Skeleton (undead)
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An animated skeleton is a type of corporeal undead often found in fantasy, horror fiction, and mythical art. Most are human skeletons, but they can also be from any creature or race found on Earth or in the fantasy world.
Myth and folklore
Animated human skeletons are known to have personified death in Western culture since the Middle Ages. The Grim Reaper is often depicted as a hooded skeleton holding a scythe (and possibly an hourglass), which has been attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger (1538). Death as one of the biblical horsemen of the Apocalypse has been depicted as a skeleton riding a horse.
Figurines and images of skeletons doing routine things are common in Mexico's Day of the Dead celebration where skulls symbolize life and their familiar circumstances invite levity.
Modern fiction
Undead skeletons play a more active, and less symbolic, role in modern fantasy fiction. Skeletons might be given 'life' by a more powerful undead or necromancer. When raised by another, skeletons are a mindless set of animated bones, brutal and virtually immune to a piercing attack that would only harm the flesh they lack. In many stories, legions of undead skeletons are raised as perfectly obedient and expendable foot-soldiers or guards. Since most skeletons are controlled by something else, they cannot make their own intelligent decisions, and can easily be led into ambushes, traps, or hazardous terrain.
In the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, whose stop motion animation techniques were accomplished by Ray Harryhausen, a number of skeletons are animated against the Argonauts. These skeletons are capable of reassembling themselves when their bones are scattered, and are only defeated when they are led off of a cliff into the ocean.
In the 1999 movie The Mummy, Imhotep controls skeletons for this purpose. With no free will or fear of death, they cannot disobey commands. Animated skeletons are not coerced by many effects of spells and combat; they cannot be unconscious or tired.
In Dungeons & Dragons (and games it inspired), animated skeletons are similar to zombies, but skeletons are completely devoid of flesh and do not feed on the living. Edged and piercing weapons, such as swords and arrows, are mostly ineffective against skeletons; only blunt weapons, such as war hammers, are effective at knocking the bones apart. A lich might look like a simple animated skeleton, but they are typically intelligent and powerful spellcasters. Clerics also often have the ability to repel or destroy undead creatures, of which animated skeletons are usually the weakest such adversaries.