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[[File:killers_pics_1594.jpg|frame|Everything is deadly in fiction![1]
Stephen King: Now for my 307th book, a couple... uh... is attacked... by a giant... uh... (looks at a desk) lamp monster! Oooooooo! |
ALL ANIMALS V. ALL HUMANS. I trust you feel the immediate, primal clutch of this concept on your heart, and I can promise you that the duckbilled platypus scene alone will be worth the price of admission.
—John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise
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If you can think of something, there's probably a B-grade horror movie about it trying to kill a bunch of people. You name it. Snowmen, ice cream men, Santa Claus, dentists, clowns, dolls, trucks, boats, lifts, chairs, computers, video games, clocks, toilets, vacuum cleaners, laundry machines (three of these, actually), condoms, rabbits, rats, robots, birds, bees, ticks, sharks, barracudas, flying fish, eggs, tomatoes (four-movie series with a remake in the works), pieces of dry toast, leprechauns, triffids...
At the very least, if there's not a horror movie based around it, there's surely a horror short story or episode of an anthology horror series about it.
A caveat: if it's a killer animal, there's about a 70% chance that it'll also be giant. If it grows too large, it becomes Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever.
Often, the titles of such films will be quite self explanatory.
Compare Everything Trying to Kill You. Depending on the object/animal, can overlap with Nightmare Fuel or Paranoia Fuel. Depending on the execution, can overlap with Narm instead. Also can overlap with Our Monsters Are Weird if the object is esoteric enough.
Comic Books[]
- Hack Slash: parasitic twin foetuses and cartoon chipmunks bring in some variety from the normal slashers and serial killers—who are all pretty darn weird in of themselves.
- There was also the story about the high-tech snowblower that "ate" pets.
Film[]
- To get it out of the way, let's just say that a lot of these movies are either produced by or eventually air on the Sci Fi Channel.
- As mentioned in Literature below, Maximum Overdrive! Practically every mechanical object known to man turns on their creators after earth passes through the tail of a mysterious comet...or was it the flying saucer that the military shot down in the epilogue? Apparently the test screen of a scene of a boy getting ran over by a steamroller actually made George Romero throw up.
- The Leprechaun horror movie franchise, Lucky Charms commercials Gone Horribly Wrong.
- The infamous Jack Frost 1997 movies (not the one with Michael Keaton), about a snowman whose snow is infused with the DNA of a murderer. Includes a scene where the titular snowman rapes and kills a woman in the shower with his carrot.
- That woman? Shannon Elizabeth. And now you know... the rest of the back-story. Good day!
- Stay Alive is just one of many movies about killer videogames. One wonders how such a game gets out of beta testing...
- Strictly speaking, that one didn't until the very stupid ending anyway.
- Killer Klowns From Outer Space—try saying the title with a straight face. This one was deliberately stupid, however.
- In the Japanese Mind Screw horror movie Hausu everything from a piano to pillows to a lampshade, to the titular House, all because the Auntie eats young female virgins to keep herself young while she waits for her boyfriend to come home from WWII. The little problem? He died in the war. She received the news but didn't believe it. Oh, and she's also dead.
- Probably the quintessential "killer toy" movie is Childs Play, which earned four sequels.
- The Gingerdead Man involves a serial killer coming back as a homicidal animated cookie.
- However, the killer in question is Gary Busey, so the monster is less terrifying than the person.
- Somewhere in the region of 50% of Full Moon productions; they're most famous for milking the Puppet Master series (killer puppets) for all it's worth.
- Classically bad horror movie The Car is almost impossible to be horrified by, simply because the writing constantly reminds you how stupid the premise is. It reaches its logical extreme when the protagonist tells his wife, "Lock the kids in their rooms... the car is in the garage."
- Which is a shame, because the actual car was a custom-designed genuinely evil-looking thing that deserved a better movie to appear in.
- A better example would be Christine, wherein it's actually scary.
- Another example (although not so good as Christine) is The Cars That Ate Paris, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Don't get excited about seeing the death of the Eiffel Tower, though, as the titular 'Paris' is in Queensland, Australia. Particularly enjoyable is the fact that the cars seemed to magically grow spikes, and that the lead car was a creamy-coloured VW Beetle. All it needed was the stripes and the number on the hood and we have Evil Herbie.
- The Burgess Meredith film Torture Garden featured a sequence about a killer piano.
- The 1977 film Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was about... guess what? A killer bed.
- Patton Oswalt has a very profane, very funny routine about this movie in which he threatens to write and produce a movie called Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes People.
- The Killer Shrews—Which looks even sillier than it sounds, since it's so obvious that the 'shrews' are actually Collie dogs in bad makeup.
- 1977 saw Kingdom of the Spiders, with William Shatner fighting billions of homicidal poisonous but normal-sized tarantulas. Normally, they are giant when they do such things.
- Given some of the other examples on this page, the 1978 horror movie spoof Attack of the Killer Tomatoes seems almost sensible in comparison.
- ATTAAAACK OF THE KILLER TO-MAY-TOES!
- Dumber (and far more awesome) than advertised. But George Clooney was in the sequel.
- Black Sheep, a horror movie about killer ... wait for it ... sheep. Though this one is a Horror/Comedy.
- Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is an early example.
- Resident Evil Extinction has flocks of killer zombie crows! We'd call it a "Take That" but its more akin to the film Laserblast taking it's potshot at Star Wars: picking on someone WAY out of their weight class.
- Lennigen versus the Ants is arguably a part of this genre.
- Killer Condom - And the condoms were designed by H. R. Giger, creator of the Alien. Confused yet?
- Japanese film Battle Heater is about the rampage of a small electric space heater.
- Snakes on a Plane could arguably follow this trope.
- Frogs (kinda stupid since most of the victims meet their demise from animals other than frogs - turtles, lizards, snakes, spiders, alligators, birds, crabs and even butterflies!)
- Slugs
- Squirm, with its masses of biting worms.
- The Brain—about a giant killer brain. Really.
- The Ring. Killer videotapes! (Okay, it's a ghost USING a videotape, but...)
- Videodrome did it first. Snuff television gives you tumours!
- The killer roach flick from the '80s called The Nest.
- Similarly, Damnation Alley features killer cockroaches in one scene.
- As does Creepshow, which did it really well.
- A killer electromagnetic pulse causes appliances in a suburban neighborhood house to go all homicidal in the film called Pulse (a film from the 80's)
- The creep factor on Pulse was way up, especially due to the shower scene, because none of the appliances seemed to really be doing anything unexpected. It's actually quite plausible that your sink wouldn't stop running, or your water heater would get broken and the temperature would rise to scalding, or the washing machine/TV could give you a fatal shock.
- Attack of the Killer Refrigerator and, in a similar vein, a film titled simply The Refrigerator. Its so corny, its So Bad It's Good, its the fridge from hell's logic!
- The Mangler (published in the collection Night Shift), a killer laundry machine.
- Monsturd, followed by its sequel RetarDEAD.
- There is apparently a movie about a book that when anybody read it they vanished into the book and it added a new story or chapter. A title would be nice.
- Monster House. I mean, it's right there in the title.
- The film The Lift is centered around a killer elevator.
- "For God's sake, take the stairs!!!"
- How hard is it to avoid getting in an elevator?
- The Rats (2002). A clan of evil rats overtakes a Manhattan department store and threatens to overrun the city. Proof that B-movies are not restricted to the 1950s.
- There was a similar film called Deadly Eyes back in the '80s.
- And, of course, there's Willard and its sequel Ben, both about killer rats.
- Ticks, horror movie where cat-sized ticks in a forest jump on people and cause Body Horror.
- A short parody of Night of the Living Dead called... Night of the Living Bread.
- Fishes. Sharks, yes, it goes without saying. For attacks of man-eating piranhas see the movie Piranha. Even flying fish can be turned into killers, eagerly propelling themselves out of the water and flying toward party-goers at a beach party to... bite their necks?
- But for normal sea-life transformed into vicious carnivorous killers, look no further than the Italian C-movie Plankton (1994) (a.k.a. Creatures from the Abyss, a.k.a. Sea Devils), where feeding on plankton poisoned by toxic waste has mutated fishes so that they can jump out of the water and eat sailors and a bunch of dumb tweens on a yacht. Nom, nom, nom.
- Razorback is a 1984 film about a large man-eating feral pig rampaging through the Australian Outback.
- The natural insanity of humankind is perhaps exemplified by the fact that there is actually more than one movie about psychotic ice cream men. Something Awful reviews two of them. Both are somehow even more idiotic than they needed to be.
- One-Eyed Monster is a film about a killer penis. I wish I was making this up.
- Someone has to do a double bill with this and Killer Condom...
- Or Teeth
- Do I sense a Crossover Crack Pairing?
- Killdozer. Yes, an evil killer bulldozer. Sounds like the perfect date for Christine. It gets its evil via alien-life from another galaxy sadly its poster was more fearful then its movie.
- The original story was one of Theodore Sturgeon's best. Talk about adaptation decay.
- The Shaft: Another killer elevator.
- I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle. A shape-shifting, murderous motorcycle terrorizes Bob the Builder in Birmingham in this 1990 B-movie. Not quite Exactly What It Says on the Tin in that the titular motorbike is actually a demon-possessed Norton Commando, but still awesome.
- Best line (as they stand round its dead remains) What sort of bike was it? Norton Commando. Funny they're usually so reliable
- Lightning Strikes: The Sci Fi Channel presents killer lightning.
- ...as opposed to the regular, non-killing type of lightning, I suppose?
- Other lightning goes up to 1.21 jiggerwatts. Ours goes up to 1.22. It's one more.
- ...as opposed to the regular, non-killing type of lightning, I suppose?
- Orca - Our adorable Shamu turned vengeful and bloodthirsty.
- 1977's Day of the Animals - Probably the KING of this trope! There are wolves, dogs, rats, snakes, hawks, owls, mountain lions, and bears! Oh my!
- Attack of the Sabertooth Oh no! A crazy saber-toothed cat is running amok in the forest! Even more oh no! They somehow convinced John Rhys-Davies to do this movie!
- Frog-g-g! - also about frogs, but played humorously with a mutated frog having sex with female humans.
- Mae bia - Thai film about a family attacked by a deadly cobra.
- Mammoth - A meteor, bearing an alien (of course), crash lands on a museum and resurrects the bones of a Mammoth. It rampages around and kills people by stepping on them. Beware his soul-sucking trunk of doom!
- They made a Dwarf Fortress movie?!
- Killer Kitties:
- Strays (1991)
- The Uncanny (1977)
- Black Cat (1981)
- Eye of the Cat (1969)
- Uninvited (1987). It's about a mutant cat that hides inside another cat and it is played by a handpuppet.
- The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972)
- The Red Shoes - South Korean horror movie about evil, possessed high heel shoes. See here. Possibly related to the fairytale of the same name.
- The Wig. When it comes to horror, there really is no limit on what the subject could be.
- Hair Extensions
- Cello
- The Giant Claw. Earth is attacked by a Giant Antimatter Space Buzzard.
- The Mad: Both Attack of the Killer Beef Patties and zombies (the people who ate said patties when they were made into hamburgers)! It's a horror comedy.
- Jumanji was a movie about both a killer boardgame and a killer jungle where everything's trying to kill you.
- Jumanji got a semi-sequel of its own, Zathura, which recycled the killer boardgame theme IN SPACE!
- The Food of the Gods and its sequel. The first included giant wasps and rats attacking people on an island. The second featured giant rodents as well only they ran wild in a city, attacking everything they could find.
- Quentin Dupieux's Rubber: A film about an angry car tire (no really) with deadly psychokinetic powers, rolling down the desert exploding the heads of anyone it doesn't like.
- Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead: Played for all the squick, potty humor, gorn, and black comedy it's worth.
- Night of the Lepus. It's a movie about GIANT KILLER RABBITS. And they're adorable real bunnies jumping around in little sets, and then closed-up for maximum dramatic effect. You've never witnessed terror until you see a furball gnawing ketchup.
- Road Train (Road Kill outside Australia) A movie about a spirit/demon possessed road train roaming the Australian Outback and demanding blood for fuel.
- The Japanese horror film Premonition (unrelated to the Sandra Bullock-starring psychological drama of the same name) is about a killer newspaper. The newspaper predicts peoples' deaths before they happen by way of the obituary section. The trailer alone was so disturbing that a mother wrote in to a local, uh, newspaper, complaining that the trailer should not have been screened on jumbotrons in the middle of crowded streets. She was probably very right.
- Played for Laughs in the independent short film Night of the Living Bread.
- Topless Robot had a list about ridiculous monsters called "Ten Creatures That Have No Business Starring in Horror Flicks", this included infected fetus cows from 2005's Isolation, the bloodthirsty sheep from the horror comedy Black Sheep, radiated deep sea worms from Deep Rising, goblin sharks from Malibu Shark Attack, giant shrews in 1959's The Killer Shrews, badly CG animated beetles from Caved In: Prehistoric Terror, a giant Slurpasaur style gila monster from Exactly What It Says on the Tin The Giant Gila Monster, and humongous grasshoppers from The Beginning of The End.
- The Mailman ("Pray you're not on his route!")
- The later Amityville Horror sequels featured such things as evil lamps, mirrors, and dollhouses.
- The Carpenter.
- The demonic turkey from Thankskilling.
- The 1989 horror-comedy Blades involves killings at a country club that turn out to be caused by a killer lawnmower.
- The Nun
- The Paper Boy ("He's bad news!") Surprisingly unrelated to the aforementioned film The Mailman.
- And now there's Rosewood Lane, another evil paper boy flick.
- The giant snail creatures from The Monster That Challenged The World.
- Rectuma. It's about a giant ass, and we don't mean a donkey (though that would also be strange).
- The Garbage Man.
- There's actually three slasher films about evil baseball players - The Catcher, Billy Club and Devon's Ghost: Legend of the Bloody Boy.
- Attack of the Killer Donuts is about mutated donuts that grow teeth and can bounce around(complete with cartoon bouncing sound effects).
- The killer shark idea has been overused so many times in b-movies that they started to use the most ridiculous ideas for the monster such as Doll Shark, House Shark, Shark Exorcist, Bad CGI Sharks(Yeah, this is an actual B-movie). There’s been so many that I’m surprise we haven’t gotten one about sharks with “freaking laser beams attached to their heads”.
Literature[]
- Some of the grimoires turn people into other tomes (thus killing them) in Pratchett's Discworld.
- There's a short story in one of the Alfred Hitchcock story collections that uses that plot.
- Terry Pratchett also used a swarm of "killer" rats, with the rat-king in The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. The titular rodents themselves (as well as Maurice, a talking cat) are all good guys, though.
- The Day of the Triffids. In the film version, the only thing that gives the immobile killer plants a fighting chance is the fact that the meteor shower on which they arrive also blinds nearly everyone on Earth. In the original novel, it's a bit more sensical, as they were, when fully-grown, just barely mobile... and the focus wasn't on them, but on the reaction of the survivors to the apocalypse to which the plants contributed, and the humans' attempts to cope. Not to mention that they didn't invade—people were farming them for their commercially-useful oil, then the strange blindness-causing meteor shower eliminates the ability to keep them from being a danger, and they started rampaging. It's still a good movie, though.
- It isn't the only Attack of the Killer Whatever that John Wyndham wrote, either: Web, the inspiration for/prequel to the Arachnophobia movie(s) involves an island full of mutated spiders that are: a) more poisonous; b) have fangs/mandibles that are stronger and sharper than normal; c) more intelligent and d) have a rabidly cannibalistic, yet simultaneously highly co-operative society that apparently crosses species barriers. Oh, and some of them are as big as dogs. This troper wasn't particularly bothered by spiders before then, and it has taken many years to get even close to his pre-Web state.
- H.P. Lovecraft's The Cats of Ulthar had a similar premise. Although it was pretty cool.
- And it was part of a Karmic Death, so it was all good.
- Stephen King seems to be the master of this:
- The short story "Trucks" in which evil trucks conquer the earth. Later turned into the film Maximum Overdrive.
- Christine, the infamous story of a homicidal (and rather possessive) car.
- And From a Buick 8, which is about another evil car. Only this one isn't so much possessed as it is... wrong.
- The Mangler, which was spun off into a trilogy of movie adaptations - that's right, three movies about a killer laundry press. It's immobile, too, so it comes down to people being stupid enough not to learn to keep from walking up to the damn thing. Although the original short story implies the thing does become mobile, in a Twist Ending.
- In various Stephen King short stories, he has had people attacked by novelty chattering teeth, paintings, a toy monkey, evil toads... Basically, if it can be seen as even vaguely creepy by anybody in the Western world, chances are it's killed somebody in a Stephen King story.
- In John Byrne's Fearbook, a catalogue that arrives in the mail convinces people to kill others or themselves.
- There is actually a book called Attack of the Killer Potatoes, according to the Other Wiki. The tomatoes should sue.
- The political satire The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon. The rabbits are infected with a highly-toxic (to humans) strain of myxomatosis. Rather than trying to wipe them out however, the Australian government is more than happy to possess the most feared biological weapon in the world. Inspired the movie Night of the Lepus.
- A mediocre local writer here in Singapore wrote a short story about killer hamburgers. Pissed at the protagonist because he switched his favorite food from burgers to fried chicken. At the end of the story, they Mind Control him in an unspecified manner in a form of And Then John Was a Zombie.
- They're mad at him for not eating them?
- Goosebumps books had dummies, lawn gnomes, egg monsters, and snowmen.
- The American Chillers books had vacuums, living tractors, ninjas, iguanas, nuclear jellyfish, a giant robot shaped like a hamburger, and much more.
Live Action TV[]
- Both Are You Afraid of the Dark?? and Goosebumps had suspiciously similar stories about killer cameras, and even got the same actor to play the same role in both adaptations.
- Both were more than likely inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone.
- Specifically, "A Most Unusual Camera".
- The Twilight Zone had a guy killed by an evil slot machine.
- Both were more than likely inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone.
- An animated sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus introduces the Killer Cars, which hide behind poles and jump on unsuspecting pedestrians. The cars are defeated "thanks to the miracle of atomic mutation" by an enormous bipedal cat, which displaces them as the town's reigning terror. This monster is then defeated by a giant hand. Animator Terry Gilliam intended this sequence to be a parody of 1950s monster movies.
- Another of the show's animations has a house roaming about the countryside, gobbling people up through its doors, until it is found by "The House Hunters" ("These are house droppings... fresh ones, too!") who slap a Condemned notice on it, causing it to collapse.
- A sketch in another episode revolved around killer sheep.
- And the Science Fiction sketch has a killer blancmange from Outer Space, which turns people into Scotsmen.
- And let's not forget the vicious gangs of "Keep Left" signs.
- And then of course there's the killer rabbit from The Movie (which rips peoples necks out, causing their heads to simply fall off).
- The Doctor Who episode "Rose" has Mickey attacked by a man-eating wheelie bin. "The Christmas Invasion" has the protagonists come under threat from a Christmas tree.
- And then there are the attack of the killer statues and attack of the killer shadows.
- Not to mention attack of the killer dress-shop mannequins.
- The 1971 episode "Terror of the Autons" has killer inflatable chairs and killer plastic daffodils.
- Killer plants (The Seeds of Doom), seaweed (Fury From the Deep), ventriloquist's dummy (The Talons of Weng-Chiang), Egyptian mummies (Pyramids of Mars).
- Monster Warriors had to deal - among other things - with a giant carnivorous butterfly that hypnotised people with its beauty, a living and very hungry blob, living radioactive junk (not that kind), giant (again) cockroaches, predatory vines, an army of giant (but of course) frogs... Well, what do you expect from the show with a deranged and Brainwashed By Aliens ex-B-Movie director as a villain, anyway?
- The spoof horror show Garth Marenghi's Darkplace has a telekinetic attack by various implements, including an attack by a whisk. A later episode has an attack by a killer set of bagpipes.
- An episode of the early 90s American horror show called Monsters had an artist who owned a killer bed that ate his dates when he took them home, until he met a girl who had a killer fridge in her apartment, which then ate him. Played completely straight.
- There's a parody of Night of the Living Dead with the name "Night of the Living Bread"—it's an episode of a Claymation TV series called Bump in the Night has the two main characters going up against a mutated, ambulatory, semi-carnivorous slice of bread, which they finally beat by flinging peanut butter at it while it's standing on the edge of a cupboard so it falls onto the floor and sticks.
- Power Rangers has some truly bizarre monsters at times - it comes with having to do a new one every episode over years and years and years. Killer rhinos and robots? Standard fare. But go long enough and you get killer spray bottles, killer buses ("Everyone who's ever stuck gum under one of my seats is going to PAY for it now!!") killer lawnmowers, killer radios (several!), killer chickens, killer lanterns, walls, roulette wheels, baseball players, bowlers, fleas, hats, fire trucks, pumpkins (rapping pumpkins!)... there's nothing that hasn't battled a Megazord in the middle of town yet! With the possible exception of tomatoes.
- Super Sentai has just as bizarre monsters as well, some of which that weren’t adapted for Power Rangers, especially ones from pre-Zyuranger seasons. Examples from pre-Zyuranger include a windmill monster, a baseball monster, a hamburger monster, an egg monster, a noodle cup monster, and a tomato monster. Examples of unadapted monsters include a bucket monster, a lamp monster, a wig monster, a penguin monster, an alpaca monster, a hippo monster, a glue monster, a sushi monster, and a dung beetle monster.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a killer puppet except he was a good guy, a cursed demon hunter (The Puppet Show) and killer eggs (Bad Eggs). The spin-off show Angel also had killer puppets (Smile Time)
- Other shows in Tokusatsu had the heroes fight against monsters with bizarre concepts:
- Choujin Barom-1 had monsters that were body parts, one of them being literally a giant human hand with legs underneath.
- Inazuman had a bubonic plague monster and a mold monster while it’s follow-up show, Inazuman Flash had a hammer monster, a scissors monster, and a guillotine monster.
- Choujin Bibyun had monsters based off of a Yokai while others were original creations. This include a chair monster, a magic pot monster, a purse monster, a paintbrush monster, and a tongue monster.
- Kyodain and Robot Detective faced against robots with bizarre concepts. Kyodain faced against a bazooka robot and a literal walking cannon robot. Robot Detective had a chair robot, a locker robot, and a spring robot.
- Symbol of Justice Condorman had a pig monster, a cockroach monster, a coin monster, and a garbage monster.
Music[]
- Tom Smith's "Fenton: Death Sheep From Hell"
- "Return of the Giant Hogweed" by Genesis.
Newspaper Comics[]
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons! (see the page pic)
- Calvin's bike is also out to get him.
Tabletop Games[]
- Dungeons and Dragons gets a lot of mileage from this:
- There is an adventure that has a "library that turns patrons into books" plot. This plot also shows up in JAGS Wonderland.
- Cats crop up again in 3rd Edition housecats, which can, it has been famously point out, kill 1st level commoners.
- Heck, in D&D, sometimes the floor and or ceiling wants you dead. Also, living cubes of Jell-O. And housecats.
- Killer rats showed up as a sentient rat hive-mind called the Us.
- One module had you attacked by a Gazebo, obviously from someone fed up of people attacking one without realising what it is.
Video Games[]
- Nanashi no Game is about a killer 8-bit RPG.
- Revenge of the Beefsteak Tomatoes
- Overlord: Raising Hell has Killer Pumpkins.
- The VGA remake of Quest for Glory II has the Pizza Elemental as a Bonus Boss, a giant killer pizza.
- A number of enemies in Earthbound could qualify for this trope: Killer hippies, road signs, fire hydrants, paintings, cars, cups of coffee, goats, Salvador Dali clocks....
- It says something about the game that Insane Cultists are some of the more reasonable enemies therein.
- Additionally, in the game's prequel MOTHER 1, the first enemy you face is a possessed lamp.
- Mother 3 as well, though it emphasizes chimera animals more, has a number of inanimate objects, like rocks and trees that can attack.
- The Final Fantasy series tends towards this in most games, with monsters ranging from squirrels to bunnies to cacti to tablewares to children's toys to doors and walls. In one game, the Big Bad was a tree.
- One of the early encounters in Final Fantasy VII was a killer playhouse that fired miniature nukes at your party.
- Final Fantasy XII has killer savepoints.
- Chrono Trigger did it first.
- Invoked in The Curse of Monkey Island with the horror novel-loving gravedigger Mort, who is apparently writing his own horror story...titled "The Grog that Drank People".
- In Dwarf Fortress, carp is the deadliest animal ever found in water. Yeah, carp.
Tarn Adams: "I think I made the fish too hardcore". |
- The Dragon Quest series has this in spades, with everything from platypi to skewered bell peppers to pots and books.
- Tonic Trouble has killer vegetables, who even have their own headquarters.
- An advertised but not released game for the ZX Spectrum was going to be called Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh-Eating Chickens from Mars.
- Kingdom of Loathing is jam-packed with this; you can fight killer cans of tomatoes, blobs of burnt meat, and murderous macaroni, all in the same place. Elsewhere, not only are there homicidal desks, there are several different kinds of them. Deadly pinatas, calculators, wallpaper, constellations, hedges, snowmen...the list goes on.
- Apple Panic, a Space Panic clone by Broderbund Software, had apples trying to kill you.
Webcomics[]
- The Sluggy Freelance horror spoofs "KITTEN" and "KITTEN II" feature the main characters being attack by, you guessed it, kittens. Tiny, cute, fuzzy, satanically-spawned kittens who eviscerate people if they don't get their milk.
- Parodied by a Full Frontal Nerdity storyline featuring a Stephen King RPG. The monster is an extradimensional radio that kills by drinking blood. It has to be killed through the use of Achy Breaky Heart.
Western Animation[]
- The Danny Phantom episode title, "Attack of the Killer Garage Sale". It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Technus uses machinery from Danny's garage sale to wreck havoc.
- In the Ace Ventura animated series, the folks of a small town in the forest are attacked by a were-moose.
- Jumanji has the title boardgame and a boardgame inside the boardgame called "Brantford: The Game" (which evokes another trope; Fill-in-the-blanks: The something), so you get a killer board game, a killer jungle, a killer city and a list of killer things in everything is trying to kill you.
- Bill Plympton did a short called Shuteye Hotel, which was about a killer pillow that bites off the head of anyone who sleeps on it.
- Kim Possible had an episode with evil snowmen animated by water from a toxic lake.
- Don't forget the monkey ninjas, spliced animals made after a popular brand of mixed animal Cuddle-buddies, and Draken's girlfriend robots.
- The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XI had killer dolphins. Lenny was certainly surprised.
Lenny: [surrounded by fins] Sharks! The assassins of the sea! [the dolphins stick their heads out of the water] Oooh. You're not sharks. You're dolphins. The clowns of the sea. |
- Not just killer dolphins, in other Halloween Simpsons also had the family dealing with killer cartoon characters (Itchy and Scratchy), a killer Crusty clown doll, a killer "evil" twin, killer giant advertising statues (Lard Lad comes to mind), killer cannibalistic teachers, killer bus gremlins, two killer houses (a supernatural one from I, and a robot house in XII), killer Homer clones, three cases of zombies (killer corpses of long-dead outlaws, zombies summoned by magic, and living humans turning into zombies from tainted hamburgers), killer blob (who happens to be a mutated Homer), killer golem, killer Transformer parodies, killer Pumpkin monsters, killer ghost celebrities, killer Jumanji parody, and a few alien invasions.
- A killer house appears in the same vein as Monster House in an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters entitled "Home is Where the Horror Is". Before that The Real Ghostbusters did it with "Mrs Faversham's Neighborhood".
- Parodied in Rocko's Modern Life with a fake B-movie called "The Do" (about a killer hairdo).
- Played for laughs in the Regular Show episode "Ello Gov'nor", where Rigby and Mordecai watch an old movie entitled Ello Gov'nor, about a killer British taxi. No, really.
- It even gives Rigby nightmares, to boot!
- ATTAAAAAAAAAACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES!!! No, really, they actually did make a cartoon series of it.
- An episode of American Dad! had a homicidial hot tub voiced by Cee Lo Green.
- Phineas and Ferb has "Attack of The Fifty Foot Sister", which is really a parody of this trope. They do get attacked by sentient potato-human hybrids in one episode, though.
- Code Lyoko: since XANA's main abilitie rely on taking control of various things on Earth in order to attack the Lyoko-Warriors, it frequently made use of this trope: killer trees, a giant food monster, a giant teddy bear, laughing gas, an Alien-like prop, killer music, gas that petrifies people for some reason, a wild boar, electrified black sludge, an airplane (to be fair, the airplane was going to be used as a guided missle), small robot dogs, spheres that look like they came from Phantasm, a virus that spreads via cellphones...
- ↑ images Clockwise from top left: Calvin and Hobbes, Attack of the Killer Refrigerator, an issue of Man's Conquest, The Cars That Ate People (US title)]]