Sinister Deer Skull

This guy is the reason you Don't Go in the Woods...

"In the woods, a hiker consumes the flesh of his deceased friend in order to give himself the strength to press on and find civilization. To his horror, the corpse of his friend comes to life and tells him that while he should not be ashamed of nearly starving to death, "there is a price to pay for eating flesh in these woods", and that his friend belongs to the Mordeo now. The hiker then begins to grow antlers and his flesh tears off his head as it morphs into a deer skull."

— Crypt TV - Insatiable Hunger

Deer, the majestic, beautiful lords of the forest, but also gentle symbols of nature's fragility.

When they're alive, that is.

While deer themselves are generally portrayed as heroic or at least benign in fiction, deer skulls tend to be bad news. With their empty eye sockets, sharp antlers, and oddly-shaped mouths, deer skulls◊ are decidedly creepy in a way that living deer aren't, which makes them a perfect accessory for villains.

The macabre connotations of deer skulls in particular have a long folkloric history. The idea of a Horned Humanoid, after all, is a very old one, and the addition of antlers to such a being has long served as a shorthand for emphasizing their connection to the wilderness. In particular, many mythologies feature a Horned God, with many depicted as having antlers. The Wendigo of Algonquian mythology is also often shown this way in modern media, but this is inaccurate to the original myths. A humanoid being with antlers, or even an entire deer Skull for a Head, therefore carries connotations of being connected to nature in a way humans are not. Even if not outright evil, they'll probably operate on extreme Blue-and-Orange Morality, but regardless, won't have much of a fondness for humans.

In short, if the protagonists of a story encounter a character with a deer skull for a face, it's a sure sign that something bad is about to go down. Even if the deer skull isn't part of a character, it's still often used as a spooky piece of set dressing, like a creepier version of a cow skull in a desert. A bleached deer skull lying on the ground — especially if there's no skeleton to go with it — adds some much-needed foreboding atmosphere to The Lost Woods or Wild Wilderness.

Can overlap with Skull for a Head (when it is part of the character's body). Compare Dem Bones (for characters made out of human bones), Taxidermy Terror, and Horns of Villainy. A Crown of Horns is more likely to be worn by a ruler trying to invoke the positive aspects of deer.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Elias from The Ancient Magus' Bride usually takes the form of a very tall humanoid, with a deer-like skull and antlers for a head. Downplayed in that he's not fully "evil", but suffers from a Dark and Troubled Past and an inhuman sense of morality.

Comics

• Monica's Gang: Played with in the "Umbra" arc from the Teen spin-off. The main antagonist is the Pale Horse of Death◊, a malevolent Eldritch Abomination with a donkey skull for a head. However, the tree branches attached to the sides of its cranium resemble a pair of antlers, invoking the image of an undead deer.

Film — Live-Action

• The demonic wendigo at the center of Antlers is portrayed as having a monstrous cervine jaw with a huge mass of antlers atop its head.
• Moder is "the monster" from The Ritual. An Animalistic Abomination treated as a Physical God by her cultists, she serves as the main antagonist and has a distorted deer skull head with various other parts including legs and bird talons hanging off of it.

Live-Action TV

• Hannibal: Will has recurring hallucinations and nightmares of a black feathered stag, which he first starts seeing after finding a murder victim impaled on deer antlers. It represents Will's relationship with Hannibal and his ever-increasing encroachment and influence on Will's life. At times, the stag is accompanied by or transforms into a Wendigo, depicted with a stag's antlers, which represent Hannibal himself (seeing as wendigos are closely linked with cannibalism).
• One episode of Animal Planet's Lost Tapes depicts one of the malicious cryptozoological creatures, The Wendigo, as a human body donning torn bloody clothes and a deer skull for a head.
• In Trace, the body of Elina Nikiforova, the victim in "Teeth on the Shelf" (who was making fineries of animal's skulls and teeth), is found with deer's skull instead of her head.
• In Yellowjackets, a group of teens ends up stranded for several months in the Canadian wilderness. In the pilot episode, a girl in a headdress made out of deer antlers and a veil leads others (all wearing identity-concealing masks) in a cannibal ceremony. In a later episode, the maybe-psychic Lottie Matthews dons the headdress.

Literature

• In The Chronicles of Prydain, the Horned King is a monstrous warrior covered in blood-red body paint and wearing an antlered mask that conceals his face.
• The Twisted Ones: The narrator's fears about the woods spike when she finds an effigy made from a crucified, mutilated deer carcass with an inverted Skull for a Head. Then it vanishes. Then she sees it walk...
• Shalin, the priest of the tribe that built Stonehenge in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novella "The People's Temple" wears one, and is also known as the Deer Man.

Mythology & Religion

• Many of the more sinister depictions of Gaulish/Celtic deity Cernunnos depict him with such antlers. Depending on the story, he can either play it straight (like being involved with The Wild Hunt) or subvert it (such as being a more benevolent Nature Spirit and patron deity of the Forest Ranger archetype).
• The modern interpretation of the Wendigo story depicts the creature with the bare skull of a deer atop a hulking, twisted, zombie-like body. The deer skulls were not present in the original Algonquian myths, where they were much more ghoulish, being the Anthropomorphic Personification of greed and hunger.

Podcasts

• Welcome to Night Vale: One of the many enigmatic and vaguely menacing elder beings in Night Vale is Huntokar the Destroyer, who appears in the form of a woman with the head of a deer. It eventually turns out that she's Night Vale's forgotten protector deity, who is responsible for the fragmented nature of time and space around the city after she tried to save it from a nuclear war in an alternate timeline.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: Siabrae are a sort of druidic counterpart to liches, the result of Druids and other primal spellcasters taking The Corruption of the land into themselves in order to fight it off. Sometimes, this works, and so the ritual is still used, but more often instead of purifying the land they become preservers of their own twisted counterpart to nature. They don't have deer skulls per se, but they have antlers made of stone, which is clearly meant to reflect their identity as corrupted protectors of the natural world.

Video Games

• Deer heads and skulls appear frequently in Rusty Lake's Cube Escape games, and they never mean anything good.
  • The Corrupted Soul that attacks you in Case 23 first appears as a deer, then as a decapitated deer, and finally as a glowing-eyed black ghost with antlers.
  • Hotel has a deer skull on the wall of Mr. Deer's room.
  • Albert Vanderboom wears a deer skull as a mask in Roots while he torments his brother and sister-in-law using voodoo dolls.
• DUSK: the Wendigos are represented in their modern depiction of zombies with a deer skull as a head◊, although in a more bestial fashion.
• The Elder Scrolls series:
  • Hircine is the Daedric Prince of the Hunt whose most common form is that of a deer skull-headed humanoid. Though he always ensures his hunts are "fair" and delights when The Hunter Becomes the Hunted, he is known to take mortals against their will to pit against each other/his were-creature servants in his hunting grounds.
  • The Reachmen are a barbaric group of nature-worshippers who inhabit the area along the border of High Rock and Skyrim known as "the Reach". They have viciously resisted any non-Reachmen attempting to conquer/settle the region dating back thousands of years, are known to commune with witchy Hagravens, sometimes worship the above-mentioned Hircine, and prefer "primitive" weapons and armor made out of bone, stone, and hide. In Skyrim, the Forsworn (a terroristic sub-sect of Reachmen rebels) Headdress is a light armor helmet that is literally a deer skull adorned with feathers and furs. Forsworn encampments are also liberally adorned with deer skull ornaments.
• In Red Dead Redemption II, the Native Burial Ground is marked with a deer skull atop a conical stack of branches with some human skulls on spikes nearby. Downplayed in that nothing bad happens there, but it does seem to have a higher than usual spawn rate for animals nearby and hunting them from the burial ground itself causes an honor loss.
• Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion: Specimen 8, a.k.a. the Deer Lord, is a large creature with a deer skull for a head wrapped in a black robe. Under its robe are human bones and screaming human souls. It will chase and try and murder the player, reciting a cryptic poem should it succeed.
• Total War: Warhammer III: The Things in the Woods balefiends, and the The Incarnate Elemental of Beasts Wendigo, each have these.
• In The Witcher franchise, Leshens (aka Leshy and Leszy) are forest-dwelling "Relict" creatures with an antlered deer skull for a head atop a tree-like body. They inhabit the deepest parts of forests, are fiercely territorial, use carrion birds as sentries, and can control other creatures to aid them in combat. According to some legends, they are the very embodiment of the forest itself, protecting it and the creatures within. Naturally, these creatures are a common target for Witcher contracts in rural areas, where they inhibit hunting and timbering the forest. In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the "In the Heart of the Woods" contract request has a village where the elders actually worship a Leshen with whom they have a pact. Geralt can either kill the creature, as the younger villagers want, or renew the pact, siding with the elders. If he chooses the latter, the younger villagers slaughter the elders and Geralt remarks how, in doing so, they've killed more people in a day than the creature had in years.
• The Wolf Among Us: The Jersey Devil, once he drops his Glamour, takes the form of a grey-skinned demon with a deer's Skull for a Head.
• In the World of Warcraft Expansion Pack Battle for Azeroth, the extinct Drust (and the witches who reprised their black magic) built wicker constructs in their image, with skulls and antlers evoking this trope.

Webcomics

• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Lalli is nearly killed in the Spirit World by a monstrous Iku-Turso-like creature with a moose skull for a head and deer skulls on its appendages.

Web Original

• One of the monsters that appears in CryptTV is a creature called The Mordeo. The Mordeo are a race of demons that are created when a human resorts to cannibalism out of desperation. When someone transforms into a Mordeo, the flesh on their head will tear off as their skull changes into that of a deer.

Western Animation

• Centaur World: The Nowhere King is an Eldritch Abomination with the skull of an elk topped with mutated antlers, a disgusting body made of a black slime, and numerous bony legs, who is the leader of the Always Chaotic Evil Minotaurs hellbent on razing Horse and Rider's world.
• The Owl House: In "Thanks to Them", Camila has to pull over because the police is investigating a car that skidded off the road. The driver tells the officer she lost control because a deer went out of nowhere and frightened them, although her little daughter insists that it wasn't a deer, but a monster. The camera slides to border of the road, showing the skeleton of said deer, result of a Possession Burnout by Belos.

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