Summary

• Some movies feature terrifying animals with accurate details, like the patrolling behavior of sharks in The Shallows.
• The live-action Jungle Book accurately depicts the size of King Louie as an extinct ape species.
• Nope incorporates real marine animal inspiration into its alien design, creating a plausible creature.

Some movies that feature terrifying animals which are seemingly exaggerated for dramatic effect still include some surprisingly accurate details. With almost any horror or survivalist movie that focuses on characters escaping a bloodthirsty predator, experts will point out that the animals in question rarely attack humans. Theoretically, if there are no other food sources or an animal is provoked, they will attack people – but critics of such horror movies typically stress that it is not likely.

However, impressively accurate aspects about a species make their way into many genres. The team behind the Jurassic Park movies researched the dinosaurs they wanted to depict for the most scientifically accurate rendering possible (although they still get some things wrong). Other completely fictional animals are inspired by real animals, and defer to that species' habits. There are also very rare, unexplained cases where humans do have a violent experience with an animal in the wild, which are sometimes turned into movies.

7 The Shallows (2016)

The shark who "patrols" a certain area.

The Shallows stars Blake Lively as a lone surfer who ends up injured and stranded on a rock 200 yards from shore with a great white shark circling her. With the high tide coming in, she is pressed for time to find a safe way to shore. L.K. Ward interviewed (via Smithsonian Magazine) shark biologist Chris Lowe of California State University Long Beach about this movie's accuracy. When questioned about the movie shark's behavior of "stalking" the rock and the buoy where Lively takes cover, Lowe responds,

"Based on tracking data done in certain locations, we know sharks patrol certain areas waiting for seals to haul out on beaches. So I wouldn’t call it stalking; I would call it patrolling. While it’s certainly possible they stalk prey, we don’t have a lot of evidence showing how they play this “cat and mouse” game."

Lowe also emphasizes that the odds of a surfer being attacked by a shark are very unlikely – "Like winning the Powerball lottery unlikely." However, The Shallows' depiction of the shark "patrolling" a certain area is accurate, even if it wouldn't have escalated into the "contest of wills" that the movie's synopsis s.

6 The Jungle Book (2016)

King Louie is modeled after an extinct species.

The original animated Jungle Book depicts the monkey king Louie as about the same size as the human boy Mowgli. This allows for the fun musical number "I Wanna Be Like You," even though Baloo and Bagheera are trying to rescue Mowgli from Louie and the monkeys. On the other hand, the version of Louie in the live-action remake of The Jungle Book is gargantuan.

Audiences might have thought the live-action King Louie was exaggerated to make him more threatening. However, his size is accurate of an extinct ape species. In the remake, Louie is a Gigantopithecus, which went extinct around 100,000 years ago (via Entertainment Weekly).

5 Life Of Pi (2012)

The protagonist survives sharing a lifeboat with a tiger.

Life of Pi, based on the book of the same name by Yann Martel, follows the protagonist adrift at sea for more than 200 days with a Bengal tiger. Piscine "Pi" is on a voyage from India to Canada with his family on a ship that is also transporting a variety of zoo animals. The ship is caught in a storm and Pi, along with a hyena, zebra, orangutan, and tiger, make it to a lifeboat. The hyena kills the zebra and orangutan before the tiger, called Richard Parker, kills the hyena.

Pi manages to establish a relationship of respect with Richard Parker, but they both nearly starve to death before reaching land. Whether Life of Pi depicts accurate tiger behavior is debatable. Tigers, like most predators, do not eat humans. Of course, the tiger might have been driven by extreme hunger to attack Pi. Life of Pi is more noted for its accurate CGI rendering of Richard Parker than how he interacts with Pi. Life of Pi's ending is ambiguous, and leaves it up to the viewer to decide if the events shown really happened.

4 Nope (2022)

Jordan Peele's alien is inspired by several sea creatures.

The twist ending of Oscar-winning director Jordan Peele's Nope is that the so-called UFO is actually a living alien itself. After she discovered a new fish species, Peele reached out to UCLA graduate student Kelsi Rutledge for help creating an alien inspired by real sea creatures (via UCLA Newsroom).

“Jordan Peele had a vision already, inspired by some animals, but he wanted to talk to a scientist to make it plausible and real. He wanted an animal that mesmerized its prey like a cuttlefish,” Rutledge said. “There’s a lot of marine animal inspiration in the way the alien moves, especially in its unfurled form, which is very similar to a bigfin squid, which have a beautiful billowing fin on their head. The alien moves in the sky like an octopus or squid, and its saucer form is directly modeled after the sand dollar. The creature’s ability to camouflage itself as a cloud is also based on octopuses, who have special skin cells that change color to blend in with the background."

From here, Peele is able to incorporate the abilities of real marine species into his movie, which is primarily about the main group of characters trying to capture video evidence of the alien. The alien, called "Jean Jacket" in the movie, even has a scientific name: “Occulonimbus edoequus,” meaning “hidden dark cloud, stallion-eater” in Latin.

3 Finding Nemo (2003)

Bruce the shark "never knew his father."

The humorous gang of vegetarian sharks in Finding Nemo are primarily played for laughs. When Marlin mentions that he is looking for his son, the ringleader great white shark Bruce has an emotional moment and says, "I never knew my father!" This is actually accurate, since male sharks leave after mating with a female and are not around when the babies are born. So technically, Bruce would never have met his father. Although it is worth noting that shark mothers don't care for their young either. Young sharks are basically on their own once they are born.

2 Jurassic Park (1993)

Most of the details about the T-Rex are accurate.

The big threat in the original Jurassic Park trilogy is the T-Rex, which is probably the most well-known dinosaur species. ittedly, not everything in Jurassic Park is scientifically accurate. For example, the T-Rex in the movie has poor eyesight, while scientists believe that the species actually had good vision. However, a variety of other details about the Rex are correct, including its strong sense of smell and stance. Jurassic Park also avoids inaccurate pitfalls of other Hollywood dinosaurs, including their speed and how they hold their tails off the ground.

1 The Ghost And The Darkness (1996)

Two lions did attack construction workers in real life.

The Ghost and the Darkness is a fictionalized of real events that took place in Kenya, Africa in the late 19th century. The movie is based on the semi-autobiographical book by John Henry Patterson, who oversaw the construction of a bridge where two lions began routinely attacking humans. To this day, scientists are not sure why these lions behaved so strangely.

The death toll is also debated, with numbers ranging from 30 to 135 people (via MovieWeb). Strange as it is, the general summary of the lions' behavior in The Ghost and the Darkness is accurate. And moviemakers hope to derive terror from convincing their audiences that what is taking place on screen has a sense of realism.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, UCLA Newsroom, MovieWeb