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He just can't handle the kickflip.

Did you just chop apart the evil zombie or robot you were fighting? Keep an eye on all the parts, because it's only a matter of time before that severed hand starts to spider-crawl after you, or scuttle off for some nefarious purpose.

With zombies and similar creatures, the ability for the hand to function independently is often a result of some sort of supernatural energy. With robots, it's usually a result of Easily Detachable Robot Parts.

See Evil Hand for when this happens before it gets lopped off. When its deliberately done during a fight, it's an example of Detachment Combat.

For other lopped off yet functional body parts see: Losing Your Head, Organ Autonomy, Brain in a Jar and Animate Body Parts.

Not to be confused with Handy Helper.


Examples:

Note to editors: the examples are divided by type.

    open/close all folders 

Robots

    Anime & Manga 
  • Sirene in Devilman can detach her arms and control them independently of the rest of her body with psychic abilities. The 1990 OVA takes this up a notch by having the detached arm capable of rotating at such high speed that it can become a Deadly Disc while in flight.
  • Doraemon have a gadget called the Spray-on Hands (most likely made of nanobots), that when applied on its user's hands, manifests as a pair of disembodied, floating hands that carries out whatever given tasks. Nobita uses this gadget to slack off as his floating hands does his homework for him, only for the gadget to (what else?) backfire hilariously - forgetting Doraemon's advice to re-apply the spray once the task is complete, Nobita, waking up from a nap, finds out his floating hands have scribbled a hole in his maths book.
  • The Junji Ito horror manga, Gyo have Tadashi's Mad Scientist uncle cutting off an arm after it's attached to a compact-sized walking machine. Said arm somehow assimilates with the machine itself and gains a life of it's own, scaring the bejesus out of Kaori (at the sight of a severed human hand on robotic legs) later on.
  • Mazinger Z:
    • Several Mechanical Monsters — such like Deimos F3 and Briver A3 — could detach their hands from themselves and attacking with them, or simply picking or holding their enemies.
    • The titular Humongous Mecha is an heroic example: During his first battle in the manga Doublas M2 coils one of its necks around one of its forearms and rips it off... and then the wrenched arm flies on its own and punches through Doublas M2. This scene is replied in the first opening. Kouji often also uses Mazinger's fists to pick things or people.
  • The Zeong mobile suit from, well, Mobile Suit Gundam can disconnect its arms at the elbow (they're connected by wires, but very long ones) in order to attack with its beam cannon fingers from any angle. For example, it could disconnect an arm and circle around a GM in order to shoot it in the back, bypassing its shield, but this isn't very necessary given its incredible power. This ability was built into the suit in order to let pilot Char Aznable make use of his telepathy to guide the arms and attack from unpredictable angles. There are several mobile suits in Gundam that use this ability, such as the Hamma Hamma and Turn X.

    Film — Animation 
  • All parts of The Iron Giant can move on their own, for self-repair purposes. This was also in the original book.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Iron Man 3 has an impressive scene where Jarvis detaches a modular armor's forearm to help Tony without any prompting as he was too busy drowning at the time.
  • The detached hand of B-4 grabs at Worf's ankle in Star Trek: Nemesis.

    Literature 
  • Family Skeleton Mysteries: After learning how to control his other bones from a distance (Sid's consciousness is based out of his skull), Sid uses one hand to write notes to Georgia, leading her to where his skull is.
  • The Iron Man: The eponymous giant is shattered into pieces falling off a cliff in the opening page of the book. A single hand animates, picks up an eye and starts piecing the rest of the iron man back together.
  • The Murderbot Diaries. In Network Effect the title character, a cyborg, finds itself suspended upside-down over a pit with its arms taunt so it can't break free. Murderbot detaches a hand which involves individually disconnecting circuits and tearing loose some flesh and nerves (fortunately it can dial down its pain sensors), then walking the hand by the fingers up onto the arm, which is then torn free of its cuff whereupon the hand is reattached. Murderbot is then easily able to break the other cuffs. The main risk involved dropping its hand during all this, which would have left Murderbot screwed.
  • Piano Lessons Can Be Murder have the kid protagonist, Jerry, finding out his school to be haunted by ghostly, severed hands of the past students (as shown on the book's cover). But in The Reveal late into the story, those hands turns out to be robotic, belonging to the school's best students in the past who ends up being murdered by the janitor - a Serial Killer obsessed with music - who then collects and convert their hands into piano-playing automatons because "music sounds better without human error". Yikes!

    Live-Action TV 
  • Doctor Who:
    • An android does this when his hand blocks a door in "The Robots of Death". The person in the room later uses the hand against another heroic android, which leads to the immortal line, "Please do not throw hands at me!"
    • The detached Cyberman arm and octopus-head-thing in the episode "The Pandorica Opens". They even shoot out tranquilizer darts!
  • Tenaya 7 in Power Rangers RPM often detaches her hand to have it get into places she can't.
  • Red Dwarf:
    • After suffering critical damage, Kryten uses one of his hands, an eye, and assorted other parts to build a miniature robot for the express purpose of getting help. And then the miniature robot starts running around in Lister's "joy department".
    • In another episode where the main characters are back on the Dwarf and imprisoned, another part of Kryten's "fully simulated anatomy" detaches itself and starts to scurry about the cell.

    Video Games 
  • SAR: Search and Rescue have disembodied, hovering giant robot hands as recurring enemies, who travels via jet boosters on the wrists and attacks by trying to grab at you. Strangely, you fight nearly fifty robotic hands the entire game, but at no point do you see the other body parts.

    Webcomics 

    Web Videos 
  • In Atop the Fourth Wall, Mechakara's hand has to contain a stupendous amount of technology for Lord Vyse's escape plan to work — technology that does not seem to serve much purpose being installed in a hand. Of course, as it turns out, this is exactly what he needs, so...

    Western Animation 
  • Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: XR has to do this as part of his Chew Toy job on occasion.
  • Bender from Futurama does this frequently, often for the purpose of stealing things while everyone's distracted by some other part of him. The very first episode has Bender putting both of his detached arms back on, with Fry wondering how he did it.
  • Monster Beach: In one episode, Widget's hand leaves her arm and starts to make trouble to her friends.
  • Cyborg from Teen Titans apparently built spy-drone capability into his modular hands on purpose (though, presumably, the hands weren't both modified at the same time).
  • Transformers:
    • Optimus Prime is disassembled, and he controls his limbs to re-unite, via robot telepathy, in an episode of The Transformers.
    • In a weird variant of this trope, Megatron can turn into a giant, disembodied hand in Robots in Disguise.
    • A both robotic and zombie version occurs in the Transformers: Prime episode "Shadowzone". After shooting off Zombie Skyquake's arm (using Starscream's disembodied arm, no less), Jack, Raf, and Miko are then promptly pursued by it.
      Miko: How can a zombie arm move faster than the actual zombie?
    • Shockwave of Transformers: Cyberverse still has his left hand which serves as a lab assistant.

Zombies & Other Spookiness

    Advertising 
  • The mascot for Hamburger Helper is a disembodied glove with a face on it.
  • And Arby's mascot is an oven mitt.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Ayakashi Triangle: Suzu can summon and control free-floating parts of her omokage, which unlike the whole thing seems to be Invisible to Normals. She first uses them to feel up Matsuri in class.
  • In the anime Vampire Hunter D, we have the title vampire hunter's left hand, which has somehow gotten a Demon embedded in it. Said demon is shown by having a face in the palm of the hand, including eyes, nose, and mouth. After being severed in a rather gory scene that includes D being staked through the heart, the hand crawls back to D's body, reattaches itself to D's arm, pulls out the stake, then attempts to revive D by a) eating earth for energy (with accompanying belch afterward), b) sucking wind to give him breath, then pounding on his chest to restart his heart. All this while a monster approaches that would be the Final Death for D. Naturally, he wakes up in time to kill the monster and progress through the story. Of course, all this is helped by the titular D being a dhampir, a half-human half-vampire hybrid.note 

    Comic Books 
  • Haunt of Fear had an issue about a man who was sold a gorilla's paw. Whatever he wished for, the paw would animate to grant him. It carried out its tasks ruthlessly, murdering anyone in its way to complete them. At first horrified by the accidental deaths, the man is reassured by a friend that he's set for life with such a thing at his command. He says he wishes he had his friends brains, which the paw essentially grants by brute forcing a brain transplant.

    Comic Strips 
  • One Calvin and Hobbes comic has Calvin's dad about to read him a bedtime story about "the Disembodied Hand That Strangled People". He ends up frightening Calvin and making him faint when he sticks his own hand through his sweater and pretends the hand has caught him.

    Fan Works 
  • In Hard Being Pure, parts that are separated from Noa's body retain a certain amount of consciousness and can act independently, as shown by her disjointed arm when she got bullied by the sophomores, or when her hand crawled back to her after Noa cut it off.

    Film — Animation 
  • In Coraline, the Other Mother's disembodied hand, which is a spindly abomination made of sewing needles, pursues Coraline all the way to the real world.
  • In Corpse Bride, the title character Emily has a skeletal right arm. After she first appears rising from the ground, said arm starts crawling after a fleeing Victor until she picks it back up. Much later in the movie, when the two are performing a piano duet, her hand comes off on its own and proceeds to crawl onto Victor's shoulder.
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas gives us Sally, a sentient doll made from leaves and cloth bags. She detaches her hands to untie Santa's binding while one of her legs attracts Oogie-Boogie, the Boogey man.
  • In Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, the eponymous school has a butler who is a floating white hand.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Asylum (1972 Horror): In "Frozen Fear", Ruth's severed arm strangles her murderous husband Walter, and later attempts to strangle Walter's mistress Bonnie.
  • The Beast with Five Fingers revolves around a murderous hand that has detached itself from the corpse of a dead pianist and which attempts to kill the heirs to his will. Except the ending has some of the survivors suggest it was actually a plot by a greedy heir to kill off the others, only for that heir to end up killing himself after he went mad and began believing his own lie.
  • Big Tits Zombie: When Darna is transformed into a zombie, her hand is severed from her body. The hand then continues to try to pick up the money she had been attempting to gather.
  • Null the biker zombie from BrainDead; after getting chopped to pieces his body parts and organs continue to attack Lionel.
  • The Cabin in the Woods. A zombie gets hacked up by one of the protagonists, but its limbs are still twitching. When a guard bursts in with the intention of shooting them, a zombie hand grabs his ankle, distracting him. The protagonists knock the guard out and the last thing we see as the doors close is the hand crawling up to the unconscious man's face...
  • In A Christmas Carol: The Musical, one of Marley's ghost companions carries a Thing-style hand in a box as his ironic punishment for "never lending a hand".
  • In the "Disembodied Hand" segment of Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, Franklyn Marsh runs over artist Eric Landor and causes his hand to be amputated. Landor's amputated hand comes after Marsh seeking vengeance.
  • Ash's severed hand comes back to cause him trouble in Evil Dead 2.
  • In The Eye Creatures, one of the creatures' severed hand takes refuge in someone's car.
  • In The Hand, cartoonist Jon Lansdale's severed hand acquires a life of its own and starts murdering those who anger him.
  • The Hong Kong horror film HEX have the ghost of Lady Chan creating an illusion where she reanimates her hand to attack a priest trying to exorcise her.
  • The zombie-witch thing in House. No, not the one with Hugh Laurie.
  • In the stoner comedy Idle Hands, the main character severs his own demonically possessed right hand and microwaves it to stop the killing. It only makes matters worse.
  • They weren't detached from anyone... probably, but the Trope Namers are the "Helping Hands" of Labyrinth, which are fairly creepy and actually do seem to mean well but are very Literal-Minded. They were trying to help, not their fault "she chose down."
  • The Syfy original movie, Mammoth, have a scene where a frozen, severed hand (ending from the wrist) gets brought to life by static electricity and then starts running around on fingers.
  • Various mummies in (wait for it...) The Mummy Trilogy pull this move. Rick actually manages to turn it to his advantage. A sword is lying just out or reach, but once a severed mummy hand grabs it he then just grabs the hand and pulls the sword to him.
  • The Phantasm series does this a couple of times, first with severed fingers, later with whole hands.
  • One of the many Yokai in Peacock King is a giant clawed hand hiding in a woman's locker. The Shinto priest, Lucky Fruit, managed to sever said hand, only for it to continue crawling around trying to fight back.
  • Governor Swann gets to deal with a undead hand in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
  • Scarecrow Slayer: Just before Caleb's father is killed in The Teaser, the Scarecrow's arm can be seen skittering along the ground in front of the tractor.
  • In Splinter, a severed hand infected by the spike-virus skitters across a floor after the protagonists. More dangerous than most, as even slight contact with a victim's skin could potentially pass the virus along via the quills it's sprouted.
  • In Trick 'r Treat, Sam's hand continues to try to kill Mr. Kreeg after Kreeg has severed it from Sam's body.
  • Twice-Told Tales: In "The House of Seven Gables", Gerald is strangled by the skeletal hand of Matthew Moll which launches itself out of the safe and clamps itself around his throat.
  • A severed zombie hand crawls across a lawn at the end of Waxwork. In the sequel it murders someone, and the characters who destroy it then must hunt through several worlds to bring back proof it wasn't the Love Interest who committed the crime. Their proof is yet another zombie hand.
  • You Don't Mess with the Zohan: In a flashback, Zohan's hand is cut off by a terrorist. Said hand proceeds to strangle the terrorist and give Zohan a bottle of soda, and he later gets it reattached.

    Folklore 
  • In Brazilian Folklore, the Little Black Hand / MĂŁozinha Preta is a haunting from the Southeast region with the appearance of a disembodied black hand that could harm wanderers at night. Some versions, however, say the hand could be pretty helpful as well when summoned, obeying orders and doing domestic chores. However, the hand would never harm slaves: one story tells about a slaveowner who ordered it to punish a woman slave, only for the hand to rebel against its master in fury, hence why it is also called Little Hand of Justice.

    Gamebooks 
  • Fighting Fantasy
    • In the first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, you will come across a room full of tiles in the shape of hands, or stars. If you stepped on a hand tile, you'll be attacked by dozens and dozens of ghostly hands materializing out of those tiles, which you must destroy in order to reach the other end. The star-tiles on the other hand are harmless.
    • Beneath Nightmare Castle have a really horrifying example, where the player, after defeating a bunch of soldiers, can choose to open a chest they're carrying or simply abandon it. Choose the former and it turns out the chest is filled with severed limbs, who then comes to life crawling out to attack, and must be hacked to pieces. Choose the latter option and the book actually rewards the player by increasing his Sanity Meter, saying he felt "an overwhelming sense of relief, for some reason, after leaving the mysterious chest".
  • Lone Wolf:
    • From the book Castle Death, the Rahkos is a floating, undead hand fond of eating brains. Unfortunately for Lone Wolf, he's confronted to it in a No-Gear Level, and it's rather hard to put down for good without a magic weapon.
    • The novelization of Fire on the Water also describes the severed limbs of the zombies from Vonotar's ghost fleet still moving on their own until hacked to pieces.

    Literature 
  • The Other Mother in the Coraline story loses her right hand as the titular Coraline escapes from the Mirror Universe. Then the right hand starts following Coraline around, trying to get the key to let the Other Mother through.
  • C.H. (short for Crawling Hand) works as a masseur and bathhouse towel-boy in the fourth Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. novel.
  • The first supernatural entity encountered in Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi is a severed left arm reanimated by resentful energy, killing several people and replacing their left arms with itself in its quest to find its original body. When finally subdued, it demonstrates the ability to point to the locations of its other body parts like a compass, kickstarting the overarching scavenger hunt/murder mystery of the novel.
  • In the 1838 penny dreadful Hugues, the Wer-Wolf, a butcher who'd chopped the werewolf's hand off tries to get rid of the severed part by burying it or dropping it down a well, but it keeps turning up again at his home, as if it's crawling back when he's not watching. A subversion, as it's strongly implied that his daughter is secretly retrieving it and planting it in her father's house, to punish him for maiming the werewolf with whom she's in love.
  • In The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, published as The Iron Giant in the United States and very loosely adapted into the film of the same name, the title character arrives on Earth as a large collection of disassembled bits that then have to assemble themselves. The book example probably belongs here rather than in the Robots folder, as the titular Iron Man behaves more like a kaiju than a Humongous Mecha.
  • In Masques, Aralorn has to get rid of an undead arm by crossing running water, and she mentions that taking the arm with her might result in the undead reassembling itself wherever the arm is.
  • Necromancers who stay alive way too long in Nightrunner turn into Dyrmagnos, beings with withered corpse bodies. If you cut them up without separating the body parts, they will rejoin. The wizards' museum has a pair of hands from an infamous Dyrmagnos which still move after hundreds of years.
  • The Handlingers from Perdido Street Station and its sequels are simply creatures that look like disconnected hands. They also happen to be Puppeteer Parasites.
  • Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Vera Miligan gets her left hand cut off in volume 1, and when she reappears in volume 2, she's reanimated the hand into a familiar which she dubs "Milihand". Oliver is baffled at why she would do this given she could have easily had the hand reattached, but Katie, typically, thinks Milihand is just as cute as Miligan does.
  • In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the Old Pink Dog Bar is home to the disembodied hand of its former owner, who bequeathed it to medical science on his deathbed; medical science didn't like the look of it and bequeathed it back to the bar. It is characterised by a fierce loyalty to the bar and an eagerness to employ extreme violence against anyone who breaks the rules, such as asking for credit. The current barman doesn't believe in the supernatural, but he knows a useful ally when he sees one.
  • The severed hand of an executed sorcerer seeks vengeance on the man who betrayed him in the Solomon Kane short story "The Right Hand of Doom".
  • The wights in A Song of Ice and Fire have limbs that continue to move about and attack even after dismemberment.
  • Patchwork, a.k.a. Modular Woman, from the Wild Cards novels, can tear off her body parts and use them remotely. She had people plant her eyes and ear (she needed the other ear to communicate with others) where they could spy on her boss's enemies.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Thing from The Addams Family is the Trope Codifier.
  • The Angel episode "I Fall to Pieces" has a surgeon who can detach parts of himself to aid in stalking/molesting his victims.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy herself once had to sell a detached mummy hand to a picky customer. It didn't go so well.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The infamous "Hand of Sutekh" from the episode "Pyramids of Mars". While this is only really a stagehand's hand holding down Sutekh's cushion when he first stands up, it has become an in-joke among Doctor Who fans.
    • Played straight for a spell in the classic story "The Hand of Fear".
    • A living plastic mannequin's arm in the first episode of the new series, "Rose", tries to strangle the Ninth Doctor.
    • "The Haunting of Villa Diodati": Lord Byron has, for very Byronic reasons, brought a 15th-century sailor's skeleton to the party in a chest. Its hands, and only its hands, are reanimated and escape. One of them tries to throttle Ryan, conveniently putting the idea of a duel out of Polidori's mind.
  • Good Eats lampshades Thing from The Addams Family. The Thing in Good Eats is canonically the grandson of the one from The Addams Family.
  • Wizards of Waverly Place. The episode that plays with this trope is even called "Helping Hand"! Although it isn't very helpful after Alex uses it to clean up the shop, then doesn't give it a break or reward it in any way.

    Pinballs 
  • In The Addams Family, Thing will come out of its box at certain times to pluck pinballs.
    Gomez Addams: That's the spirit, Thing! Lend a hand!
  • The Edutainment Game The Brain has a disembodied hand on the playfield to represent the sense of touch.
  • The playfield for Pinball Magic features Matra Magna's disembodied hand, holding her Magic Wand.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Trolls can attack with any severed parts.
    • In 3.5, Warlocks have an invocation that severs their own hand, which animates and crawls around like a spider, to be used as a sort of scout. They can also do this with an eye. Don't worry, the limbs come back.
    • Lebendtod of Ravenloft can remove their hands, heads, or whole limbs in a similar manner.
    • "Bigby's Many Hands" line of spells, which summon the disembodied hands of, presumably, the Wizard Bigby, which do various "things" depending on the spell. Similar spells are mage's hand, which is for non-combat purposes, the spectral hand, and others, including one even called helping hand.
    • The Book of Vile Darkness has the grim revenge spell, used by undead caster, to sever (painfully) the hand of a living victim, and then animate it as an undead monstrosity bent on draining the lifeforce of its previous owner.
    • Also from Book of Vile Darkness, the spell Graz'zt's long grasp detaches the hand of the caster and sends it flying around. It can flank or grapple, though its main interest is to transmit touch spells, making it a superior (but riskier) version of spectral hand.
    • Forgotten Realms adds a lot of variations, such as Alcimer's flying fist or Daltim's flaming fist (the signature spell of a Halruaan mercenary pyromancer: the same general idea, but on fire) and a few grasping and/or attacking claw variants, such as Caligarde's claw and Manshoon's xorn talons. There are also more tricky and obscure spells like Halaster's grappling hand (door-sized force hand selectively intercepting magical attacks and creatures with magic items, but passing through non-magical matter) or Duhlark's long reach (large arm remotely formed from any present material that can grab, smash or pull and conducts spells like Spectral Hand).
    • Crawling claws, a mindless, weak, but usually swarming monster originally from Forgotten Realms — an animated severed hand in any shape from fresh to skeletal. It doesn't count as a proper undead, just a construct, thus is not turnable and even good wizards sometimes make one or two dozens. Mostly used as a guardian, but there's a more useful flying variety which can grasp and move at once, so those who can make them get hovering test-tube holders and suchlike. The vampiric variant, though, is much nastier.
    • In CD&D, a powerful form of undead known as the druj exists, which takes the form of animated body parts: either eyes, skulls, or this trope.
  • The advantage Independent Body Parts from GURPS: Powers.
  • In some scenarios of Mansions of Madness dead bodies spawn 2 autonomous hands under GM's control. These buggers are more annoying than all the zombies and demons combined.
  • In Munchkin, the Crawling Hand is an Undead monster; it can be fought normally, or, if you give it an item, it becomes your pet crawling hand and gives you a combat bonus.

    Video Games 
  • In Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings And The Lost Ocean you have the Devilish Hands and their family of monsters. Unusual in that they're two hands, fused together at the bottom of the palm, and they crawl along akin to a Giant Spider.
  • The Choking Hands from the Blood series. They're the only "clingy" enemy in the whole game, and the "use" key has to be mashed to toss them offnote . They're extremely weak to compensate for their irritating attack strategy and speed easily capable of keeping up with Caleb. They return in Blood II: The Chosen, and when they see the player, they'll stand on the wrist stump and give them the ol' one-finger salute before going after them.
    ''"I'll swallow your soul!"
  • Dead Space has this as a major issue with one of its enemies.
  • In Post-2014 Dwarf Fortress, severing body parts from the undead renders them inanimate, but necromancers and mummies can easily reanimate the body parts so long as they have a part capable of grasping (i.e. hands, mouths, pincers). They can even do this to body parts severed from living beings, so adventures can find themselves in the unlucky circumstance of having to fight their own severed arm.
  • A stage in Flash of the Blade have you on a boat when deformed hands starts rising out of the water's surface to claw at you, which you need to fend off. Bonus points for those hands being covered in eyes.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • The Floormaster and Wallmaster enemy types in games resemble gigantic disembodied monster hands.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has Zant's hands in the Palace of Twilight. Each hand holds one of the Sols that Link has to steal. When the Sol is removed from one of them it will come to life and try to take it back.
    • Several games have an undead hand that lives in a toilet and asks Link for paper for unexplained reasons. The one that appears in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is revealed to be named Phoeni in a guide, but it is unclear if the ones who appeared in previous (though chronologically later) games are the same character or not.
  • The old Infocom text adventure The Lurking Horror had one, in the form of an amputated human hand you could reanimate. It's actually very helpful to you, and is key for surviving some of the late game challenges, including helping you defeat the Final Boss.
  • Mystic Defender have gigantic draconic hands ending at the stump as an enemy late into the game, as large as your player hero. They attack either by clawing at you or materializing a round, exploding projectile from their palms, which they then drop from above.
  • Phelios has a really creepy area where your character gets attacked by floating, severed blue limbs (ripped at the elbow) who tries grabbing you.
  • Struggling: After curing Amadeus' heart cancer, he gifts Troy with the ability to separate and move his arms independently of their body.
  • Master Hand and Crazy Hand from Super Smash Bros. are giant, disembodied, floating, gloved hands.
  • Guybrush's left hand gains a mind of its own when it's infected by the Pox of LeChuck in Tales of Monkey Island, and acts on its own whether or not it's attached to Guybrush's arm.
  • Tibia has Hands of Cursed Fate, which are human-sized purple hands. They're one of the strongest enemies from the unnamed Demon dimension and, by extension, in the entire game.
  • One of these is available as a non-combat pet in World of Warcraft.

    Web Animation 
  • Dingo Doodles: The evil mad scientist witch-doctor Quinn-Ora is assisted in battle by nine floating severed hands from various creatures that have whips tied to each finger.
  • Mystery Skulls Animated: Arthur's left arm is seen moving about on its own and gaining a sinister eye in its palm after it was torn off of him when he was possessed by something through it.

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 
  • In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Hands on a Hamburger", Master Shake detaches his hand/glove so he can go to the bathroom while still technically touching the giant hamburger. This startles Frylock, who apparently didn't know Shake could do that.
  • In the Gravity Falls episode "Little Gift Shop of Horror", one segment involves Grunkle Stan's hands getting stolen by a "Handwitch", who has a veritable army of disembodied hands at her beck and call.
  • The Owl House: Eda gets off her staff and one of her hands detaches and is left clutching it. The hand cracks its knuckles, freaking out Luz.
  • In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Frankendoodle", SpongeBob finds a magic pencil that brings drawings to life, so he uses it to draw a picture of himself. Unfortunately, "DoodleBob" runs amok, and SpongeBob has to erase him. But he missed one arm, which then crawls its way to SpongeBob's home and uses the pencil to regenerate DoodleBob, who then plans to Kill and Replace our hero.

Other Examples

    Comic Books 

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