13 Real Animals Lifted Directly Out of Your Nightmares

Nature seems to have a limitless supply of creativity. From giant spiders to gamma ray bursts, nature has gotten more mileage out of the same old material than the writers of The Simpsons.

But sometimes the things she comes up with are so goose-fucking insane they make Crispin Glover look like Jean-Luc Picard. We're talking about creatures that seemed to have abandoned all earthly processes of evolution to achieve pure horror.

Like...

Also known as the fish of the damned, it appears the only reason we don't hear their curse-filled lamentations is because they're underwater. Fill your aquarium with these fuckers and you'll fall asleep every night watching them silently proclaim your impending damnation.

They only grow to be about four and a half inches long, but their bite-sized terror is potent--they hide in the deep during the day, then rise up at night, returning once more to the abyss as day breaks. We believe they're called hatchetfish because that's what you'll wish you had in your hand if you saw one.

Looking like a human mouth surrounded by tentacles, this thing could have come straight out of bad horror anime. Or possibly the final level of a Gradius game.

That is Promachoteuthis sulcus, an extremely rare, deep sea squid known only from a single specimen. Researchers have a science boner over the fact that these things have weird tentacle proportions, but the rest of us are just freaked out by the teeth, which we're told is an illusion: What appear to be teeth are actually lips that cover the more normal squid beak. This is the equivalent of buying novelty hillbilly teeth and wearing them all the time for no reason.

Still, we're not sticking our fucking finger in there.

Hey, what could be creepier than a weird human mouth stuck on a sea creature? How about a whole fucking face?

That is a Matsuba Koi. If that name sounds familiar, that is because they're those big gold fish found in Japanese ponds. Apparently, every so often, some types wind up with a human-looking face, and one that looks slightly pissed off.

Can you imagine being out fishing and catching that bastard? With that face looking up at you? And it calls you "daddy"?

Bullshit. That cannot be real. Evolution did not spawn a creature with a fucking yellow smiley face on its back. Science is lying to us.

This is Theridion grallatora, a.k.a. the Happy Face Spider, a.k.a. a sick joke somebody is playing on the world's spider experts. Some think the terrifying cartoon face somehow evolved to ward off predators, presumably by convincing them that instead of seeing a spider, they're merely having a bad acid trip. Best to abandon dinner and go lie down for a bit.

The Deep Sea Holothurian, better known as an abyssal sea cucumber, sounds like a boss from Final Fantasy and looks like something Khan would attach to the brain of a Starfleet officer.

It is only a few inches long, has no face and eats mud, which is exactly how we described our genitalia on Match.com. Somehow, the abyssal sea cucumber is one of the most successful ocean dwelling species, presumably because any predator would take one look at this thing and run home to sleep with the lights on in their parents' room.

"That's fine, I'll kill your parents too."

OK, so it's not a spider. Amblypygi, or the tailless whip scorpion, looks like nature decided to take everything that creeps us the fuck out about bugs and roll them together in one sleeping bag-lurking masterpiece.

If somebody told us that a bite from this thing would explode the heads of 17 elephants, we would believe them based on this picture alone. Amazingly, the amblypygi has no venom at all and lives mostly in tropical forests and caves, doing its best to mind its own business. Well, as much as creature that looks like that can mind its own business while shoveling prey into its mouth using its fucking hands.

That's the giraffe weevil, and never has something so unsettling gotten such a cute name. It hails from Madagascar, and apparently the long freak neck is an adaption to help male weevils roll leaves into tubes for keeping their eggs.

All we know is that before today we thought giant-ass insects were about the worst thing you could find in your house. Now we know it's quite a bit weirder if you just take one part of the insect and grow one part of its body to freakishly huge proportions.

Hey, speaking of which...