Comingsoon.net is putting on some protective gear and heading out into the wild to find the best movies about killer animals. Check out our picks in the gallery below!
A good monster movie like Godzilla or The Blob is impactful because of the sheer size and strength of the creature on-screen—creating something brand new and unleashing it onto the general public is a truly horrifying thing to consider. However, an alternative to these kinds of scares is the idea of a real life creature wreaking havoc. Instantly, the horror is grounded and the threat seems all the more real.
With the upcoming release of killer croc movie Crawl, it’s hard not to look back on all the killer animals that have blessed moviegoers over the course of film history. Of course, you’ve got the more absurd ones like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein, but—for Crawl’s sake—it’s worth taking a look at the creature features based on actual animals. No matter their size, these guys have brought nothing but terror to the world around them… and that’s why we love them.
killer creature movies
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An American Werewolf in London (1981)
John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London tells the story of two college kids attacked by a werewolf while hiking through Europe. It’s a horror film with tinges of dark comedy, making it a worthy addition to this collection.
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Cat People (1942, 1982)
Both Jacques Tourneur and Paul Schrader’s takes on Cat People turned out really great, despite how wildly different the two approaches are. One thing remains the same between the two: people turning into killer cats, just like the title suggests.
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Cujo (1983)
Stephen King has explored almost every corner of the horror genre, so of course he’s touched on killer animals. Cujo, based on his book of the same name, follows a killer dog turned vicious by a bat bite.
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Jaws (1975)
Definitely the seminal killer creature movie, Jaws follows three men dead-set on taking out the great white shark terrorizing their small beach town on the east coast. Considered to be the first blockbuster, the film remains hugely thrilling and incredibly suspenseful to this day.
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The Birds (1963)
Alfred Hitchcock’s killer bird movie really hits a nerve. Through the exclusion of any sort of soundtrack, Hitchcock creates a very real sense of dread (no matter how ridiculous the idea of killer birds actually is).
