Swamp Monster

"What are you doing in my swamp?!"

As we all know, Swamps Are Evil, and filled to the brim with dangerous animals, plants, and tribes. But sometimes, they are also home to something a little more nasty.

The Swamp Monster is a horrific creature found almost exclusively in the swamp. The foul water is where they have made their home and they will not or perhaps cannot ever leave. On the rare instances they do, they will likely return to their home eventually.

Expect them to be hostile towards any visitors unfortunate enough to stumble upon their territory, though on occasion benevolent swamp monsters do exist. They usually have the ability to stay submerged in the water, if the water isn't where they usually reside.

The exact nature of a Swamp Monster varies between different works, but common forms it takes include:

• A Muck Monster that is either composed of vegetation or Festering Fungus or even covered by it, giving them a distinctly green coloration. These guys tend to be made of the swamp itself and it's very likely they have nature based powers. For extra horror, many of them were once human beings who were transformed into this creature by the swamp itself.
• Some kind of reptilian, amphibian or icthyoid humanoid creature, mostly inspired by the Gill Man. If there are multiple members of their species, they may even form colonies or settlements in the swamp.
• A hairy humanoid creature that resembles Bigfoot, but often covered in mud and plants. This version is often inspired by real accounts of cryptids and other alleged creatures, but their existence remains unconfirmed.
• A Fiendish Fish, enormous crocodilian, or similar water-dwelling creature who primarily stays submerged, but may go to the surface to hunt or prey on unsuspecting humans. This version may overlap with Lake Monsters if they inhabit a body of water that is sufficiently big and open. Even an especially violent sauropod dinosaur could qualify.

See also: Sea Monster, Stock Ness Monster for similar creatures with a different choice of habitat. See Will-o'-the-Wisp for a phenomena that may or may not be a creature that often occurs in swamps.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Parodied in Rave Master: the heroes are sent into a swamp to fight the monstrous plant beast dwelling there and recover the MacGuffin... but said plant monster is actually the size of a normal flower and gives in upon being stepped up by accident.
• Toriko: While exploring the First Biotope, Sunny and Komatsu run into an ancient giant swamp which is the hunting ground of several massive creatures: just upon arriving, they see a giant fresh-water moray eel, a massive multiple-headed snail and finally a crocodile-mouthed shark who devour both creatures in one gulp.

Comic Books

• Big Bang Comics: Bog is a demon who Escaped from Hell, and nearly killed the Devil in the process. He now dwells in a swamp on Earth and fights any attempt by the forces of Hell to drag him back.
• DC Universe:
  • Solomon Grundy is a supervillain whose origins are of a deceased criminal, Cyrus Gold, whose body was dumped into Slaughter Swamp, where the mutagenic chemicals and mystical energy revived him as a gigantic zombie at least partly composed of plant matter. He was introduced as an enemy of the Golden Age Green Lantern, who had difficulty fighting him due to his ring's weakness to wood, which was what Grundy's swampy body was largely made from. Grundy has gone on to menace many other heroes from throughout the DC universe.
  • Swamp Thing is one of the Trope Codifiers for the Muck Monster variety and appears to have eclipsed Man-Thing in fame due to his appearances in numerous adaptations. Swamp Thing is an entity whose body is composed of vegetation and plant matter, and has been granted very powerful Green Thumb powers that actually make him an elemental avatar of nature. Unlike many other examples of this trope, Swamp Thing is a full-fledged, if unusual, superhero. There have been many different holders of the Swamp Thing name over the years, with perhaps the most famous version being Alec Holland.
• Eerie Magazine's fifth issue featured a cover story called "The Swamp God Strikes", about two explorers and their guide, tracking the titular monster, which turns out to be a surviving T. rex. And they are lunch.
• The Heap is the Trope Maker for comics swamp monsters, specifically the Muck Monster variant. There have been multiple versions of the character, but the most famous example is the Baron Eric von Emmelman version, a WWI pilot who crashed into a swamp, where his will to live caused his body to merge with the swamp itself.
• Marvel Universe
  • The Incredible Hulk: Joseph Timms was a petty criminal who escaped from prison to be with his dying wife. He ran into the Florida everglades, only to drown in the marshes. Decades later, after the Hulk accidentally spilled radioactive waste into the swamp, Joe Timms was resurrected as a swamp creature now called the Glob. The Glob's body is made out of muck and dirt, with the Hulk's punches simply sinking into it, making him a difficult opponent for Hulk to defeat.
  • Manphibian is an Expy of the Gillman and part of the Marvel's monsters lineup. Despite his resemblance to his inspiration, his origins are extraterrestrial in nature. He ends up becoming a member of the Legion of Monsters.
  • Man-Thing is one of the Trope Codifiers, being among the most famous Muck Monster swamp monsters in all of fiction, rivaled only by his DC counterpart Swamp Thing. Man-Thing was once a scientist named Dr. Theodore Sallis who attempted to recreate the Super Serum used on Captain America, before an accident led to the serum fusing him with the mystical energies of the swamp, transforming his body into a humanoid mass of swamp material. As Man-Thing, it has lost his human intelligence and is mostly a creature of instinct, though it is sensitive to emotions, particularly fear, which will cause it to burn targets who exhibit said emotion. Despite its limited intelligence, Man-Thing often ends as an incidental hero. Later it's also revealed the mystical energies made Man-Thing the guardian of a Nexus of Realities present in the swamp.
• The pre-Code horror comic This Magazine is Haunted ran a story called "The Slithering Horror of Skontong Swamp", where a prison escapee runs afoul of some waterlogged undead creatures.

Fan Works

• Equestria Divided: Ponies who die in the swamps of Froggy Bottom Bog sometimes return to life as swamp shamblers, lumbering masses of mud, moss and tree branches in vaguely quadrupedal shapes. They also emanate clouds of toxic gases, and House Everfree sometimes uses them in battle to sicken and poison enemy troops.

Film — Animation

• Monsters vs. Aliens features Missing Link, a parody expy of the Creature from the Black Lagoon resembling an ape with green scales and Ear Fins.
• Shrek: Shrek makes his home in a swamp. In the first movie, he is shown scaring villagers who enter his swamp with Torches and Pitchforks, since it's the best way to get them to leave him alone; then, when fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters displaced by Lord Farquaad settle in his swamp, he sets out on a quest to get rid of them.

Film — Live-Action

• In Attack of the Giant Leeches, a swamp community in Florida is terrorized by... well, you can probably guess.
• Creature from the Black Lagoon: Gill Man is the Trope Codifier and Trope Maker for the Fish Person variant, being a humanoid fish monster and the titular antagonist of the film.
• In The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke and R2-D2 land on the swampy planet of Dagobah, R2 falls into the mire and is swallowed by some unseen predator, though it immediately spits him back out again. We catch a brief glimpse of a snakelike coil emerging from the mud. According to supplementary material, it's a creature called a dragonsnake.
• King Kong (1933): When the crew of the Venture cross a Skull Island swamp on a makeshift raft, they run afoul of a bad-tempered (and apparently carnivorous!) sauropod dinosaur, who rises from the murk to terrorize them.
  • King Kong (2005): A deleted scene (restored in the film's extended cut) has a very similiar setup, but swaps the dinosaur for a Piranhadon, a gigantic 50-foot predator that is basically a giant lungfish with the teeth (and appetite) of a piranha.
• The Legend of Boggy Creek was a 1972 horror docudrama featuring a Bigfoot-like creature called the Fouke Monster that roamed around a swampy area of Arkansas. Supposedly inspired by real-life sightings of this cryptid, the film had him terrorizing rural residents.
  • It was successful enough to beget two sequels, Return to Boggy Creek by another director and later, the first film's creator returned for Boggy Creek 2: And the Legend Continues.
• In The Princess Bride, the Fire Swamp - in addition to the lightning sand and its namesake habit of producing unexpected blasts of flame from marsh gas - is also swarming with Rodents of Unusual Size.
• The Shape of Water's Amphibian Man is a clear expy for the above Creature from the Black Lagoon, and is said to have been captured in the Amazon, where the native people worshiped him as a god. When Elisa rescues him from the research facility and installs him in her bathtub, she has to add some specific chemicals to the bathwater to give it that brackish swampy quality he needs. Unlike most examples on this list, the Amphibian Man is not only benevolent, he's the romantic hero.

Gamebooks

• Deathmoor is filled with monsters, from a prehistoric dinosaur-like fleasheater to giant fishes, oversized millipedes and spiders, a massive tentacled behemoth whose lair is filled with the skeletons of its victims, creatures animated by the muck and water-dwelling reptiles.

Literature

• In Edmond Hamilton's novella "The Abysmal Invaders" (first published in Weird Tales in 1929), an army of Living Dinosaurs and their Lizard Folk riders march out of an Illinois swamp and destroy a small city. However, it turns out that they don't actually come from the swamp at all, but from deep Beneath the Earth, and the elevator up from their realm simply opens in the swamp.
• Fengshen Yanyi: at one point, Yang Jian takes a rest from his journey in a marsh and is suddenly attacked by a gigantic, non-descript monster (the text merely states that it has a huge mouth with sharp tusks and wields dual tridents) who tries to devour him. Yang Jian routes the beast by summoning lightning and chase it in a dark cavern, where he finds his trademark edged trident and his yellow gown.
• Goosebumps:
  • Played for Black Comedy in How to Kill a Monster. A brother and sister are left alone in their odd grandparents' house... and discover a green-furred swamp creature has roosted in the attic. When the monster attacks them, it suddenly reveals that it's allergic to humans and dies of an asthmatic attack. The kids triumphantly leave the house and travel through the swamp to find help. Too bad it turns out the monster has LOTS of siblings of its own out there.
  • A similar creature appears in "Here Comes The Shaggedy". This one is unusual, in that it's able to disguise itself as two preteen boys, who fuse themselves together and form the monster.
  • In You Can't Scare Me!, the protagonist and his best friend attempt to pretend to be the Muck Monster of a local swamp legend to try to scare the protagonist's annoyingly-superior-at-everything sister. Not only does the swamp monster turn out to be real, but the protagonist's sister proves to be superior yet again by literally Talking the Monster to Death.
• InCryptid:
  • Yowies are the Australian equivalent of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti, and tend to live in swamps. They're generally Benevolent Monsters, though.
  • Other, less friendly swamp-dwelling cryptids include swamp hags, swamp fairies, and swamp bromeliads.
• The Monster of Partridge Creek is a Canadian Western / Weird West short story set in the Yukon Territory, where a natural sulfur spring has created a marshy environment, called a "moose lick", that does not freeze over in the winter. This attracts larger animals, such as the moose themselves, which, in turn, attracts the attention of the monster - a shaggy-coated Ceratosaurus.

Live-Action TV

• Goosebumps (1995): One of the episodes is based on "How to Kill a Monster", but changes the monster itself. Instead of a green, swamp-dwelling bigfoot, it's a nasty, yellow-colored reptile with a head like a vulture.
• The Legend of Dick and Dom: "Swampy's Girlfriend" has the gang requiring "a Swamp Monster's song" as an ingredient for their potion, so they visit a settlement built on the edge of the swamp called "Bog Off". The residents are actually well-acquainted with their local Swamp Monster, "Swampy" (who is the covered in green plant matter variety) and try to get him to sing, but Swampy is very depressed; as such, they try to give him a girlfriend to make him sing. Eventually, Lutin finds another female Swamp Monster called "Ruby" and the episode ends with the two swamp monsters falling in love with one another.
• River Monsters: The real life series revolves around Jeremy Wade travelling the world hunting for monstrous fish that are reported in various rivers, often in swamp-like locations.
• Ultra Series:
  • Ultraseven: One episode has the TDF getting stranded on an alien swamp, called the 9th Dimension, which is filled with giant insects, bloodsucking ticks and a Giant Spider called Gumonga. The swamp turns out to be created by a powerful Reality Warper alien called Bell, who ends up fighting Ultraseven at the end of the episode culminating with Ultraseven drowning Bell in the swamp's waters, destroying it and causing the entire swamp to dissapear.
  • Ultraman Taro has a swamp constantly covered in Mysterious Mist, which turns out to be inhabited by a toad-like monster called Tondaile who uses its Overly-Long Tongue to ensnare and capture humans for food.

Music

• The Czech song "Jozin from the Marshes" ("Jožin z bažin") by Ivan Mládek and his Banjo Band is an Affectionate Parody of heroic ballads about a horrible swamp monster who eats passers-by and can only be defeated with the help of... a cropduster plane. And this being 1978 Czechoslovakia, a Škoda car replaces the hero's horse.

Mythology, Religion, and Folklore

• The Honey Island Swamp Monster is an alleged Bigfoot-like creature that has been purported to inhabit the Honey Island Swamp in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.
• The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp is a purported reptilian humanoid creature sighted in Bishopville, South Carolina during the 1980s. The initial report was that it was responsible for attacking a man's car while he was driving.
• The Kappa is a Japanese cryptid that lives in swamps and frequently shows up in Japanese media. It is described as looking like a biped turtle is known for sinister behavior such as kidnapping children or sucking the soul out of victims.
• The Bunyip is an alleged creature in Indigenous Australian folklore that is said to reside in billabongs (seasonal waterholes). Descriptions of the creature vary greatly, with it ranging from a giant starfish to being a seal-like creature with a dog-like head. All sources agree, however, that it primarily resides in water and will prey on people who venture too close to the shore.
• The Mokele-Mbembe is a cryptid supposedly found in the swamps of the Congo River Basin. The name comes from the Lingala word for "he who stops the flow of rivers", and it is usually considered to be a very dangerous and ferocious animal. The first recorded descriptions of the things had them with enormous horns, which led some cryptozoologists to speculate that it was a surviving Triceratops population, but their pop-cultural image quickly became codified as Aquatic Sauropods after a much better-circulated alleged sighting described them in these terms.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Bog hounds are canine monsters that arise from a cursed moor - the majority look like wolves comprised of the mud and straw of their home marsh, while the moor hound that leads them is formed from the vapors of the bog, and thus can only be hurt with magic weapons. They don't fare well in sunlight, which causes bog hounds to instantly freeze into easily-broken statues of hardened mud and plant matter, and makes the moor hound vulnerable to even ordinary weapons. But until that moor hound is slain in the daylight, it and its pack will continue regenerating each night to haunt their moor.
  • A swamp that's tainted by magical pollution can create mudmen, humanoids made out of swamp mud. Not very intelligent, they instinctively try to drown anything that enters their territory, often destroying themselves in kamikaze attacks as they try to smother their foes.
  • Swamps and bogs are also the domain of choice for black dragons, who are generally the nastiest and cruelest kind of dragon.
  • Shambling Mounds are vaguely humanoid piles of animated swampy vegetable-matter.
  • Some editions of D & D, as well as Pathfinder, offer variant rules on the mummy to create swamp-dwelling undead more along the lines of the bog bodies of European peat bogs, for dungeonmasters who find the usual Ancient Egypt Fantasy Counterpart Culture setting a bit too predictable and played-out.
  • Swamps are the favored home of catoblepases, which are monstrous, omnivorous, and deadly quadrupeds. They're armed with a tail club with a long reach heavy enough to rattle and daze anything struck by it, but their most feared weapon is a Deadly Gaze which can rot the flesh off of bone, if not outright kill the victim. Catoblepases not only give off utterly repulsive stench, which smells of dead flesh, skunk odor and swamp gas, but they also infuse the stench into swamp gases around its habitat. They also putrify their swampy habitats by other means, choking out beneficial or medicinal herbs and plants, making the water unclean and filthy, and making the animal population prone to aggression and disease. Catoblepases are generally feared in settings' folklore, and rumors about the creature are often considered bad omens.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Kruleboyz are a subspecies of Orruks that make their home in dank, misty swamps where no one else goes (and their shamans can bring the swamp with them if they need to leave. In addition to being generally unpleasant folks themselves (they aren't called Kruleboyz for nothing) they also are known to tame and ride various swamp-dwelling beasts, including troggoths, giant vultures, and huge amphibious lizards called sludgerakers.

Video Games

• Artix Entertainment:
  • AdventureQuest Worlds: In "Mudluk Village" there are numerous swamp monsters including frog-like dragons, gigantic fish called Swamp Lurkers, and even giant leech like monsters with legs.
  • DragonFable: The ironically named "Crystal Clear Lake" is a murky swamp with mobs there including a Man-Thing-esque monster called the Swamp Shambler, as well as a Gill Man-type creature called the Lagoon Goon. The latter is also capable of summoning a monstrous fish to attack the player.
• Bounce On: At one point, Bounce runs into a swamp monster that resembles a living tree. As such, he has to battle him by smashing the venus flytraps on his head and then bumping into his nose.
• The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning: Growths, foes found in the Swamp area early in the game, are hulking humanoids made out of knotted vines and branches and with a coating of green plants over their torsos. They attack with physical blows and by throwing clumps of slime at Spyro.
• Memoria Freese: One story event features a creature known as the Swamp King, who is a giant slimy Muck Monster mass of eyeballs and tentacles. It's stated to be the swamp itself, and fighting it is a near impossible task, unless one happens to be able to target its Achilles' Heel with potent magic designed specifically to vanquish it.
• Lies of P: One boss of the game is the "Green Monster of the Swamp", alternatively called the "Puppet-Devouring Swamp Monster" is a strange monster that resides in the Barren Swamp and as its name suggests likes feasting on Puppets. No one is quite sure what it is, although Geppetto theorizes that it is a Muck Monster that was granted life due to the excess ergo in the area from discarded puppets dumped there, and by extension it seeks puppets out due to craving their ergo.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: The Final Boss is a Muck Monster called Swamp Man, who seems inspired by both Man-Thing and Swamp-Thing. Is eventually revealed to be Jack Baker, undergoing mutation due to the Mold.
  • Resident Evil Village: Amongst the Gothic Horror game bosses, Moreau is a monstrous, mutated, emotionally-stunted Fish Person who, unlike the other three Lords, lives in squalor in a marshy reservoir. He attempts to kill Ethan when the latter trespasses on his premises, eventually mutating from his vaguely humanoid and land-swelling form into a gigantic, monstrous fish-like form which spends time lurking in the water in a Monster Delay.
• Sea Salt: The Creature is an expy of Swamp Thing that is unlocked in the swampy region of Rotwood, attacking with long-reaching vines.
• Shantae: The Mud Bog areas are filled with Mud Bog creatures made out of the stinky, sludgy mess that the area is filled with. They either jump around in a blobby mass or pop out of the swampy floors and ceilings.
• Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus: A recurring enemy in "Vicious Voodoo" is the Swamp monsters (also known as Marcel Woodfist), sentient plant monsters brought to life by Mz. Ruby with Hollywood Voodoo. Sly also encounters a giant snake monster in "The Lair of the Beast" mission, with said beast being kept in an enclosure with voodoo magic. The mission involves Sly breaking in, escaping being eaten by it and freeing it, the snake breaking through the barricade so that Sly can get into the heart of Mz. Ruby's operation.
• Valheim: As if the draugr, blob monsters, fire elementals and giant leeches weren't enough, the Swamp biome also contains the aptly-named Abominations, enormous twisted combinations of Undead Abomination and Botanical Abomination with a nasty habit of disguising themselves as yet another sunken log before attacking. These things are tough enough to take on and defeat trolls.
• The Witcher has enough of these to have a whole book about them, which include: Drowners and Drowned Dead, which are essentially dead men revived by the swamp as zombie/ghoul like creatures. There's also the Bloedzuiger, a gigantic monster with a leech-like head.
• World of Warcraft has a few such as the Bog Beasts and Fungal Monsters. The Expansion Pack Mists of Pandaria added the cyclopean Mistlurkers, who hide in swamp mists.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-811 ("Swamp Woman") is a woman mutated into a grotesque form who is implied to have lived alone in a swamp from a very young age. Most notably, she has an extremely strange physiology that has turned her into a Poisonous Person — she has an incomplete digestive tract, secretes digestive mucus from the palms of her hands and soles of her feet that rapidly reduces organic tissue into black liquid (which she then absorbs into her skin for nourishment), voids waste by vomiting a black tar containing various infectious bacteria that she can spit at a target while hunting, and has liquid rot for blood. However, despite her predatory nature, she is rather docile and child-like.

Web Videos

• Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel): The titular "Secret of Scape Ore Swamp" is a reptilian bipedal beast said to inhabit the swamp located in South Carolina. It ended up becoming infamous when several sightings reported that it liked to attack and chase after cars passing through highways located near the swamp at night. Some accounts even allege that it even fights against Sasquatches residing in the nearby forests.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: "The Swamp" features a monster made from vines. This monster turns out to have one of the Foggy Swamp's resident waterbenders inside controlling the vines.
• Ben 10: Swampfire, one of the Omnitrix aliens, seems to invoke this. He is a Plant Person with his body composed of vegetation and has Green Thumb powers. His species is stated to have evolved from carnivorous plants.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: In the amply titled episode "Bride of the Swamp Monster", a swamp monster mistook Muriel for his love love, Swamp Woman, and took her away. So it was up to Courage to locate Swamp Woman so he can reunite the the swamp monsters and save Muriel.
• Family Guy: Spoofed in "Business Guy" when Lois suggests her dad dress up as a Swamp Monster to scare Peter away, before a real Swamp Monster shows up. A Scooby-Dooby Doors chase scene ensues before the Swamp Monster is actually revealed to be Hugh Laurie.
• Fangface
  • "The Shocking Creature Feature!" has a swamp haunted by Energy Beings created by a Mad Scientist, who is trying to find a more powerful energy source to make them even stronger so he can Take Over the World.
  • "The Creepy Goon From the Spooky Lagoon" has the gang encountering a fish man pretty clearly modeled on the one Creature from the Black Lagoon. Another Mad Scientist puts the Goon and Fangface himself into a brain-swapping machine to try to create the perfect henchman.
• Godzilla: The Series: The Swamp Beast is a possibly supernatural creature made of plant and animal matter.
• Hilda: "Chapter 4: The Eternal Warriors" features a swamp creature called Sigurd; a tall, green, humanoid being whose body is mostly covered in the mud from the swamp. The tie-in book "Hilda's book of Beasts and Spirits" mentions that Sigurd's race is actually made from mud and vegetation.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: "Feeling Pinkie Keen" features a hydra that eats ponies and lives in a swamp called Froggy Bottom Bog.
• Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?: "Revenge of the Swamp Monster!" features one as the Villain of the Week, but like many monsters turns out to be a civilian in a disguise.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): The Creep is a strange mashup of this concept and Jason Voorhees, essentially being Jason made of plant matter. He was created when a batch of mutagen ended up in a bog, bringing the vegetation there to life.
• ThunderCats (1985): "The Totem of Dera" has Mumm-Ra use the titular magic item on the Baleful Swamp to create the Baleful Swamp Monster, a creature made of mud and sludge, to attack the Thundercats.

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