Speaking as a big horror fan, I think 2026 has gotten off to a good start, with plenty more promising gruesome offerings on the way. But the horror movie I’m most looking forward to right now is Hungry, the hippo-themed creature feature coming out later this June.
Why? Well, as astute readers may know, I have a soft spot for horror flicks that try to have at least one foot in scientific reality. And compared to sharks, bears, or the many other animals Hollywood has made scary movies about, hippos are a much more fearsome danger to people in real life.
A hefty hippo death toll
To be clear, the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) is far from the deadliest animal in the world. That would be mosquitos, thanks to the many dangerous diseases they can spread via their bites. Malaria alone killed over a half million people worldwide in 2024, according to the World Health Organization.
Once you exclude disease-related animal fatalities, though, hippos aren’t slouches. In their native home of Africa, they’re estimated to kill around 500 humans a year. These deaths aren’t caused by predation, since hippos are herbivores. But these huge beasts are incredibly territorial, and they’re not afraid to use their powerful bites to tear apart anything they perceive as a threat to their homes, humans very much included.
The hippo’s annual death toll is way heftier than those of many other animals Hollywood has villainized, including the granddaddy of animal horror, the shark. There were 12 recorded shark deaths worldwide last year, for instance, a bit above the norm. Grizzly bears, another popular horror villain, might kill two to three people in North America a year.
And there’s been no shortage of horror flicks made about animals with even meeker death tolls, such as octopuses (perhaps only three known deaths total, all involving the highly venomous blue-ringed octopus), orcas (zero reported deaths in the wild, though four involved captive whales), and piranhas (very rarely, though they were linked to a string of four deaths in 2022). Hell, people have made movies about killer rabbits, slugs, and sheep before they made one about hippos.
Shout-out to the Lake Placid franchise and its deadly crocodiles, though, since real-life crocs do kill around 1,000 people a year.
Hippo horror
Now to be fair, Hungry actually isn’t the first hippo horror movie. That honor seems to go to the Australian-based Hippo’s Revenge, released last December. Judging by the complete lack of attention it received and the middling IMDB reviews it’s gotten from the few people who watched it, though, I think Hungry will catch a lot more eyeballs (the trailer for it released last week has already garnered millions of YouTube views).
Just as with sharks and many of the other animals mentioned above, hippos have lots to fear from people. The common hippo (and its pygmy cousin) has experienced severe habitat loss and widespread poaching over the past century, and they’re currently classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). So don’t let any movie magic distract you from the reality that we’re much more dangerous to these animals than they are to us.
Still, for those wanting some real-life inspiration behind their horror movies, you could do a lot worse than the destructive potential of a rampaging hippo.
Hungry was written and directed by James Nunn and is being produced by Signature Entertainment. It will be released direct-to-video in the U.S. and other countries on June 23.
