It stars Janet Leigh of Psycho fame as a woman who is endlessly pestered by the killer bunnies. Night of the Lepus (1972) Whoa! Big rabbits attack in this 1970s campy classic.Īnimal: Bunnies, or rabbits, or really big rabbits…īackstory: The word “lepus” is a Latin word meaning “hare,” but the film’s producers decided that including the word “rabbits” in a film title simply wasn’t scary enough, even though they green-lit a movie plot involving killer habits who terrorize a remote area in the American West. There are plenty of other killer animals to take up the slack, and they are apparently outraged that the Southern plantation’s wealthy owner (Ray Milland of Lost Weekend and Dial M for Murder fame) has been over-using pesticides to kill wildlife. Frogs (1972)Īnimal: Frogs…but also birds, lizards, snakes, spiders, and even a butterfly…īackstory: Pay no mind to the fact that, despite the film’s poster showing a human arm disappearing into a giant frog’s mouth, there are no killer frogs in this film. The Deadly Bees (1966) While bees are critical to our environment, they’re deadly in this 1960s movie.īackstory: Based on the 1941 novel A Taste for Honey and featuring a screenplay by Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho, this film tells the story of a fatigued pop singer who visits an exotic island to recuperate, only to realize that the farm’s owner has cultivated a strain of aggressively deadly bees. Stripped from its environmental theme (the Daphne Du Maurier short story on which the film is based implied birds are acting this way due to climate change), all that’s left in The Birds is a tense, menacing atmosphere and unexplained attacks from flocks of irate birds that’ll give you a new perspective on the pigeons you see daily on your way to work. Hitchcock spared no expense to make his avian masterpiece: An estimated $200,000 was spent on mechanical birds, while animal handler Ray Berwick captured and trained hundreds of crows, seagulls, ravens, and sparrows. The Birds (1963) Birds is the first ecology horror film.īackstory: This classic Hitchcock thriller is a foundational creature feature or eco-horror film. Rex employed special effects that were far ahead of their time. The scenes where the giant ape struggles with a brontosaurus and a T. He captures it and ships it to New York City, expecting riches and fame rather than horror and destruction. A film producer visits a remote island that harbors a giant ape. King Kong (1933)īackstory: This is the godfather of all eco-horror movies and has been remade numerous times. Let’s get into the natural horror movies. Thanks to Jaws, the 70s were a particularly ripe time for this kind of movie. In this list, we’ll explore the scariest movies involving animals throughout cinematic history. Seth Green stars in Ticks (1993), which features enormously large ticks.
Then are the animals we rarely interact with but can be fierce: monkeys, bears, sharks, wolves, bats - and yes, even sheep - to haunt you. Those small arachnids in our homes called spiders, the snakes outside our abodes, the birds in the sky, the bees buzzing by the flowers, perhaps even our own pets, whether it be a cat or dog - the dangers of even the most domesticated animal are real, and scary at least in these fictional films.
This man is being attacked by a rabbit in the campy horror Night of the Lepus (1972). As humans, we are used to being at the top of the food chain however, deep down we realize this is a fragile ecological dynamic and that all these creatures have great power that can horrify us and kill us. Animal horror movies, sometimes called creature features, or eco-horror movies, dive into a primordial fear we have of nature taking revenge against us for how we have changed it and adapted it to our needs.
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