was needed to just scratch them), it took three years to dig up a small one, and they can seemingly "choose" between growing and repairing what meager damages they have. And most of all, they have bizarre spaciotemporal properties: People can disappear in their vicinity, and at ill-understood times they suddenly curve in half, open a gateway in a shower of lightning, and shunt all nearby through it, between time periods or even universes. Whatever triggers this transportation reflex of sorts isn't known, but people have been grabbed from decades prior to be dumped in place, or even ripped out of an alternate universe and swapped out with their counterparts. At least one person passing through said they were briefly in an endless forest of Special Trees during transit. Trying to contain them doesn't stop them; the Special Tree inside the Washington Monument still curved the entire tower in 2003 during an event, seemingly having merged with it. There are Special Trees in the Pyramids, too, which are actually the tips of infinite towers. Something has caused them to start emerging from the sands.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: The Mycelium is a massive creature (no doubt of alien origin) that hid beneath Camp Opinicon and had command over a savage race of Mushroom Men. Because fiction likes to portray fungi and plants to be similar, Ben was able to telepathically communicate with it as Wildvine.
• In Ben 10: Alien Force, the Highbreed failsafe is a towering monster composed of a mix of plants, trees, soil, and organic matter. It was created from several Brainwashed and Crazy humans merging in a special cocoon and turned into its components, including 'antibody'-like beings that serve as an immune system, or in Grandpa Max's case the thing's brain.
• Big City Greens: The second Halloween Episode, "Squashed!", is about Tilly borrowing an alien chemical from Gwendolyn Zapp to help the family grow their pumpkins. However, it works too well, as the pumpkins then into mind-controlling abominations.
• Undergrowth from Danny Phantom is a giant ghost plant that ends up covering the entirety of Amity Park in his vines and controlling the minds of the people out of revenge for humanity's destructive attitude towards nature.
• The Darkwing Duck villain Bushroot is a Plant Person, but his stock in trade is turning ordinary plants into monstrosities.
• Josie and the puss*cats has the villain Doctor Greenthumb, who has made prototype plant monsters in his lab. The things are about eight feet tall and have grasping tendrils. Greenthumb plans to cultivate and loose an army of these things unless he's paid richly to keep them bottled.
• The New Adventures of Superman: Although starting off as a Plant Person, the eponymous character in "The Tree Man of Arbora" turns into one as it grows to gigantic proportions as it consumes water.
• In the Ready Jet Go! episode "The Plant From Bortron 7", Jet grows a Bortronian plant under the light of the Earth's sun. However, it becomes a huge, Godzilla-esque plant that rampages the town. And don't even think about getting us started on what happens at the end!
• When we (briefly) see the Beast's true body in Over the Garden Wall, it appears to be an amalgamation of Edelwood trees. And because Edelwood is people, you could in one sense consider him a Flesh Golem.
• Samurai Jack: Though Aku is normally characterized as being a creature of dark alien essence, there's a lot of wood and tree motifs to him. When he was a non-sentient pile of goo he attacked with sharp tree-like spikes. His horns resemble branches, his essence twists and deforms itself into an evil-looking tree when the Emperor seals him away, his joints creak like wood, and during his confrontation with the Scotsman, he even calls Aku a tree-demon. Plus, his standard form is tall. Really, really, tall.
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch has the Slither Vines in "Paths Unknown", a plant creature created by Dr. Royce Hemlock of the Galactic Empire's Advanced Science Division as a bioweapon to use against insurgents threatening the peace Palpatine's Empire achieved at the end of the Clone Wars, though it got out of control, forcing Hemlock and his subordinates to use a Base Delta Zero order to bomb the lab it was created in to hell. Despite this, its vines continued to spread beyond the facility and into the jungle, where it hunts down Deke and Stak, 2 clone cadets who were going to be soldiers in the Empire's ranks, but were getting blood drawn instead.
• SWAT Kats has the recurring villain Doctor Viper, who was an assistant botanist before turning evil. Viper routinely creates giant plant monsters in his quest to overrun Megakat City, plus a corps of smaller plant-mooks to deal with intruders. One such abomination is a Blob Monster that incubates spores, which when loosed, would cause the city to be Reclaimed by Nature, tangled in vines and ivy and moss galore.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012):
  • Creepweed from "The Creeping Doom" is a gestalt entity born from the merging of the Creep, a Jason Vorhees/Swamp Thing Plant Person, and the Son of Snakeweed, a clone of the plant mutant Snake Weed. It is a massive entity with the same healing factor as its components, emitting a strong sleeping gas and trapping human beings with the intent of eating them.
  • Fungus Humungous from the episode of the same name (and not the trope of the same name) was a giant mutant mushroom lurking within New York City's sewers, thriving and spreading itself and its army of Mushroom Men within its dank, dark corridors. It was able to grow stronger and larger by feeding on the fear of others, doing so by using its hallucinogenic spores to cause those exposed to it to experience their greatest fears (Casey with rats, April with bats, Raphael and co*ckroaches, etc.).
• In one episode of VeggieTales, a massive "rumor weed" (having been bestowed sentience when a potted plant landed on an electrical wire) gradually grows larger until it grows over an entire building.

Video Games[]

• Alraune, Whisperer of Dementia (changed to "Whisperer of Insanity" in her One-Winged Angel form) from Bayonetta 2 was once a woman who took her own life by dousing her body in mandrake poison as revenge against the husband who left her. She was reborn as an Infernal Demon in Inferno, her physiology like a Plant Person with a rose motif and uses her claws as weapons. Ironically, she has a grudge against Madama Butterfly, the demon who Bayonetta is contracted to.
• Blasphemous, the troubles with the fanatically religious land of Cvstodia began when the High Pontiff transformed into a burning tree whose ashes swallowed up a majority of the church leaders and transformed them into monsters, thus ushering in the Age of Corruption. From there on, abominations involving trees are a recurring thing in the game.
• Control: The "mold" frequently mentioned in various safety posters around the Federal Bureau of Control turn out to be references to "The Mold", an otherworldy fungus-like creature that has infested the Oldest House with Alien Kudzu that tries to bait humans into eating it so it can control their bodies.
• Dark Souls:
  • The Bed of Chaos from Dark Souls is a massive demon that was once the Witch of Izalith, one of the Lords and a god to the humans of Anor Londo who, in an attempt to recreate the First Flame and prolong the Age of Fire, accidentally created the Chaos Flame, turning everyone in Izalith into chaos demons. It takes the form of a massive tree-like monstrosity whose roots can be found all across Izalith, with the chaos flame sitting atop it.
  • The Curse-rotted Greatwood from Dark Souls III. Curses in the Dark Souls universe cannot be broken, one can only get rid of them by passing them on to someone or something else. Some genius in the Undead Settlement decided to designate a giant tree as a curse dump for the entire town, and the massive amount of curses put into the thing caused it to mutate into a giant monster that you have to hit in the groin a lot.
  • The Birch Women of Dark Souls III's Painted World of Ariandel are humanoid trees resembling women which either shoot fireballs from their branches or breathe freezing breath. Except for one, which thrashes about trying to maul you with its branches while howling like a lunatic, for absolutely no explained reason.
• The Old One, the Big Bad of Demon's Souls, looks like a massive bramble of trees and tree limbs.
• Devil May Cry 5: The Qliphoth is a massive, very tall demonic tree that sustains itself in both human and demonic blood through its roots. Once in a thousand years, the tree can bear fruit; any demon who eats it would gain enough power to rule the demon world. The Big Bad, Urizen, attempts to grow this tree through Red Grave City, causing it to kill many people via impaling them with its roots or letting the Empusa demons harvest blood for it. He also partially merges himself with it to sustain himself with the tree's power, waiting for it to bear its fruit.
• One of the Source-powered skills in Divinity: Original Sin II lets you summon a Hungry Flower: a monstrous plant the size of a tool shed that has a mean bite for any enemy nearby and poison spit for everyone else. Its only limitation is, naturally, the inability to move.
• The Triumphant skin for Wormwood in Don't Starve Together, being a representation of what Wormwood would look like with the power of the Nightmare Throne and "Them". He has an Eyeless Face with a giant eyeball growing out of the flower on his head when he blooms, serrated edges on his leaves, several rows of thorns across his torso, and hands that look a bit like Venus flytraps. According to the flavor text of the skin he's also a Poisonous Person. Even the other characters' Triumphant skins aren't as freaky-looking and mostly look like their normal selves with Villainous Fashion Sense, although they could be considered Humanoid Abominations since they have the same power source.
• Drakengard 3 has the parasitic Flower growing out of Zero's eye. It doesn't look like much, but it allows her to regenerate from lethal injuries by sprouting a whole new body in a brutal, bloody fashion. It's also what spawned the other Intoners who Zero is trying to kill, helped make Drakengard's Crapsack World even worse through its song's corrupting influence, and is the nascent form of a Grotesquerie Queen that will destroy the world unless stopped. In the final battle, the Flower grows to gargantuan size and sprouts colossal facsimiles of the Intoners to defend itself from Mikhail's counter-song.
• Elden Ring goes all-in on the imagery of botanical nightmares, often coupled with Body Horror. Several powerful and dangerous enemies take on the form of twisted and corrupted plant-like beings, and as the game progresses and one dives deeper into the lore of the setting, it becomes apparent that beautiful, glowing Erdtree that towers over the Lands Between is in fact an invasive creation of the Greater Will intended to extend its domain over the world and to help suppress the life that existed before it.
  • Ulcerated Tree Spirits are a monstrous combination of tree and serpent, combined together to create a fast, terrifying figure of bark, scale, and flesh that sprays golden flames as it undulates and rampages around. The creature itself is disturbing for the sheer wrongness it exudes, along with mismatched limbs, cancerous growths, and its erratic and disjointed movements.
  • The Prince of Death, previously Godwyn the Golden is a colossal mixture of shellfish and enormous tree, his body slowly growing and expanding throughout the Lands Between to infect areas with cancerous roots and copies of his eyes and face. Furthermore, his influence is causing corpses to rise from the dead and preventing some of the dead from returning to the Erdtree. Further, Godwyn is technically still alive, as his body remains living after his soul was slain, making the Prince of Death a mindless, half-living tree-like abomination.
  • Malenia, Blade of Miquella, outwardly looks human, but her body is a vessel for the Scarlet Rot, a malignant infection that alters plant and animal life it comes into contact with. When unleashed, the Rot takes on the form of a vast, beautiful red flower, and Malenia herself sprouts wings that look to be made of delicate, rotten leaves. Further pushing it into this trope is the fact that the Rot is a manifestation of one of the Outer Gods, the Eldritch Abominations of the setting.
• EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance: The Ze-kiro and Jabuliposi who attack en masse in the weird dimension halfway through Stage 4. The former resembles a large patch of dead grass, which opens to reveal a predatory eye and a large, hungry mouth. The other, a large flower that opens up to reveal rows of teeth along each petal, and a face in the middle.
• Fate/Grand Order: The Trees of Emptiness are of an alien origin, given to the Crypters by the "Foreign God" for their mission to "rewrite" the world, and are what prevent the Lostbelts from being purged by the World's will due to them being aberrations from the Proper Human History. The trees' height reaches to the skies, a fully-grown one has rolling imagery of space and stars mashed with their silver barks as a literal microcosm of a galaxy, and when they first manifested they violently grew their roots to impale people, and cover the earth, causing mass extinction of humanity over three months. They're also nigh-indestructible.

• The Elder Scrolls: It is said that the Hist, the trees that the Argonians revere, were the original inhabitants of Tamriel, and that they were originally from one of the 12 "Worlds of Creation" that were shattered by Padomay and then coalesced by Anu to create Nirn. They are said to possess "unfathomable" knowledge from the earliest eras of creation, a form of omniscience and foresight into future events, and are able to mentally influence and physically alter beings who drink their sap. They are believed to be utterly alien and utterly incomprehensible, even for those who have achieved CHIM (essentially, a state of awake lucid dreaming that can alter reality along with a full understanding of the workings of the universe), something which can't even be said about the likes of the Daedric Princes.
• EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance has two in the Ghost Gate dimension: what can only be described as a carnivorous square of dead grass, and a large flower with tooth-lined petals and a human face in the middle.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy V: Exdeath at first appears to be a Tin Tyrant, but is revealed to have once been a tree used as a prison for evil souls, before said souls made the tree sentient. His first form as the final boss takes on the form of a demonic tree with the upper half of his humanoid form sprouting from the top.
  • Final Fantasy IX:
    • Soulcage the Eldritch Abomination in charge of the Iifa Tree takes the form of a tree sprouting roots that act as arms and has a skull-like face. The very Iifa Tree could count as well — a truly gigantic tree that controls the flow of souls between Gaia and Terra — but it acts mostly as an Eldritch Location.
    • The same place contains enemies called Stropers which have a tree-like shape but are made from stone rather than plant materials.
  • Final Fantasy XII: Though Malboros are a staple of the Final Fantasy series (and more or less odd-looking, but natural beasts in each), there are two variants in this entry that have especially strange abilities — if the flavor text is anything to go by. The Malboro King variant wears a crown that supposedly transforms anyone who puts it on into a Malboro King, and the Cassie variant is said to have been sprouted by accident from a physiologist in ages past.
  • Final Fantasy XIV introduces overgrown Malboros that more or less resemble a pyramid made of mouths and tentacles. Shadowbringers reveals that these types of Malboros are how Malboros originally looked and were created by the ancient Amaurotines, while Endwalker reveals that the Ascian Halmarut made them specifically to keep insects out of his garden.
• In the Heart of Thorns expansion of Guild Wars 2, the Elder Dragon Mordremoth is made out of plants. He can control thorny vines and grow mobile plants out of corpses; the entire Maguuma Jungle is controlled by his minions. All the Elder Dragons are Eldritch Abominations, destructive forces made of pure magic that have slept for thousands of years, and Mordremoth is no exception. Like many eldritch abominations, he can also control the minds and enter the dreams of weak-willed Sylvari.
• The Flood from Halo, despite resembling a zombie apocalypse at first blush, are surprisingly fungal in how they grow and spread, and the Gravemind even resembles a giant flower made of flesh. Their Cosmic Horror Story origins as revealed in The Forerunner Saga adds to the "abomination" side of things.
• Two boss monsters of House of the Dead are plant-zombies. The Sun of House of the Dead 3 is a massive tree with vine tendrils, human faces in its trunk, and flowers that bud into Xenomorph-esque heads. The Moon of House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn is a giant humanoid tree that can absorb more zombies to make itself bigger — and mobile.
• In Infinite Crisis, Atomic Poison Ivy is a cross between this and Humanoid Abomination, with a plant bottom half and a human top half.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: Many of the Forces of Nature's mooks are this, such as the tree-like Urgles and the thorny Jitterthugs. Apparently, they're all made of natural materials, justifying their appearances.
• A few of the Heartless and Unversed from Kingdom Hearts take the form of plants. Most prominent are the Creeper Plant and its variants across multiple games, the Leechgrave, the Cursed Coach, and the Grim Guardianess.
• Kirby:
  • In Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe, the final boss of Magolor Epilogue sees the fragments of the shattered Master Crown possessing the first Gem Apple of the series, causing it to become a massive, horrifying demonic entity with a giant Gem Apple Tree for a body.
  • Kirby: Triple Deluxe: The giant flower plant Dreamstalk isn't really an abomination until Queen Sectonia merges with it, after which the plant grows out of control and starts sucking the life out of not just the Floating Continent Floralia but also the Planet Popstar. Merging with the plant also gives Sectonia immense powers, as well, as seen in her boss fight.
• The Thorian from Mass Effect is a massive plant that fills many Starfish Aliens and Eldritch Abomination criteria. It's incredibly old, it looks like Cthulhu, and it can Mind Control people, which requires unbelievable mental strength to resist. Oh, and there's also the God-complex. It's fairly benevolent though, by Eldritch Abomination standards. It protects its slaves like a craftsman protects his tools and when it doesn't have need of them they're free to pantomime a normal existence.
  • Adding to its strangeness in the setting, it is a form of sentient life that had essentially been able to ignore the Reapers through an incredibly long hibernation cycle. It had clear memories of past cycles, which made it a target for Saren.
• The Pumpkin King from MediEvil is a giant pumpkin monster created by the game's Big Bad Zarok, its presence in the Pumpkin Witch's pumpkin patch turning all of the pumpkins into sentient monsters that Sir Daniel faces in "Pumpkin Gorge" and "The Pumpkin Serpent".
• Moons of Madness, being set within the universe of The Secret World (see below), also feature the Filth. Notably, Dr. Inna Volkova is corrupted by it into becoming a rather hostile human-tree hybrid of some sort that the protagonist deliberately says is no longer human.
• The Plant Abomination from the Facebook game Phantom Chronicles is a grotesque creature that resembles a cross between a pair of webbed hands, a human body, and a hagfish, capable of growing even more hands in its evolved form Hellish Plant Abomination.
• Pokémon:
  • Xurkitree resembles power cables that sometimes take the form of a tree.
  • Celesteela and Kartana are plant-based Ultra Beasts. (Celesteela is based on bamboo and grows like a plant in the ground, while Kartana is made of paper and is implied to grow off the trees in the Ultra Forest introduced in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon)
  • Wo-Chein from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a snail-like Pokémon made of leaves that uses a chain of bamboo slips as a shell. The slips also act as its Soul Jar. The way it was born even makes it seem more like a youkai than a Pokémon.
  • Brute Bonnet is the primal Paradox form of Amoonguss that came from the distant past, despite still possessing the same Poké Ball pattern as its contemporary relative. It's even implied that it wasn't born in the past, but created by Professor Sada's time machine.

• Remnant: From the Ashes: The Root is an interdimensional plant-like Eldritch Abomination that invades and conquers worlds, and can manifest a demonic tree-like Alien Kudzu. Some beings manifested from it, such as the Ent, are examples themselves, with the Ent, in particular, being a wooden Cthulhu.
• A number of these pop up in the Resident Evil series, as the various viruses tend to be able to mutate plants as badly as animals. Most well known is the deadly Plant 42, the penultimate boss of The Residence that appears as a massive bulb surrounded by prehensile blood-sucking vines, while the sequel introduces the less deadly (but more mobile) Plant 43s. Later games introduced the Veronica and Dorothy plants, both serving as bosses to their respective chapters.
  • Resident Evil 2 (Remake) changes Plant 43's so they are now more humanoid (whether they are made from people or mimicking them is unclear). Now, they are much more dangerous as they take much more to bring down and forgo spitting acid in favour of just biting your head clean off.
• The Secret World: The Filth is a rather hostile form of Alien Kudzu deliberately connected to the Dreamers.
• The Divine Dragon from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a giant, holy being that lives within the Divine Realm. It hailed from a realm west of Japan (likely either China or Korea) and took root in what would eventually be the location of the Fountainhead Palace. It holds a strong connection to the Everblossom, a cherry tree in permanent bloom, with the Dragon itself looking rather like a giant branch growing out of a tree. It is also missing an arm, implied to have been the result of a branch from the tree being removed. It is also accompanied by the Old Dragons of the Tree, an army of smaller tree-like dragons that appear to be suffering from illness, perhaps as a direct result of the branch being severed. It is also indicated that the Divine Dragon is the source of the Dragon's Heritage that Wolf and his master Kuro possess, thus making it also responsible for the Dragonrot that has plagued Ashina from time to time.
• The Sepulcher from Silent Hill: Homecoming is the manifestation of Sam Bartlett's guilt over murdering his son Joey Bartlett via live burial. Sepulcher appears as a gigantic cross between a corpse and a monstrous tree. His whole body hangs from the ceiling, and his bloated underside resembles a destroyed trunk of a tree, with bits of bodies hanging out of it. His "trunk" is connected by hooks to several bodies that are wrapped in cocoon-like sacks of flesh. He supports himself with his long arms and large hands, he only has three fingers with four fingernails, which he also uses to attack. His face is dominated by a root-like, fleshy tumor. When he is dismounted from the ceiling, he will crawl on his arms and drag the rest of his body behind him. The skin on his arms are stretched thin, reminiscent of a decomposing corpse. The oozing growth over his mouth could also represent Joey's suffocation while buried alive, the tumor-like growth also bears a resemblance to Amnion's umbilical cord.
• The Sims 4, of all games, introduces one of these in the StrangerVille expansion. Upon moving to StrangerVille, you will immediately notice that there are some very strange glowing flowers all over town, as well as a number of sims who behave in a possessed manner, talking about becoming one with "the Mother" when your sim tries to talk to them. These are the result of spores released by a giant plant creature that lives in the depths of the secret government lab outside of town. Defeating it requires large quantities of herbicide and the vaccine you created to cure the possessed sims.
• Super Metroid: Spore Spawn is a giant plant creature with a very hard outer shell that protects a vulnerable core.
• Touhou Project has the thousand-year-old Saigyou Ayakashi. It was once a particularly beautiful cherry tree, but after a famous poet decided to spend his last moments admiring its Cherry Blossoms, enough people imitated him that the tree became a Youkai able to beguile people into relaxing beneath its branches, draining their lives away and feeding upon their blood. It was eventually rendered dormant with a magical seal powered by one of the bodies beneath it, and the tree was sent to the Netherworld, to the garden of its ghostly ruler, Yuyuko Saigyouji. The plot of Perfect Cherry Blossom kicks off when Yuyuko decides it would be nice to resurrect the person sealing the Saigyou Ayakashi so the famous cherry tree can bloom again. She had forgotten that she was the one buried under the tree...
• Undertale: At the end of the Neutral route, Flowey the Flower gains the power of the human souls and becomes an enormous, omnipotent beast called Omega Flowey/Photoshop Flowey. This form combines plantlike features with machine parts, and makes some disturbing use of Medium Blending.
• World of Warcraft: Draenor was originally dominated by sporemounds, immense plant elementals that would consume anything not part of themselves. They eventually grew so powerful that they actually fused all plantlife on Draenor into one hivemind, the Evergrowth. Left to its own devices the Evergrowth would have grown out of control and consumed all of the planet's resources before starving, leaving Draenor lifeless. The Titan Aggramar's breakers managed to shatter it and the last sporemound was later destroyed by the Apexis, but from the corpses of the Evergrowth came the Botani and Primals. They seek to either consume all non-plant life or convert it into slaves via spore infestation. The Zangar Sea is another product of the sporemounds, being an entire fungal biome born from the corpse of the sporemound Zangar which actively seeks to infest the land.