"Want the cookies off the top shelf? I'm your guy!"
This is a trope where a monster of some kind has extra-long arms. These arms won't necessarily be used in a physical way. It's more just to indicate how unnatural the monster is. Shows up frequently on Humanoid Abominations as a quick way to indicate something's not quite right. Most Maniac Monkeys, Killer Gorillas, and dangerous ape-men will have a mild “natural” version of these, because most apes really do have proportionally longer arms and shorter legs than humans.
In some cases, the arms themselves might not even need to be shown: if the creature/character in question is wearing clothes of some sort, the arms might be hidden at first by long sleeves, only for their unnatural length to be revealed when they bend the arm or grab something.
Often paired with Creepy Long Fingers. See also Noodle People. Compare Rubber Man, who tend to be not (as) creepy.
Compare Nightmare Hands which may or may not be attached to anyone at all.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- A typical attribute of demons in 3×3 Eyes are unnaturally long arms, usually paired with big hands and Creepy Long Fingers tipped with claws. Glaring examples include Yoko, upon assuming her Hua She form, Amara the plant-based demon, whose arms are nearly as long as his whole body and usually hidden under a cape and Kalkin, whose arms are twice the length of a normal person's body.
- The Beast Titan from Attack on Titan has arms long enough to touch its ankles. Unique from other examples in that he uses these arms as a sort of human catapult, able to throw objects at near Mach speed.
- Void from Berserk has arms that appear to be at least as long as he is tall. As if he didn't have enough scary shit going on already...
- In Death Note, a shinigami usually has long arms.
- The entire Devimon line from the Digimon franchise (sans Demidevimon who (ironically) lacks arms).
- Adam, the First Angel in Neon Genesis Evangelion appears with these when he's briefly glimpsed right before initiating Second Impact. EVA Unit-03 also appears to have these, and can actually stretch them out, although this is likely a result of Bardiel's mutation.
- The Longarm Tribe from One Piece, who have two elbows on each arm, making them much longer than a normal person's. They actually do use those arms in combat, but few of the members of the tribe have been seen doing so yet.
- Yatsume Mumyoi from Rurouni Kenshin. In his case, he had his arm lengthened by wearing a set of iron rings on them since childhood (think of the rings worn by the long-necked African women). To top it, while most of the other characters are at least human-looking, he literally looks like Venom from Spider-Man.
- In Spirited Away, the bathhouse's boiler-man, Kamaji, has unnaturally long arms. He also has multiple arms, giving him a spider-like appearance.
Comic Books
- The Closet (2022): The monster in Jamie's closet has very thin limbs that are so long, his hands reach down to his knees.
- Carlos, one of the villains in Major Bummer, gets creepily long arms and legs, as well as long super-sharp nails, to go with his (rather vaguely-defined) superpowers. The final result is very creepy-looking but, since Major Bummer is a comedy comic, the villain himself is more amusing than scary.
- Minor X-Men villain Gorgeous George sports this look, mainly due to being a mutant made of a viscous tar-like substance who, after a night of heavy drinking, forgot how long his arms were supposed to be.
Fan Works
- Maris Stella: Forgiven Neglect has super long arms that can stretch halfway across the city.
Film — Animated
- In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington has very long arms and legs, to emphasis his skeletal-ness. Fortunately, he's a pretty chipper guy.note
- The Little Mermaid: Ursula summons a ghostly green pair of arms from her cauldron to take Ariel’s voice for part of their bargain, as payment for turning her human.
Film — Live Action
- A very, very brief shot during the party, in The Addams Family has a unnamed member of the extended Addams clan raise his hands so high that they look inflatable.
- In Close Encounters of the Third Kind the first alien we see has very long, thin arms and legs, and is by far the most inhuman looking one.
- Come Play: The monster stalking the young protagonist has disproportionately long arms and legs (as well as inhumanly long fingers), enhancing his creepy appearance.
- Hostile: The Reaper that spends most of the film outside Juliette's van has a pair of arms that look like this due to its emaciation.
- It (2017): Pennywise drags a fatally wounded Georgie into the sewers after unnaturally extending an arm to snatch him.
- The incredibly wacky Chinese superhero film The Super Inframan has Giant Arms! No, really, just Giant Arms! Roger Ebert has fun with this in his review:
Roger Ebert: "In one cliff-hanging scene, for example, the Professor has Infra-Man wired up on the operating table when Science Headquarters is attacked by gigantic mutant arms. That's right, arms: no body, just arms. The arms squirm all over the headquarters, knocking off the power supply. The Professor shouts into his radio: "You have one minute to restore power before Infra-Man dies!" His aide struggles toward a red power switch. He is knocked unconscious by an arm. Shot of a stopwatch ticking away the seconds. He regains consciousness, struggles some more. The arm attacks again. With ten seconds to go, soldiers burst into the room with a power saw and cut the arm in half. The switch is thrown and Infra-Man lives."
- The Ice cream man from the film Legion.
- Master of the Flying Guillotine has a "yogic" fighter who's able to extend his arms to ridiculous lengths.
- In the "Find the Fish" interlude from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life Terry Jones appears with extra long arms.
- In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Freddy is chasing Tina down the alley, his arms extend to a freakish length, with his claws scraping the walls on both sides of the alley.
Literature
- In The Chrysalids, the man David refers to as the "spider-man" (whose real name is Gordon) has arms and legs which are eighteen inches longer than they should be in proportion to his body. David is somewhat creeped out by him when they first meet and tries to stay out of range of his long arms; at their next encounter (which takes place several years later) Gordon appears no less freakish. And the fact that he has a somewhat squicky interest in teenaged girls like Sophie and Rosalind just adds to his overall creepiness.
- Discworld: The Librarian of the Unseen University Library (who is a sapient orangutan) often has some reference to his extremely long arms made in his various appearances. They only really classify as "creepy" when some idiot has gotten on the wrong end of Beware the Nice Ones; when the Librarian's his normal peaceable self, they just add to his rather goofy look.
- While he doesn't possess any extra limbs, titular character the Arm from The Ear, the Eye and the Arm looks decidedly creepy thanks to his extra-long limbs. When he decides to ramp that effect up a bit, he unhinges them a little and crooks them in odd ways; he even uses this to scare some primitive tribesmen into thinking he's a boogie man.
- Illium: The Big Bad monster from Olympos, known as Setebos, has miles upon miles of tentacles that burrow through the ground like a complex network of worms... but one of the heroes discovers that these are actually arms, with hands at the end of them. If you disturb one of them, the hand will grab you and the whole arm will retract, dragging you through the tunnels and eventually into one of Setebos's many mouths.
- Laughing Jack: Laughing Jack's striped arms dangle past his waist and appear to have no bones, complementing his ragdoll-like design. The origin story shows that his arms have grotesquely long black fingers on the ends and can elongate and constrict living beings to death.
- In Sea of Silver Light, the conclusion to the Otherland series, John Dread attempts to cause havoc in the Other's personal realm by mutating Jack Sprat and his wife, which are Finney and Mudd's incarnations in this world, into monsters. Jack grows immensely tall and thin while his arms grow to impossible lengths.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "Wild Blue Yonder", the Doctor and Donna encounter beings from beyond the edge of the universe that are imitating human form. Initially they are indistinguishable from the people they're imitating, but after a while they lose grip on their forms and their arms stretch until their hands rest on the floor, the first of many disconcerting transformations.
- The X-Files: The episode "Squeeze" features a man named Tooms who has creepily long everything, including arms. It turns out that he can stretch himself to fit into narrow places.
Music
- Nine Inch Nails had a concept album called Year Zero, set in a dystopian future. Part of the backstory involves various people around the world having drug-induced hallucinations of an entity referred to as "The Presence" which manifest as a giant spooky hand reaching down from the sky (shown on the album cover
◊ and also in the spectrogram for the song "The Warning"◊).
Mythology
- The Nuckelavee is a demonic creature from Orcadian mythology that resembles the torso of a man merged to the middle of the back of a horse, where a rider would usually be sat. The "man" part has arms so long that they reach the ground.
Tabletop Games
- Jin-Gitaxias from Magic: The Gathering has long metallic arms that look skeletal and his hands have long fingers as a bonus.
Toys
- Chirox from BIONICLE has bat wings made up of three limb segments and carries long and stupidly thin blade. His official packaging art has him with his upper and middle arms folded up, resembling Shoulders of Doom, to make him look less ridiculous.
Video Games
- All Is Dust (2015): The mysterious red being that you see around the farm has thin arms that are so long they could drag along the ground.
- Arrogation: Unlight of Day has the old mansion's zombie, whose arms are literally a foot above the floor, which swings around weirdly as the monster tries chasing you about.
- The Battle Cats: The Tecoluga family is this. Tecoluga is a small cat-like... thing with arms longer than its body. Its evolved form, Tesalan Pasalan, takes the creepy factor to another level, as it becomes a humanoid cat-like monster with tiny legs and ridiculously long arms that add to the disturbing overall image. Its true form, Lufalan Pasalan, reduces the creepy factor a bit by having the same design while wearing a vest and straw hat.
- Lavos's final form in Chrono Trigger resembles a bipedal creature in a spacesuit with extra long arms that he raises dramatically to cast various attack spells.
- In Fatal Frame, there is a hunched over old man ghost with creepily long arms. His name is "Man With Long Arms" and, just to make him even creepier, he has a particular interest in taking children as his victims...
- Fight the Horror: The skull-headed boss has some pretty long arms.
- The plant-like Guado from Final Fantasy X have clawed arms that reach down past their knees.
- The Marionette◊ from Five Nights at Freddy's 2.
- Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel has The Pianist, a shambling monster with four extra-long arms, with at least two ending in talons.
- In Half-Life, headcrab zombies develop unnaturally long arms and long claw-like fingers.
- One of the Special Infected in Left 4 Dead 2 is The Jockey, whose mutation has caused his arms to grow abnormally long. He shuffles on the ground on all fours like an ape, then jumps onto a player's back and grabs them by the head to "steer" them, often into a group of enemies.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The aptly named Dead Hand in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It has six of them, and they attempt to grab Link while the rest of its body remains underground.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the four giants you need to summon don't have torsos, just a face and creepy long arms and legs. They're on your side though, and those very hands play a vital part in saving Termina. Played straight with Majora's Mask when it takes its vaguely humanoid Majora's Incarnation form. The Mask sprouts freakishly-proportioned arms and legs out of its rim that move about in a creepy fashion as it dances about the arena. Its final form, Majora's Wrath, adds Combat Tentacles to even longer arms.
- This seems to be a typical trait of the Twili people in general, even the ones who aren't enemies, in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
- The Shadow Beasts' arms are so long they have to move with them like gorillas, and even their fingers seem long compared to their arms.
- For their leader Zant, the effect is enhanced by the tassels at the ends of his long sleeves, which nearly reach the floor. As it turns out, his actual arms aren't much shorter.
- Even Midna's arms seem to reach her knees when she's standing up. This only applies to her cursed imp form, as her natural one is more conventionnaly proportionned.
- The Dark Ones (aka "Homo Novus"), creatures from the game Metro 2033. They have extra long arms that they hold out creepily towards/around their victims as they telepathically menace them.
- The Janitor from Little Nightmares. He uses them to grab runaway children, including Six, the protagonist of the game.
- Endermen from Minecraft were partly inspired by The Slender Man Mythos, and thus also have very long arms that extend halfway down where their calves should be.
- Resident Evil:
- The "Bandersnatches" from Resident Evil – Code: Veronica. Bonus points for having one giant arm and one atrophied arm.
- The cancelled version of Resident Evil 2 was at one point going to have numerous zombies in the jail cellblock with disturbingly long arms reaching out at the player through the bars of their cells, possibly as a Shout-Out to a particularly creepy scene from The Serpent and the Rainbow.
- Kotaro Fuuma from Samurai Warriors has long arms, which he can stretch and twist at will. Plus, he's very eerie looking. Later portrayals show that it's actually his gauntlets that can stretch out like a whip.
- Based on SCP-087 from the SCP Foundation, the fan-created SCP-087 videogame features a creature like this at the bottom of the stairwell. As you approach it, its hands come out of the darkness, unnaturally long.
- Slender Man in Slender and its sequel. In newer versions of the games, Slender Man sends out his tentacles if you look at him too long, or when he's about to get you!
- Dhalsim from Street Fighter II has arms that stretch across the screen, based loosely on the Yogic fighter from Master of the Flying Guillotine.
- The Limnos monsters from Titan Quest sport very long arms with sharp claws, and are much creepier than the other monsters. The same can be said for the Telkines.
- Witchkin: The clown Witchkin has arms that almost reach his feet.
- In Warframe, various Orokin characters have a disproportionately long right arm. Ballas' arm in particular is twice as long as his left one. According to in-game lore, their limbs were deliberately shaped as such to represent their so-called "generosity".
Web Originals
- In the sixth episode of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, Roy grabs Red Guy by the shoulder. The latter is quite disturbed when he looks and sees Roy's arm is stretching across the entire room.
- Dreamscape: Keedran's abomination form looks like a Creepy Centipede with arms like this, one of which is a snake and the other that looks like a bear's.
- The Overlord of Evil's arms are about the length of his entire body, and he has to keep them tucked.
- DSBT InsaniT: Psycho Man's arms are nearly the length of his body, complete with Wolverine Claws.
- Goodbye Strangers: Several strangers have arms that appear way too long. The endroni has a pair of muscular legs that look too short for its long body while its arms are much longer than its legs and have the wrong number of joints.
- SCP-096 ("The Shy Guy") and SCP-3288 ("The Aristocrats") of the SCP Foundation. The former also has an abnormally large jaw, while the latter also have Creepy Long Fingers and More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
- Slender Man from The Slender Man Mythos. In certain stories, this is due to his arms actually being disguised tentacles.
Western Animation
- Soundwave of Transformers: Prime is a Decepticon who turns into a MQ-9 Reaper, with his arms formed from the UAV's wings. Soundwave also emphasises the 'creepy' by being completely silent and a surveillance specialist who is always watching and listening, along with possibly being a more dangerous a fighter than Megatron.