[Editorial] Animals Gone Wild - Top 10 Killer Animals in Horror

One of the best things about horror movies is how they can make pretty much anything scary. While the villain may often be a run-of-the-mill human serial killer who has a preference for teenage victims, the horror genre is littered with baddies and killers who are the complete opposite of what we’ve come to recognise as danger. 

One type of villain which features quite heavily in horror movies is animals. Sure, there are plenty of animals out there who are more than capable of killing a human being if the fancy took them, but horror movies like to take their animal villains to the extreme. I’m talking over-sized insects, carnivores eating far more humans than they could fit in their stomach, and animals turned evil by both natural and human interference. 

To celebrate just how often humans lose their lives to killer animals in horror movies, here are ten of my favourite and most fun examples of animals gone wild. It was a tough list to narrow down, but I’ve tried to cover as much of the animal kingdom as possible! 

10. Dr Mambo in Cabin Fever (2002)

Dr Mambo gets a place on the list purely for being involved in two of the most gruesome scenes in Cabin Fever. When we first meet Dr Mambo, he’s a friendly pet with an excellent name, and nothing more. Unfortunately, he soon gets infected by the same flesh-eating virus as everyone else in the vicinity and turns super nasty. 

Not only does Dr Mambo make short work of Marcy by eating her alive outside the titular cabin, but he also snacks on poor Karen, who has been locked in the shed in order to train and contain the virus. 

Dogs are meant to be man’s best friend, so seeing Dr Mambo turn so quickly from super-cute pooch to the snarling killing machine is extra menacing.

9. Extra-Smart Sharks in Deep Blue Sea (1999)

There are so many good shark movies out there, it was hard to narrow it down to one choice, but the scientifically-enhanced sharks in Deep Blue Sea win purely because of how sneaky they are. 

Many killer shark movies involve people making questionable decisions and ending up in the water, ready to get munched at any moment. In Deep Blue Sea the sharks have been made super-smart by a team trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. This means these sharks know what they are doing, and manage to outsmart the humans at pretty much every turn.

The sharks even manage to drive the humans through the underwater facility in exactly the right way to flood the facility, hopefully engineering the sharks’ escape into the sea. It’s also extra brutal to see the sharks taunt the survivors as they kill off their friends one by one.

8. Genetically Engineered Sheep in Black Sheep (2006)

A lot of the animals on this list are already scary or have the potential to easily kill humans, but sheep are usually portrayed as nothing but cute and innocent. But another set of poorly-executed experiments sees the sheep on this New Zealand farm develop a taste for human flesh in the black comedy Black Sheep. 

Not only that, but in zombie-like fashion, the sheep infect whoever they bite, turning them into half-sheep half-human killer creations. My favourite killer sheep in possibly the little lamb, which a couple of environmental activists steal from the farm. In the commotion that follows, the lamb ends up slowly crawling across the forest floor to bite activist Grant, before heading off to infect any nearby sheep.

Sheep may not seem like the scariest animal, but if you’ve ever cut across a field before and had a herd of them run at you, you’ll know that anything can be scary in the right circumstances.

7. A Giant Man-Eating Lion in Prey (2016)

We never really find out how he ended up there, but Prey follows a larger than average man-eating lion prowling the streets of Amsterdam and eating literally every person he comes across. 

Even though he’s quite over-sized and not afraid of a little murder, the lion proves very tricky to hunt down, and this means he gets himself into all sorts of amazing situations. These include chasing a takeaway driver on a moped, ending up inside a moving tram, and lurking at the bottom of a slide in a playground so he can pick up a child-sized snack.

No one is safe in Prey, with more than a few small children getting devoured, but it’s so fun to see a lion prowling an urban landscape.

6. Over-Sized Wasps in Stung (2015)

Wasps are always scary, but the absolutely huge wasps in Stung are impressively terrifying as your chances of outrunning or escaping them are incredibly slim. These once-normal wasps have been mutated to a giant size due to plant fertiliser which is mixed with growth hormones.

The wasps start frighteningly large, however, these are parasitic wasps. This means that after stinging a victim, a human-sized wasp bursts out of its human host, which is a far more frightening problem. The giant wasps are birthed almost instantly as well, meaning once you’ve been stung, you’re well past saving. 

In some cases, the wasps take over the brains of their host before bursting out of them, allowing them to make the most of a human body before the hatching process is complete.

5. Giant Anacondas in Anaconda (1997)

Much like sharks, there are a lot of killer snake movies, but Anaconda has been a viewing staple of mine since I was a kid, so it’s earned itself a high spot on this list. My favourite thing about the giant snakes in Anaconda is how much they love swallowing people whole for amazing comedic effect. 

First of all, Gary gets eaten whole, with the snake later slithering past the camera to show us Gary’s open-mouthed outline pressed against the inside of the anaconda’s belly. Later on, a larger anaconda squishes and devours Paul, before spitting his entire body out at Terri as she runs for her life. 

For a snake that is meant to slowly digest its meals and eat only four to five times a year, I love how all the rules go right out the window to watch these snakes munch on as many people as possible. Plus the anaconda’s vaguely human screams as it burns in the climax of the movie only adds to the bizarreness.

4. Venomous Spiders in Arachnophobia (1990)

As someone who suffers from severe arachnophobia, Arachnophobia was always going to be a terrifying film. It tells the story of a super-aggressive spider from Venezuela, ‘The General’, who ends up in America and mates with a normal house spider. This creates an army of infertile drone spiders who are tasked with wiping the area of any potential threats while the newly-created queen births a second, fertile nest. 

Apart from the queen and ‘The General’, all the spiders used in this movie were real, which adds to the terror factor. These spiders wipe out as many townsfolk as possible by hiding in lampshades, lurking in slippers, and pouring out of bathroom sinks. The sheer number of these spiders and the lethal level of their venom makes them hard to defeat, even though they’re relatively small in size.

3. Killer Boars in Hannibal (2001)

There are probably quite a few people who have a grudge against Hannibal Lector, but no one tries to exact their revenge in a more over-the-top fashion than Mason Verger in Hannibal. After Hannibal drugged Mason and convinced him to horribly disfigure himself, Mason has been hell-bent on the most horrible revenge he could possibly think of.

Well, it turns out this revenge involves training a pack of quite large wild boars to develop an unquenchable taste for human flesh. With the pigs prepped, Mason plans to feed Hannibal to the pack of boars so he knows what it feels like to be eaten. 

However, things don’t turn out too well for Mason, as he ends up getting shoved into the pigpen himself while Hannibal escapes. Watching the pigs snuffle over Mason’s body shows just how horrible death by boars would be, and it’s a nasty end for Mason considering he plans the worst death possible for Hannibal and ends up on the receiving end of it himself.

2. The Grey Gorillas in Congo (1995)

Congo tells the story of a team searching for the ruins of a lost city, a rare blue diamond, and the missing team of people who went before them and never returned. While the group has a friendly gorilla called Amy with them who can communicate with her carer, it’s the grey gorillas who are lurking in the lost city which the team really need to worry about.

The grey gorillas have been bred by the city’s occupants to protect the blue diamond, and therefore they are super violent. These gorillas are huge, with terrifying faces, and are not afraid to smash a man’s face in when they catch him stealing their diamonds. 

The appearance of the grey gorillas is hinted at throughout the whole movie, and while they’re only on screen for a couple of minutes in the movie’s climax, it’s a couple of minutes of pure carnage and joy.

1. Zombie Beavers in Zombeavers (2014)

Beavers probably don’t ever rank high on a list of scary animals, but mix those beavers with toxic waste and you’re left with a far more terrifying result. After their dam is exposed to the toxic waste, the once-cuddly group of beavers decide to attack any human, or any other animal for that matter, in the immediate area. 

Much like Black Sheep, once you’re bitten by a zombie beaver, you end up turning into a hideous half-beaver half-human creature. The effects used for the human beavers is especially terrifying, with huge bulging eyes and massive buck teeth. However, as killer animals go, the little zombie beaver puppets themselves are definitely the cutest on the whole list.

Zombeavers shows that it’s incredibly hard to defend yourself against something that can munch through wood, especially when you’re staying in a wooden cabin. So even though beavers don’t look too dangerous, it shows just how quickly they could take you out if the mood overcomes them.

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