The most memorable killer animals in movies

The granddaddy of the killer animals. Kong didn’t seem violent by nature, but he didn’t mess around. He killed some dinosaurs on Skull Island and racked up plenty of human kills. Unfortunately for him and Fay Wray, planes proved too much for him to handle.

Jaws is perhaps the quintessential killer animal movie now. Sure, it made people more afraid of sharks than necessary, but man, it was a gripping thriller. Steven Spielberg basically invented the summer blockbuster with his story of a shark wreaking havoc on an island town in the North Atlantic.

Hey, dinosaurs are animals! They just happen to be extinct animals. That’s not the case in Jurassic Park, another film by Spielberg. The man knows how to make animals scary, especially if you are a lawyer hiding in a bathroom.

Based on a Stephen King story, Cujo is about a Saint Bernard who becomes vicious after contracting rabies. Unfortunately, this huge, aggressive dog keeps a mother and her young son trapped in their car. Cujo is a claustrophobic horror film and makes you realize how bad things could have gone in Beethoven. Charles Grodin should breathe a sigh of relief.

Crawl is a slick, low-budget horror film that was one of the best — perhaps the best — films of that genre in 2019. A hurricane in Florida leads to flooding, which leads to alligators on the prowl. They end up in the crawl space of one particular house, trapping our main character’s father and leaving her to come to the rescue.

From alligators to crocodiles, although Lake Placid isn’t exactly realistic. This horror comedy is about a gigantic croc chomping down on humans in the titular lake. The first film is pretty fun, but a series of direct-to-video and made-for-TV sequels had swift diminishing returns.

The weather is brutal enough for the plane crash survivors of The Grey, but the Alaskan winter isn’t the only problem. There are also wolves. Liam Neeson ends up in a straight-up fistfight with wolves. Yeah, this is a pretty intense survival action film.

Anacondas are big snakes, but the snake at the center of Anaconda is even more massive. Like, big enough to swallow Jon Voight whole. It’s a pretty ridiculous horror movie, but ‘90s moviegoers had some fun with it.

Roger Corman, also the B-movie huckster, saw Jaws and wanted to capitalize. Thus, he gave us Piranha. Now, among Corman flicks and Jaws knockoffs, Piranha is one of the best. It helps that Joe Dante directed it.

Alfred Hitchcock was considered the master of horror and suspense; he once went the killer animal route. The Birds is particularly menacing and unnerving as a film. Birds start killing people in a small town for unknown reasons. Suddenly, birds become lethal and dangerous. This is definitely a Hitchcockian take on this type of movie.

Another movie about a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness? This time, the concern isn’t wolves but a bear. Well, also men driven to their breaking point, but mostly a giant, bloodthirsty bear. The killer animal in The Edge was played by Bart the Bear, an animal actor who played basically every prominent bear in a movie in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Jumanji has become a belated, extremely successful film series. It all started in 1995, and we want to shout out the original, even if they are all killer-animal movies to a degree. Basically, if it’s a killer animal found in Africa, it shows up in Jumanji.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dıck is an iconic American novel and one of the foremost stories about an animal. The white whale isn’t as much of an active killer as some of the animals on this list, but Moby Dıck does plenty of killing in the story. There have been a few movie adaptations of the novel, but none definitive. This one has Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab and direction from John Huston, though.

We don’t always think of bugs as animals, but they fall under that umbrella, especially in this sense. Besides, Arachnophobia is a strong horror film, so we wanted to include it. Spiders of all sizes are found in this film. John Goodman gave a fun performance.

The hype and pre-release memeification of Snakes on a Plane overshadowed the movie. It seemed to brim with the potential to be a fun, bonkers horror movie. Instead, it was just kind of a middling film. Still, we had to include it as one of the most-talked-about movies about killer animals.

Back to sharks. Sharks show up often in film; generally, they aren’t friendly. That’s even true in Finding Nemo. Open Water is one intense horror movie, especially because it feels more plausible than Jaws. Two divers are left behind by the boat in open water, and that water is filled with sharks.

Night of the Lepus is remembered as a cult classic, a horror film that’s fun to watch and laugh at. It is a cheesy, silly movie. It is, after all, a horror movie about mutated killer rabbits. Janet Leigh is in it. This is a slightly less successful horror film than another of her efforts, Psycho.

Dr. Evil wanted sharks. Specifically, sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. Unfortunately, that was not possible. Instead, he got sea bass. Mutant sea bass. Ill-tempered sea bass. Hey, that’s more memorable than any shark could ever be, even if they did have freaking lasers attached to their heads.

Night of the Lepus didn’t really work because people had trouble buying rabbits as horror-movie killers. Instead of being scared, people laughed. A few years later, the Monty Python crew intentionally did that. The killer rabbit in Holy Grail is supposed to be funny, but that doesn’t make him any less lethal.

A new addition to the world of killer animals in films, and we aren’t talking about the alien. There’s a secondary, complementary story in Nope. It’s about Gordy, a chimp that stars in a sitcom. Then, one day, Gordy freaks out, and suddenly, a scared chimp is on a violent tirade that proves lethal. Sure, an alien may never eat us, but the possibility of a chimp bashing our skulls in remains plausible.