Speaking as a huge horror fan, I think 2026 is off to a good start. beginwith many more frightening and promising offerings on the way. But the horror movie I’m most looking forward to right now is Hungryhe hippo-themed creature feature which will be released at the end of June.
Because? Well, as astute readers will know, I have a weak point for horror films that try to have at least one foot in scientific reality. And compared to sharks, bears, or many other animals that Hollywood has made horror movies about, hippos are a much scarier danger to people in real life.
A high number of hippo deaths
To be clear, the hippopotamus (hippopotamus amphibian) is far from the deadliest animal in the world. They would be mosquitoes, thanks to the many dangerous diseases they can transmit through their bites. Malaria alone killed more than half a million people worldwide in 2024. according to the World Health Organization.
However, once disease-related animal deaths are excluded, hippos are not far behind. In their native home of Africa, they are My dear kill about 500 human beings a year. These deaths are not caused by predation, as hippos are herbivores. But these enormous beasts are incredibly territorial and are not afraid to use their powerful bites to tear apart anything they perceive as a threat to their homes, including humans.
The annual death toll for hippos is far higher than many other animals Hollywood has villainized, including the granddaddy of animal horror, the shark. There were 12 recorded shark deaths around the world last year, for example, a little above the norm. Grizzly bears, other popular horror villain, could kill two or three people a year in North America.
And there has been no shortage of horror films about animals with even lower mortality figures, such as octopuses (perhaps only three known deaths in total, all related to the highly poisonous blue ringed octopus), killer whale (although no deaths have been reported in the wild) four involved captive whales), and piranhas (very rarelyalthough they were linked to a series of four deaths in 2022). Hell, people have made movies about killer rabbits, slugsand sheep before they made one about hippos.
Greetings to the Placid Lake franchise and their deadly crocodiles, since real-life crocodiles don’t kill around 1,000 people a year.
hippo horror
Now to be fair, Hungry It’s actually not the first horror movie about hippos. That honor seems to fall to the Australian Revenge of the hippopotamus, released last December. However, judging by the complete lack of attention it received and the lackluster IMDB reviews it received from the few people who saw it, I think Hungry will catch a lot more eyeballs (the trailer released last week has already garnered millions of views on YouTube).
Like sharks and many of the other animals mentioned above, hippos have a lot to fear from people. The common hippopotamus (and its pygmy cousin) has experienced severe habitat loss and widespread poaching over the past century, and are currently classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). So don’t let the magic of any movie distract you from the reality that we are much more dangerous to these animals than they are to us.
Still, for those who want some real-life inspiration behind their horror movies, they could do a lot worse than the destructive potential of a rampaging hippo.
Hungry was written and directed by James Nunn and produced by Signature Entertainment. It will be released direct-to-video in the US and other countries on June 23.
