The Top-10 Shambling Mounds in Pop Culture History
From my favorite book when I was 9, The Official Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (1978 edition): “Shambling mounds, or ‘shamblers’ are found in dismal marshes or certain wet subterranean places. They are omnivorous, feeding upon any living material (via their weird roots and tendrils). They attack fearlessly, clubbing with their limbs twice per melee round.”
I was watching Wes Craven’s early film “Swamp Thing” recently, and the Shambling Mound kept coming to mind. I realized that, like characters who melt, or living food items, our pop culture consciousnesses have a specialized corner devoted to big living piles of stuff. Big wet mounds of living garbage. Seriously. Give it a few moments thought, and you’ll find that big gooey evil beings (or sometimes good ones) are shambling about the occasional film, game, or TV series. Actually, don’t give it thought, as I have compiled a list of ten of them for you to ponder.
Here, then, are the top-10 shambling mounds in popular culture.
10) The Creeping Terror
from “The Creeping Terror” (1964)
The story goes that the producers of “The Creeping Terror,” the 1964 Vic Savage film that we all know only because of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” had actually made an elaborate and convincing monster suit for the central monster in their invasion flick. It was, and this is only according to legend, very convincing and scary. But then, at the last minute, there was a theft on set, and someone made of with the awesome monster suit. With shooting scheduled to commence the next day, and needing to stick to the low-budget, less-than-a-week-long shooting schedule, the producers threw together a suit at the last minute, and the result is the shambling mound we see on the screen.
The monster is a large, slug-like being with a big, upright… proboscis?… sticking up in the front. It looks like a bunch of kids under a quilt. It eats people. Well, people lay quietly still while the monster kind of shambles over them. I’m guessing it’s eating them. The monster is never properly named, so we can only ever refer to this quilt monster as The Terror. That creeps.
I’ve said before that cheap special effects can be way more charming and impactful than slick special effects. I like the utter obvious cheapness of The Creeping Terror. You can tell it was made by excited filmmakers. Or panicked ones. Either way, the exterior story is way more interesting than anything in the movie.
9) The Adipose
from “Doctor Who” (2007)
“Doctor Who” has no shortage of oddball aliens with arch schemes to take over or destroy Earth. If they’re in the past, the future, or in some parallel universe, there’s invariably going to be a creature who wants to kill all the humans, and take all the cool stuff we got. I guess humans make the best stuff, and have the sexiest women. Why else would aliens always be so interested?
One of the stranger monsters to invade Earth was a being called Adipose who was using human bodies to store their young. But not like an incubator, like in “Alien.” They were harvesting our fat to create their young out of it. Yes, they are beings made of human fat cells. We only ever saw their young, which looked like little foot-high smiling marshmallows with arms and legs. It’s never addressed in the episode in which they appear, but I imagine they’re slimy to the touch, and feel like wet, wiggling puppies, coated in crisco. They don’t rightfully shamble, I suppose but little walking lumps of human fat, I think, qualify.
8) Heap
from MAD Magazine #5 (1953)
Who here has read the early issue of MAD Magazine? I bet it’s more than we think. I liked the madcap weirdness the early issues possess. There’s a kind of chaos in the early issues of MAD you don’t get too many other places. The newer issues tap into it occasionally, but there’s something about the 1950s that made the weirdness all the weirder. I like to think that, if I was raised in the 1950s, I would have read MAD on a regular basis.
In the fifth issue of the magazine, they ran a story called “HEAP!” wherein a mysterious alien force imbued life to a pile of garbage. It rose up into a big lump and menaced scoety. It was, however, a friendly mound, and the local police were able to feed it, give it a home and a life. It even managed to find a female pile of ick which it would proceed to date and marry. My mom still tells stories of reading about Heap, and how, while preparing for a date, would gingerly comb it’s head down.
Living pile of garbage. Thank you MAD. It turns out that Heap was also based on a mossy monster from the comics in the 1940s. I haven’t read those, but the cover drawings I’ve found online look pretty wicked.
7) Sludge
from the Malibu comic “Sludge” (1994)
Who remembers the Ultraverse? I used to read those comics back in the mid 1990s. It was created by Malibu comics, and it was a somewhat successful attempt to create a new superhero canon to compete with Marvel and DC. It was mildly successful, I say, in that Marvel ended up buying the characters, and featuring them in Marvel titles. The setup was this: Mysterious blasts of energy, originating on the moon, have been hitting random people on Earth, providing them with superpowers. A cable car in San Francisco hits a team of strangers, and they decide to team up. Some kids are mutated, and they form a group of superpowered runaways, sorts like a directionless X-Men. And, most disgustingly, a recently murdered New York cop, who had been disposed of in a sewer, was hit by energy and merged with the sewage around him.
The result is Sludge, a half-man, half-sewage creature with, uh, sewage powers. Like he’s eight feet tall, but can ooze through small space. His mind isn’t all there, and he makes grammatical errors even in his interior monologue. Sludge, despite the gross and weird origin story, was played as a tragic figure. Disgusted by his own appearance, he longed for death, but found that, thanks to his makeup, was unable to die. He sought out evil superpowered beings who might have the secret, and often found himself doing dubious and evil things in return for his own murder. How sad. I was fond of the comic, though, as the villains were always kind of bonkers (there was a gator man, and a pumpkin-head man). Sludge though? Weird.
6) The Kalamanthis
from The Chronicles of Narnia (1949 -1954)
No information exists on the Kalamanthis.
5) Mi-go
from “The Fungi from Yuggoth” (1929, 30)
Only the most hardcore of H.P. Lovecraft fans have probably waded through this completely surreal set of brief poetic cantos that he wrote early in his career. I have a book-on-tape version of them, and they’re obtuse and hard-to-follow. Most of the sonnets deal with forbidden knowledge, and exploring the strange other-realm of Yuggoth where the fungi live. The sonnets are certainly evocative, but don’t have the teenage nerd appeal of the stories he’s better known for. They, instead, seem more like an ancient work of literature from a civilization we don’t know a whole lot about. I suppose, in that regard, tey were successful.
The fungi themselves were a semi-intelligent race of planet creatures. In the poem, they come from a lush, mysterious, misty Edenic realm on Earth, where they live in half-conscious bliss. In other stories, the fungi are mentioned, but they were repurposed as a malignant growing force from a distant planet. Either way, they were greasy, lumpy fungal forms. Shambling to be sure.
4) Sigmund
from “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” (1973 – 9175)
I’ve written about this show in the past, so I’ll try to be brief. Sigmund was a polite sea monster that was ousted and rejected by his more mean-spirited sea monster family. He fled onto a beach where be befriended to young human boys, who would hide Sigmund in their secret beach clubhouse, and get into wacky misadventures with him. The show was a boilerplate ’70s sitcome with very, very slight twinges of satire hanging about it. It was one of the more successful shows of the Sid and Marty Krofft canon.
Sigmund himself has a strange anatomy. He’s clearly part octopus, as he’s squishy and has tentacles. But he also has leafy, slimy flaps of seaweed handing off his head. In my mind, Sigmud was actually part plant, if not entirely. In dialogue, they use the word “squid” a lot, but I’m positive they were plants, those sea monsters. Either way, they were capable of being dysfunctional and goofy.
3) The Shambling Mound
from Dungeons & Dragons (1974 – present)
The inspiration for this list, the shambling mound, took up way too much space in my childhood imagination to not mention here. The mound was an acidic lump of wet leaves that could melt you with acids and pound you with tendrils. I never actually played a game that featured a shambling mound, but it seemed pretty cool. I loved the picture in my old Monster Manual, and I would spend days re-drawing it (as well as other monsters). Monster battle royales would form in my head.
If you’ve ever encountered a shambling mound in your D&D game, let me know. I’d love to hear tales of actual (well, in-game) hands-on experience with these things. It will satisfy so many of my childhood fantasies.
2 and 1 (tie) The Man Thing and The Swamp Thing
from Marvel comics (1971) and DC comics (1971) respectively.
I know there are plenty of comic book purists out there who are going to rush to the defense of these creatures, and point out to me the subtle differences between the two (one can speak, another can’t; their origins are different), but I think we can all safely assume that both The Man Thing and The Swamp Thing occupy the exact same space in our pop culture memories. They fulfill the exact same need. They appeared in the same year, and they even look alike. Perhaps one company ripped off the other. Perhaps it was just one of those happy coincidences. Either way, we have two popular swamp monster shambling about.
The Man Thing was bound to the Florida Everglades, and was the result of an experimental serum that turned a brilliant scientist into a living hulk of moss. The Man Thing can’t really think like a person, but has empathic powers, and tends to side with underdogs to defend them from evil overlords. He was mysterious, and seemed to live in the swap, only helping those that came his way. Not really a superhero, but more of a monster. He was featured in a straight-to-video feature film in 2005.
The Swamp Thing has a similar origin (indeed they two “things” had a few common writers: a brilliant scientist, working on an experimental chemical, turns himself into a giant swamp monster by accident. He was originally an outright beast who would stalk and kill any people that came near. He wasn’t so much a shambling mound, as a strong man covered in weeds. As the comics progressed, he quietly became benevolent like the Man Thing, until he was more of a hero. The comics were more popular than Man Thing’s, and he would go onto be in two feature films (in 1982, and in “Return of the Swamp Thing” in 1989). There was even a TV series and a cartoon show.
Which mound do you prefer?
Witney Seibold is a mound himself who rose from a swamp eons ago, and has assumed the shape of a man. He has taught himself to write and to talk about movies. You can see its output in the following places:
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