SPECULATIVE HALLOWEEN BESTIARY:
SNOULS




As I touch on in a recent short video, 2025 has seen a truly remarkable flood of Halloween Snails, following a little trickle of the precious sweeties since the 2023 Crazy Bonez snail as well as the 2024 paintable example from Michael's.

But WHO ARE these beautiful angels who have wetly oozed, as all angels do, into hearts nationwide? What are we to make of these noble mollusks who have so valiantly arrived to save us from the monotony of so many other Holiday icons?

Almost all examples thus far have carried a human skull around as a shell, or at least a snail shell with human skull features. I speculated a little in my video review that these represent another supernatural curse that may befall a human being, as we already saw play out in one Junji Ito manga, but here in the Halloween Bestiary we demand scientifimical logic and reasoning beyond Ito's cryptic glimpse into the most enviable life of "Slug Girl."


Some gals get all the luck!

I'm not going to declare Ito's creation a SNOUL (Snail Ghoul) and presumptuously attach my own lore to it, since I happen to like his entities without an explanation. The world has room for many unrelated head-snails and skull-snails!

But for our generic Halloween version, let's say the curse of cranial gastropodification probably begins with a little slug or snail slime. Let's say this must be brewed into a potion along with the complete upper skull of a human cadaver and a sample of human saliva or mucus; even the dried salivary contents of some chewed-gum, if our spellcaster is desperate enough.

The resulting potion will have to be ingested, even just a drop, by the same person who donated the spit, and from there the victim undergoes the whole transformation we suspect. Their head slowly fills up with a snail's body, and once it has a complete foot, it breaks neatly off the host's neck and crawls away. Maybe they're still conscious for a while, but their mind will gradually fade away to that of the gooey new animal. Their original soft tissues begin dying and sloughing away as well, and even the underlying skull begins to coil as the snoul continues to grow...but it wouldn't be much fun of this were really the only way for them to form, or if a snoul ever permanently transforms into mundane escargot.

We can fix the first issue by saying that ingestion of snoul slime has the same effect as the original potion, regardless of the subject. Making your first snoul, then, gives you a much easier means of mass production if that's what you're into. For the second problem, we're going to try to make this a little bit deeper and a whole lot spookier!

Terrestrial gastropods are almost all opportunistic omnivores, eating anything at all that can't move away in time. That includes a lot of plants and fungi, usually, but they're just as prone to eating any animal matter they can, such as feces or carrion. Let's say a snoul left to its own devices may indeed become indistinguishable from just a really big snail, but if it ever happens to graze on human for any reason, the withered scraps of human brain within its shell will regain a little trace of that particular human's consciousness.

If it can continue feeding from the corpse, the snoul's shell will steadily become more aware and return to the appearance of a skull. The process is slow going, though; slow enough that under most natural circumstances, there' a chance the corpse will be stripped of flesh by maggots or other competitors before the process can advance much further, especially given that the body was likely in an advanced state of decay to catch the snail's attention at all. Though the half-awake revenant now craves more, it's still trapped in the form of a snail, and the situation typically resolves itself as the entity degenerates again over the course of another year.

But what happens if the snoul does have access to another corpse? And another? Maybe there's an ongoing plague, famine or war in the vicinity. Maybe it finds the filthy pit where peasants keep dumping their dead, or in a modern setting, a poorly kept dumpster of medical waste. Then there are the various scenarios in which someone begins feeding it on purpose, especially if it's regained enough intelligence to speak a little, or if its original creator was planning around this to begin with.



The more corpses it feeds from, the smarter and livelier the creature gets, the faster it rejuvenates itself, and the longer it will take for it to begin rotting again. The skull can eventually grow back into an entire head, though both its new flesh and its new personality are the sum of every different person it's scavenged on, and no matter how intelligent it might become, it's still insatiable for human corpse material...the fresher the better, of course.

Once the head is fully formed, further sustenance only makes the whole creature get bigger, but more importantly wiser, until perhaps its mind transcends natural limitations and can communicate telepathically, perceive the spirit world or foretell the future.

The various benefits (and arguably less desirable side effects, I GUESS) to Snoul creation should be obvious. It can be a petty revenge curse against just one person, it can be a way to spread mass chaos, it can be a way to gather intel from various dead people, or it can even be nurtured into a powerful oracle.

The last thing we could add on is that a snoul with any remaining trace of humanity, such as a partial skull-shell, will retain supernatural properties after it dies. If it fed on enough corpses, it will even have grown enough bones to creep on indefinitely as a mobile enough skeleton snail, and that can be restored to its fleshy form if it absorbs human blood.

As for spooky snails with anything other than human craniums for shells, of which we have also seen a few...like I said, there's always room for more!




PAST HALLOWEEN BESTIARIES:



THE HALLOWEEN BESTIARY BOOK:

Written by me with illustrations by our friend Bynine, this little book collects thirteen monsters inspired by Halloween decorations. Get a real copy here while they last, or if they're currently sold out, a digital version on my ko-fi.



WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THIS SITE!

MORE HALLOWEEN FEATURES: