With Talk to Me making sentient severed hands cool again, Liam Maguren fingers through the book of cinema for some of the big-screen’s most iconic.
I know what you’re thinking: “Not another listicle about sentient severed hands.” However, with Australian A24 horror Talk to Me bringing said hands back in vogue, we’re well within our rights to dig up this dead-n-beaten horse for those sweet SEO clicks.
Here are five of the most iconic sentient severed hands to grace the big screen.
The Addams Family (1991)
The Addams Family (1991)
Thing T. Thing, the granddaddy of demonic digits, is inarguably cinema’s most iconic sentient severed hand. Like most hands, however, he didn’t start life severed. In the original TV series, Thing came out of a box, leaving audiences wondering what the rest of him looked like.
The movies did away with that mystery by severing Thing from the lower forearm. Though the original show’s writer and creators weren’t too happy about this decision, it allowed 1991’s The Addams Family to explore Thing more as a character. Free from the confines of a hidden body, the visual effects team combined forces with magician Christopher Hart’s hand to enfuse the simple body part with a bountiful personality. (Hart would go on to hand-act for 1999’s Idle Hands, which you will not find on this list.)
Future movies kept Thing out of the box, indulging the sentient severed hand’s unique characteristics. Netflix’s Wednesday went so far as to hire another magician, Victor Dorobantu, to play Thing with nimbleness and nuance. Talk about your slight-of-hand…
Bride of Re-Animator
Though this poor lil’ guy didn’t last long in the sequel to 1985 horror classic Re-Animator, it made enough of an impression to warrant a run of collectable prop replicas. Assembled by registered sick fuck Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), the freakish finger fellow barely counts as a hand. However, thanks to some neon-green science juice, it gains sentience. Horrible, horrible sentience.
Unlike the others on this list, the sentient severed hand in Bride of Re-Animator also has an eyeball—and there’s something about that eye that draws immediate empathy. The first moments of its short life see it stumble like a newborn fawn, look around, sense the creep vibes oozing off Dr. West, and attempt an escape. A few minutes later, they crush him with a book. It’s heartbreaking.
As should be expected from any film with ‘animator’ in the title, our tragic chum comes to life with some really charming animation. Combining stop-motion with traditional puppetry (and one instance where they just drop the puppet), it would make for the best use of practical effects on the list, if it wasn’t for…
Evil Dead II
Evil Dead II
The biggest bastard on this list, the sentient severed hand from Sam Raimi’s goof-horror classic doubles as a great opponant in one of cinema’s best fight scenes. A lot happened before the severance, with Ash (Bruce Campbell) failing to defend himself from his own possessed hand beating the crap out of him. It’s a tremendous piece of solo acting.
After Ash (awesomely) chainsaws it off, that’s where this sentient severed hand truly shines. Like all deadites, the little sucker displays a true devotion to dickishniss—it scuttles off like a rat, hides in the walls, sarcastically taps its fingers, delivers some verbal mockery (how?), flips the bird… it’s so good.
The film wears its stop-motion-ness proudly, not even pretending to make it match the shots of the puppet with those of the real hand. And who would have it any other way? It’s silly-looking, which perfectly matches the silliness of the whole movie.
The Iron Giant
The Iron Giant
In a—quite frankly—flawless comedy sequence, Brad Bird’s masterpiece showcases a robotic sentient severed hand for the ages. Learning about his secret robot friend’s ability to recall parts of himself, our lead Hogarth must suddenly hide the huge missing hand from his unaware mother during dinner.
Hogarth drives the scene with a tightly tuned performance, his panic and attempts at restraint reading superbly through the animation. But the hand comes into its own as a character separate from the iron giant.
With the wrist as a tail and index finger as a head, the hand moves with dog-like obedience and naivity. While being fun to watch, the physical behaviour also beautifully mirrors the child-like personality of the titular ‘bot. The hand can also watch TV, which makes no sense, but it’s adorable nonetheless.
I Lost My Body
I Lost My Body
French filmmakers Guillaume Laurant (Amélie) and Jérémy Clapin created what might be the only feature film with a sentient severed hand as the protagonist. Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2020 Academy Awards, this coming-of-age oddity tells the parallel stories of a young man trying to find love and a hand trying to find its body.
You’ll have to watch the film to discover how these two stories connect. Suffice it to say, there’s an incredible amount of sentient severed hand stuff going on. Playing out like a survival thriller, the hand’s journey sees it ziplining across rooftops, dodging incoming traffic, fighting rats, choking out a pigeon, and reminiscing about how great life was as a connected non-sentient hand.
Like most of cinema’s sentient severed hands, I Lost My Body feels playful and inventive with all the hand’s atypical movements and behaviours. However, the body part’s also capable of expressing longing and melancholy—relatable feelings for anyone who’s ever been sentient and… severed.
