History Main / PossessingADeadBody

A type of TheUndead resulting from a dead body being reanimated [[DemonicPossession by a spiritual or otherwise non-corporeal being such as a ghost or demon]]. Depending on the case, possessing a dead body may or may not be better than possessing a live one. Dead bodies are easier to possess but (logically) less powerful because of the likelihood of decay having already set in, while live bodies tend to be more powerful but harder to possess. It also depends on the possessor themselves; their powers/nature may mean that they're just fine possessing a withered corpse, or contrarily are able to [[PowersViaPossession bestow the body with additional supernatural abilities]] beyond "just" being a walking corpse.

* ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'', ''Magazine/WhiteDwarf'' magazine #87 article "With a Pinch of Salt". One method of creating a zombie is to summon and bond a Franchise/CthulhuMythos monster to enter and possess a corpse. Normally only a monster that isn't tied to a physical body can be used, such as a gaseous Fire Vampire or a member of the Great Race of Yith.

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** ''Magazine/WhiteDwarf'' magazine issue #56, article "The Fiend Factory". The mind shadow is a fiendish creature that can possess and control a corpse, including having it attack other creatures. If the corpse is reduced to zero HitPoints or is turned by a cleric, the mind shadow is forced out of the body. Otherwise, the mind shadow can maintain possession for up to seven days.

** ''Magazine/WhiteDwarf'' magazine issue #56, article "The Fiend Factory". The mind shadow is a fiendish creature that can possess corpses. It can control the body, including having it attack other creatures. If the corpse is reduced to zero HitPoints or is turned by a cleric, the mind shadow is forced out of the body.

[[folder: Anime & Manga]]

* In ''Manga/{{Inuyasha}}'', one species of demon known as Shibugarasu (or Dancing Corpse Crow), are able to bury into a victim's chest, devour their heart, and then possess the corpse to make it look like the victim is still alive.

[[folder:Films -- Animated]]

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* ''Film/{{Night of the Living Dead|1968}} 30th Anniversary Edition'': At the end, the unhinged [[SinisterMinister Reverend Hicks]] declares to a reporter that the zombies are human corpses possessed by demons from hell. This is clearly supposed to be a crazed rant however, and is never proven one way or the other.

* ''Film/HellraiserBloodline'': Two Cenobite cultists in eighteenth century France kill a young prostitute so they can use her dead body as a host for a demon princess who then adopts the girl's name (Angelique). Note that most Cenobites don't actually require host bodies, but are rather [[DemonOfHumanOrigin humans whose souls were corrupted in Hell]].

* In ''[[Literature/TheSpaceTrilogy That Hideous Strength]]'', the amoral scientists of the N.I.C.E. communicate with higher-dimensional lifeforms by specially preparing severed human heads for the "macrobes" (as the scientists call them) to possess and speak with. What the N.I.C.E. is too blind to realize is that these macrobes are literally demons from Hell.

** If the spirit animating the corpse ''isn't'' bound by spells or {{geas}}es, that's when zombie apocalypses happen. Instead of infecting others with their bite, the demon--a being of electricity--tries to take over the nervous system of its victim in order to devour their soul, and skin is conductive. The living, active soul of a living being is stated to be much "tastier" than the dead informational echoes in a long-dead body.

* ''Literature/CiaphasCain'': The first step in creating a daemonhost appears to be providing a dead body for the daemon to move in to. In "The Beguiling", a Slaaneshi cult goes the HumanSacrifice route; in ''The Last Ditch'' a daemon possesses a servitor instead of one of the living crew members on the bridge. ''The Traitor's Hand'' strongly implies that Emeli sucked the souls out of her cultists before she could refashion their bodies into a suitable form for her.

* Discussed in ''[[Literature/{{Chalion}} The Curse of Chalion]]''. Several characters say that a body slain by death magic must be burned before nightfall to prevent ghosts from possessing it; one describes such a possession, seen many years ago.
-->I saw a case once, when I was a young divine. The degraded spirits are shambling stupid things, but it’s so very awkward to get them out again once they take possession. They must be burned...well, ''alive'' is not quite the right term. Very ugly scene, especially if the relatives don’t understand, because, of course, being your body, it screams in your voice...
* In the ''Literature/OldKingdom'', less powerful Dead such as [[OurZombiesAreDifferent Hands]] are created by a Dead spirit possessing and reanimating a corpse - any corpse will do, so long as it's mostly intact, though it's implied there's a stronger connection to the spirit's original body. More powerful Dead entities ''can'' do this too, but are just as likely to use artificially created construct bodies or even exist as raw spirit with no body at all.

* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'':
** In season 4, the demon Ruby took to possessing a human body that was technically dead after Sam objected to her using a living person's. The woman in question was comatose and had just been removed from life support before she moved in.
** In the final episode of season 4, it's also shown that decades earlier the demon Azazel murdered a convent of nuns so that Lucifer could use one of their dead bodies to talk to him from his prison.
* ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E3TheUnquietDead "The Unquiet Dead"]] had recently deceased corpses being inhabited by the Gelth, gaseous aliens who had lost their corporal forms. It gave the impression of ghosts possessing corpses to rise as zombies. While the Gelth initially feigned victims and invoke sympathy in the Doctor, they're later revealed to be malicious, as they desire all living humans to be dead so they can inhabit their bodies too.
* In the ''Franchise/BuffyVerse'', this is explicitly said to be what a vampire is. You die, and an evil demon takes over your body.

* In the universe of ''Series/{{Lucifer 2016}}'', it's possible for the denizens of Hell to escape by possessing the body of someone who recently died.

* In ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' Shedim are spirits from a distant metaplane who attach themselves to corpses, or the bodies of astrally projecting mages sometimes.

* ''VideoGame/GuiltyGear'': Zato-One has a LivingShadow named Eddie, who is its own entity. When Zato died, Eddie reanimates his corpse; his name in the selection screen becomes "Eddie" in some games rather than "Zato-One".
* ''Franchise/MortalKombat'': In ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombatDeadlyAlliance Deadly Alliance]]'', the VillainTeamUp of Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, defeated and killed a lot of the Defenders of the Earth, especially the until-then protagonist Liu Kang. But later before the CosmicRetcon of ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombat9 MK9]]'' (''[[VideoGame/MortalKombatDeception Deception]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombatArmageddon Armageddon]]''), a revived and [[FaceHeelTurn heel-turned]] Raiden reanimated Liu Kang's body as a zombie to fight with him against [[DraconicHumanoid Onaga]] and [[ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight everyone who stands in his way]], no matter if they're allies or enemies.

* ''Videogame/LegacyOfKainDefiance'': Raziel the wraith rebels against his former master, [[EldritchAbomination The Elder God]], and as punishment is denied the right to use conduits between the spectral world and physical world. He gets around this by projecting his spectral form into human corpses and reshaping them into his own image.

* The Former Humans of the ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' series are of this variety. They were Marines killed by the demons, which then took possession of their fallen bodies.

* In ''VideoGame/DragonFable'', Valtrith extracts the soul of Serenity, then uses her soul as part of a dark ritual which summons a darkness spirit known as Caitiff, who inhabits the [[ArtifactOfDoom Skullreaper of Doom]]. The end result of the ritual is the hilt of the Skullreaper gets impaled through the chest of Serenity's corpse, which in turn allows Caitiff to control her corpse as an extension of itself.

* [[spoiler: Yomiel]] of ''VideoGame/GhostTrick'' is a ghost who is able to animate his own corpse. [[spoiler: This is thanks to a [[GreenRocks radioactive meteor]], a fragment of which is lodged in his body and keeps his corpse perpetually on the edge between life and death, making him virtually indestructible (much like Franchise/TheCrow). By the end of the story, the main character is like this.]]

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'': Ascians can do this, in addition to possessing living people, as shown when [[spoiler: Elidibus possesses Zenos after his death]].
* ''VideoGame/BeyondTwoSouls'': In "The Condenser" chapter, the spiritual entities who escaped from the Infraworld reanimate an entire hallway of human corpses to menace Jodie.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'' module Q1 ''Queen of the Demonweb Pits''. When a Raise Dead or Resurrection spell is cast on a dead body, the body will be brought back to life and the dead person's soul will re-inhabit it. If this is tried on one of Lolth's planes in the Abyss, there's a chance that the soul of a dead ChaoticEvil person will possess the body instead.

* According to a legend printed in Ludwig Bechstein's ''Book of German Legends'' (1853), a student of the scholar and occultist Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535) met his doom when he secretly read in a forbidden grimoire lying around in Agrippa's study, [[SorcerersApprenticePlot thereby accidentally summoning a demon who killed him.]] To avoid inconvenient questions about how the student died in his study, Agrippa summons another spirit and commands it to possess the dead body. The dead student walks out "like a living person" and drops dead at a random street corner, making everyone believe he died of some unknown but natural cause.

Not to be confused with someone who collects dead bodies; see GraveRobbing for that.

* ''Literature/TheLaundryFiles'' by Creator/CharlesStross features zombies (or [[NotUsingTheZWord Residual Human Resources]]) in a mixture of the voodoo and artificial, since sufficiently advanced science ''is'' magic. '''Note: copied from OurZombiesAreDifferent'''

* [[spoiler: Yomiel]] of ''VideoGame/GhostTrick'' is a ghost who is able to animate his own corpse. [[spoiler: This is thanks to a [[GreenRocks radioactive meteor]], a fragment of which is lodged in his body and keeps his corpse perpetually on the edge between life and death, making him virtually indestructible (much like Franchise/TheCrow). By the end of the story, the main character is like this.]] '''Note: copied from OurZombiesAreDifferent'''

* ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "The Unquiet Dead" had recently deceased corpses being inhabited by the Gelth, gaseous aliens who had lost their corporal forms. It gave the impression of ghosts possessing corpses to rise as zombies. While the Gelth initially feigned victims and invoke sympathy in the Doctor, they're later revealed to be malicious, as they desire all living humans to be dead so they can inhabit their bodies too.
* In ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' this is explicitly said to be what a vampire is. You die, and an evil demon takes over your body.

* ''TabletopGames/DungeonsAndDragons'' module Q1 ''Queen of the Demonweb Pits''. When a Raise Dead or Resurrection spell is cast on a dead body, the body will be brought back to life and the dead person's soul will re-inhabit it. If this is tried on one of Lolth's planes in the Abyss, there's a chance that the soul of a dead ChaoticEvil person will possess the body instead.

-->'''Caboose:''' I have an idea. ...I HAVE AN IDEA!\
'''Tucker:''' Yeah, we heard you the first time, Caboose, we were just ignoring you.\
'''Caboose:''' Since you possessed that Red guy, and took control of him, why don't you just possess your own body?\
'''Church:''' Oh I see, so that way I would be living inside of my own dead body.\
'''Caboose:''' Yes.\
'''Church:''' Unable to move, just, laying there, rotting in the sun for all eternity.\
'''Caboose:''' Yes.\
'''Church:''' Okay, Caboose, I'll be sure to get right on that.\

* In the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "Sub Rosa", the disembodied spirit that has been altering Beverly's mental state to try and get her to sleep with him decides to jump into Bev's dead grandmother's body and use it to try and attack the crew stopping him.

* ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'': In season 4, the demon Ruby took to possessing a human body that was technically dead after Sam objected to her using a living person's. The woman in question was comatose and had just been removed from life support before she moved in.

* ''Film/InvisibleInvaders'' (1959). Space aliens possess the bodies of dead human beings in order to deliver an ultimatum: surrender the Earth or suffer mass destruction caused by hordes of dead bodies under their control.

Alternative Titles: ''Possessed Zombie, Spirit-Possessed Zombie''
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A type of TheUndead resulting from a dead body being reanimated [[DemonicPossession by a spiritual or otherwise non-corporeal being such as a ghost or demon]]. Depending on the case, possessing a dead body may or may not be better than possessing a live one. Dead bodies are easier to possess but (logically) less powerful because of the likelihood of decay having already set in, while live bodies tend to be more powerful but harder to possess. It also depends on the possessor themselves; their powers/nature may mean that they're just fine possessing a withered corpse, or contrarily are able to bestow the body with additional supernatural abilities beyond "just" being a walking corpse.

Compare {{Necromancer}}, where the corpse is being reanimated by an outside party who doesn't inhabit the body themselves; OurLichesAreDifferent, a necromancer who possesses their ''own'' dead body; DeadGuyPuppet, where a corpse is literally used as a puppet through non-mystical means; and ParasiteZombie, where the corpse is controlled by a PuppeteerParasite. See also KillAndReplace.