The animate dead spell has no mention of a soul being used for the purposes of the spell, however, when animating a zombie or skeleton within Golarion, a sliver or shard of the creature's soul is still utilized. I'm basing this on things mentioned by James Jacobs such as THIS and THIS.
As the merged body/soul of outsiders are unrecoverable when slain, is it still possible to animate their body? Is it also impossible to use the more powerful create undead spells on them? Are there official examples of villains animating outsiders in Golarion?
You can turn Outsiders into Undead, they're still flesh after all. And the soul is still there as well, it's just one with the flesh.
It's my understanding that when slain, the outsider is destroyed -- body and soul. What remains is the matter of the being (perhaps not even really considered a corpse), and "their signature quintessence is released to contribute to the power of their home planes." So far as outsiders go, the article "The River of Souls" in the Mummy's Mask clarifies further:
Upon an outsider's destruction--whether it be a petitioner naturally merging with a plane or the violent destruction of another planar native--its quintessence returns to its home plane. This transference of energies might be immediate or a gradual process, depending on where the being's existence ended. Beings of specific alignments destroyed away from their home planes have their energy released into the multiverse. ... In the cases of those whose existence as an outsider ends on a plane of a matching alignment, its quintessence infuses the plane in a manner similar to corpses on the Material Plane returning their nutrients to the soil.
James Jacobs states that a sliver of a soul is used to animate dead. Presumably the entire soul is used in the case of creating more powerful undead. It's not clear that even such a sliver remains in the corpse of an outsider to animate it with.
There's a Vampire Succubus in The Moonscar I believe.
Were they created from the corpses of outsiders? Were they from the negative energy plane? Sorry, I'm not familiar with The Moonscar but I would like to find an example of outsiders like devils or angels being made into undead within Golarion's cannon.
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Yeah it's an often weird and case by case thing, complicated by the absence of body/soul duality in outsiders. Vampire outsiders clearly can occur, while lich fiends for instance would seem to be impossible given the nature of liches and the reasons they embrace undeath.
Nightshades are just strange, with 'Undead Revisited' giving a nice exploration of their origins (less undead fiends and more undead that have been created by a conjunction of negative energy and a dying fiend).
I don't think I've seen a lich fiend since...2E? I wonder how they'd manage it these days.
Pit fiend: "Step one: Develop personal ritual of unspeakable depravity." *Pit fiend looks around* "Did that this morning over breakfast of broken souls. Now what do I do? I have an entire library of those! Which one do I need? Stupid mortal directions!"
Why would outsiders even want to become liches? Mortal casters use it for a kind of immortality, but most outsiders (not counting some native ones) don't age.
The other way around, a lich becoming a half-fiend and maybe even a true outsider eventulally, I find more plausible.
Easy way for an undead outsider:
Bestow Curse
Cursed to rise as undead
Not so easy:
Contingency -> Animate Dead
While still dying, the animate triggers
/cevah