Why are the Legend of Zelda’s giant eyeball bosses always so creepy?

As any seasoned The Legend of Zelda player will know, there is an unwritten rule regarding boss battles in the games: Aim for the eyes. How many of us have tried to keep this in our heads as we’re struggling to aim for the giant blue eyeball of Gohma before it laser-blasts us, or land another strike at a Hinox before it can club us into smithereens?

There is certainly no shortage of bosses with giant eyeballs, or just one giant eyeball, such as Gohma and the Hinox. What the Zelda games also have, however, is an abundance of bosses who are little more than — or no more than — giant eyeballs. These bosses, I believe, are some of the most unpleasant and unsettling in all of the games, in ways that you don’t quite get with a Moblin or a Lynel.

Let’s be honest. There is something undeniably creepy about a giant eyeball chasing you around a dungeon. But why is that, exactly?

The very first giant-eyeball boss was Digdogger from the original The Legend of Zelda. Just a few years later, A Link to the Past gave us not one but three different giant-eye bosses: Arrghus, Kholdstare, and Vitreous. Link’s Awakening brought us the Slime Eye, Majora’s Mask has Wart, and later games kept them coming. Ocarina of Time does not appear to have a giant-floating-eyeball boss per se, but I think Morpha the amoeba in the Water Temple, with its eye-like nucleus floating in a translucent blob of living watery slime, comes the closest to being such a boss.

The recurring presence of giant eyeballs among Zelda bosses may purely be a practical decision by the game designers and programmers: An eyeball makes a very logical “kill point” for the player to lock onto. But again, one cannot deny just how creepy and weird they are.  

I suggest that the creepiness of an eyeball boss works on several different levels. First, by virtue of being a giant eye, it can see every one of your moves, and it is virtually impossible to hide from it. Second, by virtue of being a giant, fluid-filled, autonomous body part, there is a definite “ick” factor that you don’t get from fighting a Lynel or a Moblin. Third, and perhaps more subtly, the loss of an eye may represent a fear of losing the ability to see, or to understand, or to reason; indeed, the sight of a giant eye that can move by itself may well cause someone to question their sanity.

Somebody’s Watching Me

Let’s consider Arrghus for a moment. We may infer that Arrghus is a reference to Argus Panoptes, the “all-seeing” many-eyed giant in Greek mythology. Hera ordered Argus to keep an eye, so to speak, on Io the nymph, who was being sought by Zeus, and keep Zeus from getting to Io. Argus had 100 eyes, only half of which were closed at a time, which meant Argus could see anything, day or night. But Zeus sent Hermes to tell stories and play his flute to the giant. This had the effect of putting Argus completely to sleep, which gave Hermes the chance to kill Argus with a stone.

The name Argus was later used for the bad-tempered caretaker Argus Filch in the Harry Potter series. In the 19th century, the word Panoptes led to the Panopticon: a proposed model of prison in which one jailer could keep watch over many prisoners at once. So what better name for a boss assigned to keep watch over a valuable object or a prisoner in a dungeon in a Zelda game?

Consider also the sense of something watching you and that it wants to take you prisoner. The one who watches has the power, and the one who is being watched does not have the power. In these dungeon scenarios, Link is not the one watching. He is the one being watched. That may well translate to a feeling of powerlessness and helplessness.

The sense that something is constantly watching you is an unnerving feeling. It can see you, and it can always find you and hunt you down. There is no hiding from it. It is not going to fight you on your terms. (but then, what dungeon boss ever has?) A giant eye can’t kill you with a sword or the usual weapons, either; it can zap you with lightning, in the case of Vitreous, or simply “slime” you to death, as is presumed to be the case for Slime Eye. With a Lynel or a Hinox, you can at least see that it is holding a weapon. Even the Gohma has its intimidating pincers.

Slime and Other Icky Things

A giant eyeball is a body part, separate from a larger body, but with a mind of its own. It is something that should be a physical impossibility, even in the world of Zelda, where magic and the work of evil mages can make just about anything possible. It makes it very clear, both to Link and to the player, that this is something extremely unnatural and abnormal.

It’s clear that the giant eyeball bosses are meant to instill a certain visceral feeling — body horror is probably the best term for it — in the player. The very nature of eyeball bosses — being detached body parts that can move of their own free will — speaks of disembodiment, dismemberment, body fluids, slime, viscera, and general grossness. These sensations are all heightened by several different eyeball bosses being found in places that are suggestive of mire, wet, or slime:

• In A Link to the Past, Arrghus is found in the Swamp Palace, and after you eliminate all of Arrghus’ auxiliary eyeballs, Arrghus skitters madly through the dungeon pool, making rather unpleasant splashing sounds as it tries to get you.
• Vitreous lives up to its name by sitting in a puddle of what is assumed to be leaked-out vitreous fluids in its lair in Misery Mire.
• In Link’s Awakening, Slime Eye is first seen dripping drops of slime from the ceiling in the aptly named Slime Cavern.
• Wart makes its lair in the decidedly damp Great Bay Temple in Majora’s Mask. All of its auxiliary eyes break loose and jump around at Link, making squishy popping-bubble sounds as they go.
• Morpha, in the bowels of the Water Temple in Twilight Princess, tries to grab Link with watery tentacles that look decidedly gooey.

Obviously, this isn’t an all-encompassing list of all that is gross and slimy. But it is clear that giant eyeballs in The Legend of Zelda tend to favor the gross and slimy.

Out of Sight, Out of (Your) Mind

If your preferred interpretation of disembodied eyes is of a Freudian bent, a disembodied eye might stand for a fear of your body being mutilated. A more Jungian view might see it as the loss of sanity, or the ability to reason or to understand things. It is possible that seeing a giant eye, something that can’t be possible, may cause someone to question their sanity or their perception. Another possibility is that the sight of the giant eye may be a deep-rooted fear of losing their sight: either losing their physical eye or perhaps losing their sense of perception and reason.

Disembodied eyes, or the fear of losing one’s eyes, are a running motif in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story, “The Sandman.” The narrator, Nathaniel, hears a rather gruesome tale from his younger sister’s nurse about the Sandman: a loathsome creature that plucks out the eyes of children who won’t go to sleep and then feeds them to pet birds on the moon. The creepiness factor of the story continues when Nathaniel encounters the loathsome lawyer Coppelius. In what may or may not be a fever dream, Coppelius attacks Nathaniel, shouting, “Eyes! I must have eyes!” and tries to pluck out the boy’s eyes.

Clearly, there is a lot to fear from facing down the giant eyeball bosses in the Zelda games. But during the boss battles, it is important to remember that while the eyes are intended to sow fear and discomfort in Link (and by extension, the player), they are also a very delicate part of the body and are easily damaged. Vitreous bounces straight ahead, and can be dispatched with a few well-placed arrows. Some well-timed spin attacks will generally take care of the other eyeball bosses.

As bosses, they can be defeated, as long as you know what to do, and keep your own eyes open.