7 Weirdest Witcher 3 Enemies (And What They Represent)

When The Witcher does horror, it does horror properly. Unleashed during the Possession quest, a Hym turns out to be poisoning Jarl Udalryk and feeding off his guilt for letting his brother drown on a sailing trip. A dark, dangerous creature that is composed of pure blackness, the Hym appears as a largely humanoid creature - presumably to represent how it turns its victims into shadows of who they once were - with antler-like protrusions above its head, latched onto Udalryk and slowly sending him insane through feasting on his troubled emotional state.

On the surface, the Hym can be linked back to the Mare - aka a Polish zmora - a figure that sleeps on people's chests at night to give them bad dreams whilst draining their energy and blood. And even more specifically in Polish folklore, the Hym could be argued to be inspired by Nocnitsa, a nightmare spirit composed entirely of shadows that appears whilst one sleeps to drain life energy. They're both pretty similar in their actions and legends, and neither is one you want bothering you when you're trying to get some shut-eye.

That the Hym is a creature that is relegated to darkness and uses emotional manipulation to cause waking nightmares clearly ties itself back to these creatures, even if The Witcher goes one step further in making the Hym an entity that is inescapable no matter if asleep or awake. And even then, death is considered the longest rest in poetic terms, so the demon's intent to drive its victims to suicide makes even more sense if it's a monster that is tied this closely to sleeping.