The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Dead Hand boss still haunts me

One of The Legend of Zelda series’ weirdest enemies is making a comeback in one corner of the internet, and I’m confronting some very unpleasant memories.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time It is impossible to be anything if it’s not separated. Every one of the dungeons is based on a specific motif. Or a specific fear of claustrophobic terror (getting eaten by a huge fish, trapped in a tree or getting lost in a mine shaft filled with dinosaurs). In any case, the theme of two of its dungeons — Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple — seemed to be “Let’s try to inflict lasting trauma on a bunch of children and teenagers.” And in my case, the designers succeeded, thanks in no small part to Dead Hand, a reoccurring boss who has made a very weird comeback on the Zelda subreddit over the last few months.

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For those who haven’t played Ocarina of time, protagonist Link’s journey into the Bottom of the Well comes about 4/5 of the way into his journey, and it is, in my opinion, the game’s masterstroke. This point was not reached before. Ocarina’s time-travel system is framed as a one-time act of transformation: Link was a child in a Swiftian Hyrule, and suddenly, he was an adult, seven years later, in a darkening world. But after you’ve gotten through the infamous Water Temple and returned to a Kakariko Village in flames, Ocarina Strongly suggests you go back to the Temple of Time (the place of the temporal leap). Rejoice in being a parent again. By revisiting Kakariko Village as the younger Link and completing a brilliant effect-and-cause side quest, your child-sized protagonist can squeeze through a small hole at the bottom of the town’s well, where a malignant entity is poisoning the water supply.

It’s here where things go from Haruki Murakami to Junji Ito. You will find a variety of monstrosities in the Bottom of the Well. These include soul-sucking, giant, invisible hands, bats and more. You can also drop in to a torture chamber/pool full of filth through an assortment of hidden holes on the floor. Yay!

But it’s Dead Hand, the boss guarding the mini-dungeon’s treasured Lens of Truth, that truly takes things too far. Look at that thing. He not only looks like a naked, half-melted Mouth of Sauron, he’s also accompanied by a series of gangly arms that sprout from the floor to face-hug you into submission. He’s a complete 180º from the mostly cartoonish bosses up to this point, and he stopped 7-year-old me dead in my tracks. I asked my seven-year-old brother to defeat Dead Hand. (I asked my brother who is seven years younger than I, to beat Dead hand for me. Ocarina Parallels do not escape my attention.

Not only does Dead Hand reappear in the subsequent dungeon, he’s also been appearing on the Zelda subreddit, where users are making both 3D printed models and clay figurines of the creature. I can’t pinpoint the exact point when the boss started popping up on r/Zelda, and that just makes its revolting resurgence all the more mysterious (read: terrifying). Thanks, Reddit! I’m going to go play the somehow-less-fucked-up Majora’s Mask.