Slow Transformation

"Sheesh, Brundle, you're looking different today. New haircut?"

Something's starting to happen to one of our characters - Maybe he's been infected with some virus... maybe some witch had gave him a curse... maybe he's going crazy... or maybe he's just gaining weight. Whatever it is, it's usually not directly explained, and we don't see him changing on-screen...

It's just that one day, he looks a little bit... off.

And each time we see him after that, the change is a little more noticeable, usually until it reaches either hilarious or horrific levels.

As mentioned above, this is nearly always either Played for Laughs, or Played for Drama as Transformation Horror.

A Super-Trope to Virus-Victim Symptoms and a Sister Trope of Transformation at the Speed of Plot. May happen with Evil Makeover and Madness Makeover. What Monster Delay is to a Big Bad, this is to a protagonist/major character — either way, the audience doesn't see the creature in all their "glory" until the endgame. Contrast Oblivious Transformation, where a character isn't even aware of the charges to their body.

May also overlap with Metamorphosis, which is often a gradual process.

And Then John Was a Zombie is sometimes the end result.

See Fisher Kingdom (more specifically the second variant) for when simply being in a certain place can have this effect.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Beastars, a hybrid child of two completely different species mature in a way similar to this, often an animal that looked more like one of their parents than the other will begin developing features of the other parent's species when they reach adulthood. Given the heavy social stigma that treats hybrids like freaks, the thought of physically hybridizing further is often treated like Body Horror for these characters.
• In the Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection six-page short "The Hell of the Doll Funeral", a child contracts Early Onset Doll's Disease. She transforms first into something like a living doll, then into something that hopefully hasn't been a living anything for a long time.
• In Naruto, the process of turning humans trapped in the Infinite Tsukuyomi into White Zetsu takes several years.
• In Simoun, everyone is born female and upon turning seventeen go to a mystical spring where they choose to either remain female or become male. For those who choose to become male the process is a Slow Transformation. For example, head mechanic Wapōrif went to the spring and became male two years before the series but still has the biggest bust in the series.
• The snail people in Uzumaki develop a spiral pattern on their backs, then start developing other, more horrific traits over the course of several days.

Comic Books

• In Teen Titans, when Raven was being influenced by her father's power, it affected her appearance slowly, giving her more gaunt angular features and a taller forehead until she fell under his sway and turned on the team (the first time it happened).

Fan Works

• The Golds: It is casually mentioned that nonhuman curse-victims and magical creatures in Storybrooke like Katja and Ruby started exhibiting their pre-Storybrooke traits slowly after the curse was broken.
• Pokéumans: The transformation into a Pokeuman takes a whole week. And is irreversible.
• The Project Dark Jade fanfic Webwork has Jade change into a Jorōgumo over the course of 8 years.

Films — Animation

• In The Cat Returns, the protagonist becomes more catlike the longer she remains Trapped in Another World.
• Eustace in "The Chicken from Outer Space" after he eats one of the chicken's eggs, he begins to turn into a giant chicken, first his eyes turn red, then his arms turn into wings, his face becomes a beak, he grows feathers, and his feet become chicken feet.

Films — Live-Action

• In Beauty and the Beast (2017), the Enchanted Objects were quickly transformed from their human selves into Animate Inanimate Objects when the Enchantress cursed them, but what little remains of those original selves slowly begins to be subsumed as the Death's Hourglass of the enchanted rose withers. Plumette (a maid turned feather duster) notes that she's growing more feathers in her tail, for instance. Should the curse go unbroken, they will become inanimate objects altogether. In the denouement, this happens as the Beast dies, and they lose all of their humanoid features — but it's just a mass Disney Death and they are instantly restored to human forms after the Beast is himself restored. See also Theatre below for how the prior stage adaptation used this trope (and was likely an inspiration for its use here).
• Black Sheep (2007): The transformation into a were-sheep starts out as this, as the initial changes are gradual once a host is infected by The Virus, but then the changes suddenly speed up toward the end.
• Wikus's transformation into a Prawn in District 9, to the point that he's become one entirely by the very end.
• The page image charts the progression of Seth Brundle's horrific transformation in The Fly (1986), the result of a Teleporter Accident fusing him genetically with a housefly. In the first few days strange hairs start growing out of healing wounds on his back and his face becomes progressively blotchier, but because he is also becoming Drunk with Power over the amazing physical stamina and strength he now has (which he credits to his teleporter "purifying" him) he doesn't begin to worry until his fingernails start coming off, revealing that the fingers are oozing pus, whereupon he consults the computer record of his teleportation and learns what's actually happening to him. A month later, his skin is completely disfigured and the human body parts his final form will have no need of begin falling off, starting with his ears. The Body Horror climaxes with what remains of his decaying human skin being wrenched apart as his true mutant fly form emerges. The film may well be the Trope Codifier for media aside from literature.
• The Fly II, the sequel to The Fly (1986) above, is about Seth's Spin-Offspring Martin. Because Martin was born with insect-human hybrid genes and is at least 75% human on the whole, when the insect side finally begins to show it unfolds over a few days. By the time he's looking his humanoid worst he's forming a chrysalis, and once it's finished the rest of the transformation happens offscreen.
• The werewolves of the Ginger Snaps films transform slowly into wolflike creatures, over the course of days or weeks.
• Honeymoon: Bea's strange behavior and physical degradation over the course of her honeymoon is the result of being taken over by an alien puppeteer parasite. It gains more and more control over her mind and slowly transforms her into a host body. She's aware of the process the whole time and is unable to do anything about it.
• In Lost in Space, Dr. Smith receives a spider bite — two decades later, he's transformed into a huge spider creature.
• In a Played for Laughs example, the protagonist of The Santa Clause slowly changes to fit the part of Santa (gaining weight, becoming unable to shave) over the course of a year.
• The entire premise of the low-budget movie Thanatomorphose is about a woman who slowly rots alive, starting as small bruises and escalating to rotten brownish-red skin and her extremities breaking off. The movie is set entirely within her apartment, which progressively becomes messy and diseased as she rots. By the end of the movie, her body completely rots and melts away into a skeleton with bits of red flesh clinging to the bone, killing her.

Literature

• People turning into donkeys in The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the original story, it takes several days for the first part of the change (the ears) to occur.
• Dracula: Due to Dracula nightly visits to feed on Lucy, she becomes weaker over time and observes that her senses have suddenly become keener but she continues to have nightmares of dark beings. By the third visit, she's lost so much of her blood that her bite wounds eventually close up on their own, she gains fangs and her demeanor is uncharacteristically more seductive, signifying to Helsing it's too late to save her from becoming a vampire. Mina's transformation is slightly different due to Dracula feeding her his blood, cursing her to turn regardless if she stays alive or dies as long as he's alive. Indeed, she starts showing signs due to losing appetite for food, her canines slowly turning into fangs, sharing a psychic connection to Dracula and being unable to stay awake during the day but being much more lively at night.
• In Dr. Franklin's Island, some of Semi and Miranda's bone marrow is removed and the DNA doctored with various kinds of animal DNA, then implanted in them. It takes about ten days for either of them to start to feel odd and almost an entire month for any changes to become visible, starting with Miranda losing a tooth. After that it speeds up and in another ten days a horribly twisted Miranda is taken away into a lab, and it's not stated how long it actually takes for her to become a bird.
• When Tash is infected in Galaxy of Fear, she starts off with a rash that, through that story, swells and spreads, sends off Tainted Veins, and she sweats and is unusually irritable. Then the rash starts oozing... then the ooze proves to be tendrils of the Blob Monster that she's turning into and moving about as the transformation speeds up. This is in a day or so.
• This is the plot of some Goosebumps books:
  • Chicken Chicken: The main character and her brother are cursed by a witch to gradually transform into chickens after they're rude to her. It starts with the main character's lips becoming hard like a beak and her brother beginning to grow feathers; by the time they figure out how to get the witch to remove the curse, they've become fully transformed and need to peck at a typewriter to communicate with her.
  • My Hairiest Adventure: The main character, after trying out a strange lotion, starts growing dark fur on his hands that keeps coming back and spreading to the rest of his body no matter how often he shaves it off. While this is happening, he also spots several alarming signs that his friends are being transformed into dogs. It turns out that the lotion had nothing to do with his transformation; the real cause of it is that he and his friends were dogs who were transformed into humans for childless families to adopt and that transformation is slowly wearing off now.
  • Say Cheese and Die — Again!: The camera's curse makes the protagonist morbidly obese and his friend dangerously thin, with the weight gain/loss taking place gradually over a couple of days.
• In Lord of the Rings, Gollum's transformation from hobbit to.... thing was centuries-long. It is implied that the Nazgul's transformation from humans to dark holes in reality was one, too.
• Stock in trade of the Evilutionary Biologists in The Moreau Factor. Somewhat mitigated by the fact that their victims are mostly other scientists deliberately chosen because they would find the research opportunities presented by their transformations (if not the actual transformations themselves) intriguing.
• Though most of it happens off-screen, in Arthur Machen's Novel of the White Powder, Francis Leicester undergoes one of these after he starts taking regular doses of the titular powder in the belief that it's his prescribed antidepressant. It starts with his appearance provoking a vague Uncanny Valley response in his sister, Helen. It ends with a formless puddle of black protoplasmic ooze, seeping through the floor of his bedroom and into the room below, and yet still very much alive.
• In one of the more positive versions of the trope, the Magical Nanny title character of the Nurse Matilda novels and the Nanny McPhee film adaptations thereof always starts off as a hideous crone but as her invariably naughty charges learn to behave her ugliness diminishes feature by feature. Once they're fully reformed she qualifies as beautiful, but that's also when she has to move on to another family.
• After Saladin Chamcha miraculously survives a plane crash in The Satanic Verses, he starts turning into a goat man, growing horns and cloven hoofs. In the course of several weeks, he becomes increasingly devil-like, eventually turning into an eight-foot tall devil with glowing eyes and smoke coming from his nostrils, before turning back to normal. During a stay in the hospital, he also encounters patients who are slowly turning into animals and inanimate objects.
• In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, when Elders reach a certain age, their body begins to change to reflect their true nature. Abraham the Mage was turned into a golden statue, while still fully conscious.
• In Seraphina, dragons' muscles are soft, and their wings incapable of flight, for the first few minutes after transformation.
• In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the inhabitants of Innsmouth are born as humans, but slowly turn into fishmen over the course of their lives.
• In Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland, having sex causes the women of McDonaldland to start transforming into wolves. This happens anytime they have sex, and it is irreversible.
• Xanth: Threnody can take hours to do a full-body transformation with her innate shapeshifting, due to her human half slowing down her demonic half. However in Crewel Lye, when Jordan and Threnody swap bodies, he figures out that it's much faster if she shapeshifts only parts of her body at a time instead of everything at once.

Live-Action TV

• The Outer Limits (1995): In the episode "Birthright", a U.S. Senator escapes from his security detail after his own men try to kill him, and gradually gets weird warts and such. It turns out that a race of reptiloid aliens had sent spies to study humans and the spies are turning back after the disguise wears off. The horror factor is the spies themselves didn't know they were aliens.
• The Round the Twist episode "Nails" starts with a distressed boy showing the protagonist he now has three rows of nails, and telling her he's turning into a monster. By the end of the episode, he has become a merman.
• Three nights after a fly spent a good two minutes on Vice President Mike Pence's head during the 2020 Vice Presidential debate, Saturday Night Live addressed the incident in The Teaser of the October 10, 2020 episode by way of a parody of The Fly (1986): Midway through the debate, Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden (Jim Carrey), watching from home, decides to disrupt the show by teleporting to it in a not-yet-perfected telepod. Aided by doctored clips from the movie, he ends up not only merged with a fly but also undergoing a cutaway-aided transformation into... Jeff Goldblum. As he mocks the Republican party, his hair turns black and stringy, he paraphrases Jurassic Park (1993), hypes Apartments.com, and even gains a pair of Nerd Glasses! (This was effectively the show's acknowledgement of online outcry for the real Goldblum to parody one of his most famous roles, an unfulfillable request because he was in England shooting Jurassic World Dominion.)

• The Halloween episode of That's So Raven has Raven and Chelsea slowly turning into cows over the course of the episode. While their physique is human, they get cow ears, tails, snouts, hooves, tongues, and also start eating and mooing like them. At the end of the episode they are completely transformed, but it is revealed that it was actually one of Raven's visions that she manages to prevent from happening.
• In "Research Alpha", an episode of the short-lived Syfy Genre Anthology Welcome to Paradox, scientist Vincent Cloak is in a race with rival John Hammond to take advantage of guided evolution, so he experiments on himself and secretly on wife Barbara as well. While both Hammond and Barbara find themselves evolving into superbeings, Vincent himself devolves into a weak simian.

Tabletop Games

• Atmosfear: The third and fourth Nightmare games are hosted by female historical figures who start out as beautiful young women and slowly morph into hideous monsters the longer the game goes on; a warty witch in the third game's case, and a bat-human hybrid in the fourth game's case.
• Call of Cthulhu: As Deep One hybrids are growing up they appear to be human. When they reach the appropriate age, they slowly change into Deep Ones and go off to join their fellows.
• Dark Conspiracy: The Darktek supplement had Empathic Viral Mutators, a virus that could change the victim into another creature over a period of 48 hours.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The "artifact transformations" — some artifacts gradually transform their users into "the proper owner" image — physically, mentally or both.
    • In WG5's Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, the Kaftan of Ogrishness slowly turns its wearer into an ogre over a period of three days.
    • In D3's Vault of the Drow, anyone possessing the idol of Lolth will, over 66 days, slowly turn into a giant spider.
  • Some 3.5th Edition Prestige Classes can transform gradually their adepts into another creature type, usually over 10 levels (which can take years of adventuring). Of course, in this case the transformation is entirely voluntary, and aim at providing more power.
    • Dragon Disciples are slowly turning into a half-dragon with every level. The epic variant of the class can further the process into a full dragon!
    • Green Star Adepts gradually become living constructs made of a green starmetal. The advantages are numerous, and although the final form carry some drawbacks, most importantly it allows the characters to become fully immortal.
• GURPS:
  • In the Space Adventures adventure "Rebirth", a genetic virus called Proteus can slowly change a human being into an alien.
  • In Fantasy Folk, a Fishmen artifact can slowly change its user into a Fishman.

Theater

• Played for drama in Beauty and the Beast. Instead of being transformed instantly as in the Disney movie, the inhabitants of the castle slowly change into objects — until they can no longer move, speak or even see. This change was made primarily to allow full-sized actors to play them.

Toys

• In BIONICLE, after the Piraka bathe in mutagenic water for a short while, thanks to falling into a trap, they don't notice it, but they start developing aquatic capabilities. When we next meet them a couple of books later, we find that their whole bodies have diminished, reducing them to eel-like spines with their heads at the end.

Video Games

• Over several cutscenes in Diablo II, the Wanderer gradually looks more and more evil, until morphing fully into a Diablo form in a final cutscene.
• In Eternal Darkness, one of the characters you play as is inflicted with a curse in their chapter, meaning he gradually rots and turns into an undead creature (this happens at set points in the level) while he tries to warn Charlemagne before he meets the same fate. He fails and ends up trapped in a room in the church as an undead monster until another character finally puts him out of his misery in a boss battle a few hundred years later.
• The monsters and face blocks from Eversion undergo this as you gradually evert from World X-1 to World X-8.
• In the Custom Nights endings in Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, this can be witnessed happening to "Eggs Benedict," the Player Character, who at the end of the main game got "scooped" and his flesh possessed by Ennard, the animated robot endoskeleton. Ennard-Eggs is shown walking out of his house and down the street, waving to his neighbors, but over successive cutscenes, his body gradually rots and shambles instead of walks, and his neighbors stop waving and eventually hide in their houses, until Eggs' body vomits up Ennard, and collapses in a pile. Then his body stands back up, as 'Eggs' reclaims it.
• In Guild Wars Nightfall, Varesh transforms into a Margonite-like appearance (and eventually a full margonite form) over the course of several missions. This involves getting 2 extra pairs of eyes (first appearing as bumps, then fully appearing) and become a lot paler.
• The Haunted Ruins: The general shopkeeper slowly transforms from a seemingly innocent girl into an evil witch the deeper you venture into the dungeon. At first it looks like she just put on makeup, but then she gets Pointy Ears, her cashier uniform becomes a skimpy dress, and a tiara and pointy nose begin to gradually form on her. This transformation is mostly amusing to watch because of how she keeps on insisting that her changing appearance is all in your head and how you simply must show the fabled "Dark Orb" to her as soon as you find it.
• The protagonist of Shadow of the Colossus gradually becomes battle-worn as he kills the Colossi. There is, eventually, an explanation for this.
• Skullgirls:
  • This happens to Filia during her ending: Upon finding the Skull Heart, she wishes for Painwheel to return to normal, a seemingly pure wish that should be granted without problem by the Skull Heart.^note If the Skull Heart decides your wish is impure, you become the next Skullgirl. However, the Skull Heart finds that her motivations are not entirely selfless: Filia's wish is partially motivated by her desire to atone for her actions during her life as a member of Medici family. As a result, poor Filia is next in line for the title of Skullgirl, but since the wish was not entirely selfish, the transformation is not instant, allowing her to at least enjoy life with her childhood friend for a while.
  • A similar thing happens in Parasoul's ending. In order to save her sister, Umbrella, from becoming the next Skullgirl, she wishes that Umbrella will never become the Skullgirl. The Skull Heart grants the wish by Making Parasoul take her place. The transformation is slow enough for her to train Umbrella to defeat her when she finally turns.

Webcomics

• Dracula: Ruler of the Night: As in the novel, Lucy goes through gaining fangs and having sharper senses. But here Helsing notices her ears are likewise becoming more misshapen to add to the symptoms. By the time she turns, they're completely pointed. When Mina is bitten, she likewise gains this as an added symptom as well as her normally short hair starting to grow out down her shoulders as a surprisingly increasing rate.
• In Exiern, dragons are born looking like humans and gradually transform into their true forms after they mature. The protagonist's sidekick/like interest (she can't admit to more than that) Denver is a larval dragon, though he doesn't know it. His sister was well along in her transformation when she was last seen.
• In Goblins, Complains is targeted by a magical effect that tries to turn him into a demon. It's quickly dispelled, but every time he's badly injured, he heals with more demonic features: black blood, a demon arm, Glowing Eyes of Doom, horns, and so on.

Web Original

• Ted Bear's weight gain in this Cyanide and Happiness short.
• TV Tropes: Our own page description for SelfDemonstrating.Sugar Bowl.
• Whateley Universe: Some transformations from the Exemplar power have been said to take at least a year to fully complete.

Web Videos

• In The Cartoon Man, Roy's initial transformation into a human cartoon character takes several days.
• Michael Swaim's... Um... "Cuteification" in Vids They Thought Would be Cute.

Western Animation

• In Adventure Time, the Ice King used to be a human named Simon Petrikov who found a magical crown that gave him immortality and great ice powers but slowly turned his skin blue, his hair white, and caused him to go mad and lose all memories of his human life. The truly tragic part is that Simon was aware of what was happening to him in the early stages of his transformation but couldn't stop wearing the crown without dying.
• Downplayed in the Aladdin: The Series episode "Eye of the Beholder", which unfolds over a few days at most. Jasmine is tricked by the disguised Mirage — who is trying to prove to Blind Seer Fasir that Aladdin would not love Jasmine if she were not beautiful — into using a lotion that, overnight, begins turning her into a naga — when she wakes, her lower body has become that of a snake. As Aladdin and his friends escort Jasmine to the faraway Tree of Renewal, the fruit of which is the only cure for her condition, she progressively becomes more serpent-like and even legitimately, though unintentionally, dangerous once she sprouts poisoned barbs (Aladdin is accidentally pricked by them and has a Nightmare Sequence while unconscious). When Mirage withers the tree as a last resort, Jasmine tries to send Aladdin away with I Am a Monster, but when he uses the lotion on himself so he can stay with her forever Fasir sees this as definitive proof that Mirage is wrong and magically restores the tree so the lovers can be happy as humans again.
• The Omnitrix transformations are usually instantaneous, but in an episode of the original run of Ben 10, Ben is bitten by a werewolf— erm— that is, a wolf-like alien activates the scanning function of the Omnitrix, and it takes him roughly 1-2 hours to transform into Blitzwolfer.
• In Centaurworld, Horse goes through one once she enters Centaurworld, beginning with the ability to speak where she'd been "just" a regular war horse on the other side, and starts gaining cute, softer features and a talking tail. As the season progresses, she tries to return home before the changes go further or become permanent out of fear that Rider won't recognize her anymore. She finishes transforming before the reunion, gaining some magical powers in the process. It's quite traumatic at first, but she learns to adjust, and this is helped by Rider recognizing her despite the big visual changes.
• The Alchemist's transformation into Skeleton King from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! falls under this category. Fortunately, it gave him just enough time to turn his pet monkeys into the Hyperforce. What wasn't shown until "Golden Age" though, was that he was slowly aging. These were his last chilling words as he became Skeleton King:
  Alchemist: Now, the Dark Ones... [as Skeleton King] take my soul!

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