The World Needs Hippo Horror

I admit I’m not Planet Earth’s foremost expert on wildlife. For one, I’m not David Attenborough, although if you give me enough whiskey, I’ll think my British accent is pretty good. For two, I don’t even live on that god-forsaken planet anymore!

​But I am a wolf, and I love horror movies, and as an aficionado of both distinctions, I feel qualified to belt from the high heavens, or in my case the deepest bowels of wolf-den hell: Please make a hippo horror movie!

Some movies have featured brilliant hippo sequences, but we need a devoted feature. 

​Why has no one done this yet? Greg McLean, where are you? Alexandre Aja, we are waiting! Many years ago, Universal had a deal with Hasbro to bring the kids’ game Hungry Hungry Hippos to life on the big screen, but that never came to fruition. Instead, we got some cool fan art imagining the concept as a Syfy original.

Let’s do a roundup of creepy creatures featured as titular terrors in countless horror movies: alligators, lions, wild boars, sharks, snakes, crocodiles, spiders, mosquitoes, piranhas, lizards, ants, bees, gorillas, wolves, etc. etc. We even have zombie dogs, monkeys, and tigers! 

But where is the hippopotamus, that herbivorous baddie with tusks the size of my cat?! Do they get excluded because they prefer the more botanical things in life? Creature features do tend to favor the meat-eating Meat-asauruses of the world. But hippos are about as dangerous, if not more so, than any of my fellow animal kingdomians.

It’s true that hippos want nothing to do with humans; to that, I can definitely relate! But every now and then, unsuspecting tourists or desensitized locals find themselves wandering into hippoland, and that’s when they learn the hard way that these two-ton titans sometimes indulge in a little meat snack.

Am I defending this behavior? Yes! 

Do I think it would work well as a horror flick? Duh!

The world is rife with real stories of people unfortunate enough to cross an angry hippo. That’s a good starting point. And with the dawn of Cocaine Bear, and the announcement of The Asylum’s Attack of the Meth Gator, humans are champing at the bit for some drug-rage, superanimal action!

Thanks to Pablo Escobar, a film called Speedball Hippo could very well be the moving tale of a group of hippos smuggled onto a Colombian drug-lord’s property. One fateful night, the hippos gorge themselves on some nose candy, break free, and begin terrorizing the locals! 

Imagine the closeups of those massive flaring nostrils. Those juggernaut jaws smacking and attacking.

​A wolf can only dream.