WITHERED HAND OF EVIL.

What is it about a dead hand? That good-old, severed hand that is independent from the body and sometimes has a mind of its own.

My personal favorite is the mega popular visual of a hand reaching out of a grave.

It sounds a little ridiculous to bring this to attention, but the HAND is an extremely common highlight in the world of horror. In 1963, The Crawling Hand saw a possessed arm wash ashore and become possessed with people who come in contact with it. Then of course, Ash is forced to sever his own life-of-its-own hand with a chainsaw in one of the most legendary horror movie scenes of all time in Evil Dead II (1987). A slacker’s demonic hand in Idle Hands (1999) goes on a killing spree. Even in modern cinema we just saw a group of teens use an embalmed hand to conjure spirits in Talk to Me (2022).

You also can’t talk about hands of horror without the greatest showstopper, THING from The Addams Family.

Without question one of the standout performances in Tim Burton’s Wednesday series is this clever and emotional severed hand who has more personality in his fingers and palm than many of the full-size, talking bodies in the show. “He” was an entertaining character in the ’60s sitcom and ’90s films but it seems like in this new storytelling of Wednesday and her adventures, the level of charisma they can pull out of this cut-off hand is really impressive. If you’re a fan of the show, you feel for Thing.

Beyond cinema, the creeping hand has been a mainstay in jokes and gags, too. This got me thinking about all the great practical tricks that have graced the magic parlors and novelty shops over the decades. Being a kid, these places were almost as impressionable as walking through aisles of VHS tapes at the movie rental store. Especially around the Halloween season. Plastic vampire teeth, big noses, bloody cuts, warts, eyeballs, ooze, Dracula capes, rodents, witch fingers, creepy crawlies and CHOPPED OFF HANDS. Even the infamous “hand sticking out of the trunk of the car” when you’re driving behind someone always made me chuckle.

There were so many bloody hands of various levels in quality. Some are good, others quite bad — but they all deserve a home!

The #1 (numero uno) rubber hand in TNUC’s personal collection is without a doubt “The Wigglin’ Hand” from 1983. For one reason, it’s cool because it’s a 43-year old rubber limb that still wiggles.

On the other hand (no pun intended), this thing rules because this is the same hand that was Chainsaw’s alarm clock in the movie Summer School! When I discovered this sacred item in 2014, I couldn’t believe it. Francis Gremp (sorry, it’s Chainsaw) was a character that I idolized as a teenager. His love of horror and heavy metal, the bonehead sense of humor and his slacker attitude at school were just the right ingredients to guide my path through life. When I ended up discovering a screen-accurate item from his bodacious bedroom as seen in the movie, it quickly became one of TNUC’s most precious artifacts.

Check out the video I made back in 2014: