One fan artist has reimagined Super Mario’s Toad as a photo-realistic human and the results are terrifying, to say the least. Rendering popular characters with a more down-to-earth art style is a fairly common practice for talented video game enthusiasts, but it seems that not every icon benefits from being looked at in a new light.   

Some of these works offer a nice take on anthropomorphic video game characters like Star Fox’s Fox McCloud, who was once depicted with an appealing Guardians Of The Galaxy-style look. Others have fancasted actors like Captain Marvel’s Brie Lawson in the role of Mario’s Princess Peach or Joe Manganiello as the heroic plumber himself. Most of these re-imaginings work out rather well for their characters, but occasionally a well-meaning artist might unearth things humanity was never meant to see.    

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As is the case with fan artist Miguel Vasquez, who posted his humanized take on Super Mario’s faithful mushroom-headed guard Toad on his Twitter page earlier today, showing him as a short stubby man with beady eyes and no visible nose. It is one of many such works depicting beloved characters like The Simpsons, Bugs Bunny and SpongeBob SquarePants in disturbingly macabre, photo-realistic detail, and it can be checked out (for better or worse) below:    

Appearing in everything from Wii U spinoff titles to Saturday morning cartoons, Toad remains a popular character among fans of Nintendo’s Mario franchise. The dutiful guard to Princess Peach has featured in several games over the years, serving as a popular player character in the Mario Kart series and showing up to reluctantly protect his royalty during rounds of Super Smash Bros. His next video game outing will be in July’s Paper Mario: The Origami King, which offers a hint as to what the cute little mushroom man might look like as an adult.    

It certainly can’t look any more bizarre than Miguel Vasquez’s creepy, photo-realistic artwork of Toad. Everything about this version of the character, from the beady eyes to the lack of a nose mixed in with the textured human skin, is frighteningly grotesque. Parts of the image bring to mind the earlier, ill-fated original design of Sonic from this year’s Sonic The Hedgehog movie or Michael Bay’s take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yet at the same time, there’s something strangely alluring about it, like a terrifying vision one can't look away from. Miguel Vasquez has a talent for turning cute and lovable characters like Super Mario’s Toad into twisted creatures of nightmare, much to the delight (or terror) of his Twitter followers.

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Source: Miguel Vasquez (via Twitter)