The Obsession of Hollywood With Animal Attack Films

Aisha Moon
Sep 24
3 min read

The psychology behind the animal attack movies of Hollywood

Animal Attack Films and Hollywood

King Kong, Jaws, Anaconda, Jurassic Park, Cocaine Bear…familiar with this list? This list is about the animal attack movies that thrilled and scared us. But why were all these movies, depicting animals as monsters, made? In reality, the percentage of animal attacks as a reason for human deaths is insignificantly low. And why is there such an abundance of these movies in Hollywood compared to other parts of the world? What does it mean? Why do animal attacks continue to allure the cultural mind of America?

There are two possible explanations. First, humans may still carry primordial memories of being hunted by predators in their subconscious. However, this argument can be easily demolished because animal attack movies are not made in other film industries of the world as frequently as in Hollywood. Again, the question is, why Hollywood?

The second explanation is this- in its journey towards modernity and progress, the USA, being at the pinnacle of material progress, has travelled the greatest distance away from nature. This enormous rift, this disconnect, has made it more frightened of nature and other animals than any other society or nation. This disconnect could explain why Hollywood movies often reflect a fear of animals, birds, reptiles, crocodiles, and even insects like ants and locusts. Just remember the movies, ‘Snakes on a Plane’, ‘The Birds’, ‘The Grey’, ‘Frogs’, ‘Claws’, ‘Jaws’, ‘Piranha 3D’, and the ‘The Planet of the Apes’ movie and TV series.

What the Experts Say about the Animal Attack Films of Hollywood

Dominic Lennard, the author of the book, ‘Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies’, is of the view that predator attacks, not rare in human history, have left a mark in our subconscious and make us revisit that fear through movies. He cites a revealing paragraph from Jeffrey Lockwood, which says that the evolutionary history of humans had rendered us soft sources of protein for our predators and this genetic memory still causes us to fear “creatures that can eat, sting, or bite us.” (as cited in Lennard, 2019, p.5). However, Lennard does not explain why Hollywood has an intense history of animal attack movies as compared to other movie industries in the world.

When the movie, ‘Cocaine Bear’, came out, ‘The Atlantic’ published an article wondering about Hollywood’s fear of animal attacks. This article also concluded that the idea of animal attack thrilled and frightened us because of the ancient fears of predators nestling inside us. However, the article also presented an underlying psychology- in such movies, the animal is the protagonist often, and the audience is expected to at least partly sympathise with it. Sometimes, the animal is a ‘martyr’ and it is “all of us”. In other words, they are the underdogs of the Anthropocene.

Only on the silver screen can they defeat humans, and that too only for a certain length of the movie. Eventually, the humans win. In this framework, the animal attacks evolve into the revolt of the underdog. The act of revolt is doomed to end in defeat and death for the animal though. The human characters in the movie and the audience, sigh in relief when the animal dies, yet, there is sadness left in their hearts.

The magnificence of the monster is lost once and forever and a unique life form disappears and is extinct. This amounts to a painful outcome caused by human action. The viewers subconsciously are aware that they have wronged the idea of a good shepherd. We have come a long way believing that we are entrusted by God or Nature to look after other life forms on this planet. When the animal dies, we have thus wronged them and ourselves, because, in real life, each one of us is the underdog.

Why Hollywood Makes So Many Animal Attack Movies

America is the first world, where the lives of millions of people are no longer touched by the serene embrace of nature or even experienced in any proximity to nature. One major cost of first-world development is extreme alienation from nature and its life forms and rhythms. In a third world, in a poor country, people have to rear livestock, and they have to co-exist with stray dogs, cats, spiders, cockroaches, earthworms, flies, lizards, and mosquitoes. They cannot afford to be frightened of them. Sometimes, a goat or poultry lives under the same roof as you.

This crucial difference may explain why the Indian and Mexican movie industries do not obsess over animal attacks as Hollywood does. The fear could be coming out of alienation but it is for researchers to delve deep and prove whether this is true or not.