Grizzly violence: 20 of the deadliest bears in movies

Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear is a fascinating and funny mix of horror and comedy. Based very loosely on a true story, as its title suggests, it follows several people, including a mother, her daughter, and a drug dealer, who are on the trail of a murderous bear driven mad after ingesting a massive amount of cocaine. Its ridiculous premise aside, Cocaine Bear does have some impressive CGI, and the bear is, at times, genuinely terrifying as it devours those who happen to cross its path. As with any good creature feature, it’s hard not to cheer the bear on, and several human figures seem to earn their grisly fate. 

The killer bear makes a recurring appearance in survival movies, serving in many instances as a representative of how nature cannot be tamed and remains in opposition to the forces of civilization. In The Edge, the beast involved is a Kodiak bear that terrorizes a group of men struggling to survive after their plane crashes. Unlike many recent movies where bears are created using special effects, this one stars none other than Bart the bear, one of Hollywood’s most notable ursine stars. Combined with the film’s tautly woven script, this gives the creature a potent menace as he stalks his human victims through the wilderness. 

Annihilation is one of the most disturbing and thought-provoking science fiction films to have emerged in recent years. A group of scientists goes into a mysterious anomaly known as the Shimmer, only to find that it creates out-of-control mutations in DNA. At one point, they encounter a bear who has mutated into a monstrosity from a nightmare, complete with one of their companions’ dying screams. It is a deadly creature — as it makes clear when it swiftly kills a team member by tearing off her draw — but it’s also clear that it is just as much a victim as anything else in the Shimmer, making its appearance all that much more terrifying. 

In Grizzly Man, acclaimed documentarian Werner Herzog turns his attention to Timothy Treadwell, a troubled young man whose commitment to the brown bears of Alaska turned deadly when he was eaten by one of them. Herzog’s film constantly reminds the viewer of the perilous fact that as adorable as they are, bears are still wild animals at heart, and, like so many other things in nature, they can very easily turn deadly. The fact that Treadwell might have actually caught the bear that killed him on camera makes his ultimate fate, and the bear itself, even more unsettling.  

Leonardo DiCaprio received much-deserved praise for his role in The Revenant, in which he plays a man savagely mauled by a bear but survives and decides to seek vengeance on those who left him for dead. The bear attack is one of the most viscerally terrifying scenes in the entire film, and it’s nothing less than a miracle that DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass manages to survive. Though the bear is acting only out of instinct — to protect its cubs — the entire sequence is a reminder that much in nature remains beyond the human ability to make sense of it or to withstand its violence.

It’s easy to see how Grizzly is very much cut from the same cloth as Jaws. As its title suggests, it focuses on a murderous grizzly bear that decides that it wants to eat humans instead of its natural prey. It has all of the features one expects of a schlocky horror film of the 1970s, with lots of gore and a high body count. The fact that a real bear portrayed the bear itself — and quite a large one at that — does grant the film a bit more verisimilitude than other films of its type, and the bear itself is a reminder of frightening these creatures can be. 

Even though Winnie-the-Pooh is most associated with the lovable interpretation created by Disney, the character’s recent entry into the public domain has predictably resulted in Blood and Honey, in which a starved and deranged Pooh has become a murderous monster. What makes this iteration of the character so terrifying is that the film doesn’t even try to make him look realistic or anything like his predecessors. He looks like nothing more than a man in a Pooh mask but, because this makes him look devoid of emotion, a far cry from his more anodyne forebears. 

What Unnatural lacks in a unique title, it more than makes up for in commitment to its schlocky premise, focusing unsurprisingly on a polar bear that has developed a taste for humans. In this case, it does so as a result of the genetic experiments that have been conducted on it. In that sense, the bear is more than just a rather fake-looking movie monster. It is also, beneath all of the hype, a reminder of just how cruel humans have been to those with whom they share the world and how easy it would be for the natural world to strike back.

Whatever its failings as a film, Into the Grizzly Maze has at least one thing going for it: the titular bear. On the surface, the film seems to be about the age-old issues of masculinity and man vs. nature, but in reality, it’s about the pleasure of watching inane characters devoured by the beast of the title. As is so often the case with movies of this sort, the bear ends up being the most interesting character, even though it has developed a taste for human flesh. There is, indeed, something innately charismatic about the bear in question, portrayed by the late, great Bart the Bear 2.

Though most of the movies’ most notable killer bears are usually Kodiaks or grizzlies, in Backcountry, the terrifying beast is a black bear. The hungry bear decides to go after a pair of lost hikers and manages to savagely maul one of them to death. The power of Backcountry lies in its ability to take the well-worn formula of the survival film and make the most of it. Its tightly-woven story manages to make the bear into a looming threat, something that can literally devour the protagonists at any moment. The ravenous black bear returns the repressed darkness of violent nature. 

Given its enormous size and undeniable skills as a hunter, the grizzly bear, in particular, has earned a privileged place in humanity’s collective fears about bears. In Grizzly Rage, a group of teenagers accidentally run over a grizzly bear cub, setting a terrifying and deadly chain of events in motion once its mother starts hunting them in revenge. Like many other such creatures, the bear in question is silly and terrifying, made all the more so by the fact that its murderous rampage is quite justified when looked at in a certain light. It’s a serviceable entry in the “nature bites back” sort of horror film.

Though Grizzly Park, in fine creature feature tradition, is, for the most part, unabashedly silly, it has an interesting premise in that a park ranger has trained a bear to slaughter a group of miscreants. The bear in question is portrayed by Brody the Bear, one of a number of trained bear actors who periodically emerge in Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, it’s very easy for the viewer to start cheering for the bear, as the criminals in the film are increasingly unlikable. Given their incompetence and unwillingness to change their behavior, it’s not surprising to see them turned into bear fodder. 

The bluntly titled Bear is similar to almost every killer-bear movie in many respects. It focuses on a group of people terrorized by a bear after their car breaks down. However, it has to be said that they bring much of the violence on themselves since one of their numbers kills a grizzly bear, engendering the revenge of its mate. The bear is undeniably terrifying, mostly because it is implacably set on destroying its human prey and because, in one of the film’s gestures to originality, it proposes that the bear might be the reincarnated spirit of a shaman. A bear with actual human consciousness is truly frightening. 

Given the rising awareness of humanity’s impact on the environment, it’s not surprising to see many 1970s films deal with exactly this issue. In Prophecy, the plot revolves around a sinister bear who has been mutated by a local paper mill. To the surprise of no one, it begins to go on a murderous rampage (it also manages to give birth to at least one surviving cub, similarly mutated). The creature might not be the best that effects can offer, but there is, nevertheless, something tragic and terrifying about the idea of a wild animal turned into something so tortured through no fault of its own. Small wonder that it begins to destroy the humans responsible for its agony.

In the imagination of many bear-oriented horror movies, it seems that humans are their own enemies more than the bears are. This can be seen in films like Claws, in which a bear starts stalking a group of hunters who went out of their way to injure it but didn’t do the decent thing and actually kill it. The beast is prolific even by the standards of killer beasts, leaving quite a trail of bodies in its wake. As scary as the creature might be, it’s impossible not to admire its proficiency in dispatching those who happen to get in its way.

The most notable creature in The Hobbit might be the mighty dragon Smaug, but a close second is the man/bear known as Beorn. Known for his ability to shapeshift into a bear, Beorn is without a doubt one of the most formidable warriors in Middle-earth. Like many other beings in Middle-earth, his abilities are laden with significance, and Beorn (and his descendants) seem to occupy a liminal space between man and animal. Fortunately for Thorin and Bilbo, and the rest of their company, his dislike of dwarves is more than exceeded by his loathing of Orcs, which makes him a valuable ally during the Battle of the Five Armies. 

For fans of schlocky and sometimes ridiculous horror movies, the 1970s was a golden age. One of the more outlandish productions of the era was the aptly-titled Day of the Animals, which revolves around a group of animals who go into a state of murderous psychosis as a result of a hole in the ozone layer. Of course, one of the said animals is a giant bear who engages in a wrestling match with a hiker (played by Leslie Nielsen, of all people), who subsequently dies and is devoured. Just as films like The Birds and Jaws use collective animal rampage to articulate social unease, Day of the Animals uses its murderous beasts to remind humanity of its vulnerable place in the cosmos.  

Grizzly 2 is undoubtedly a bit of a mess, even for a sequel. Nevertheless, it still is another notable iteration of the killer bear trope. The plot is fairly simple, with a story about a grizzly that starts to devour humans in revenge after a hunter kills her cub. Though the human characters ultimately defeat the bear, the film makes it very clear that she is far more of a hero than any of the human characters, who, almost without exception, seem more concerned about their own desires than they are about nature. 

Richard Harris may be best known to audiences today for playing Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, but for some time, he was known for playing in several survival movies. One of the most notable of these was Man in the Wilderness, which, as its title suggests, focuses on a man’s efforts to try to attain revenge on the men who left him for dead. The bear attack is a particularly notable part of the film, and it is yet another instance in which the bear represents the forces of nature against which the man must measure himself. 

While the bond between a father and his son might be the emotional center of Walking Out, it’s the grizzly bear attack that really leaves an impression on the viewer. In the fine tradition of so many other survival films, the bear embodies nature's uncaring forces. Though hardly as malicious or deliberately malevolent as some of the other dangerous bears in the movies, this beast nevertheless manages to inflict quite a bit of damage on humans. It’s a timely reminder always to be careful when going out into the wild.