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  • A major theme in The Abominable Snowman, as our hero repeatedly points out that the dwindling of the Dwindling Party is due to the greed and recklessness of the expedition's leader, and the yeti have good reason to avoid people.
  • In the Alien series, it's usually the humans' attempts to exploit the aliens for profit that set the plot in motion.
    • In Alien, the MegaCorp expects a crew member to be impregnated.
    • In Aliens, Burke tries to impregnate Ripley with an alien.
      Ripley: I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
    • Alien³ follows as a result of the second, but Company members arrive and try to cash in on the aliens.
    • In Alien: Resurrection, it's the military that is tinkering with alien genes to create weapons. The most heroic character in the film is a second-gen android, as lampshaded by Ripley: "No human being is that humane."
    • Downplayed in Prometheus. The worst humans seen are more selfish and/or pragmatic than anything else and the rest are pretty decent. The alien on the other hand (the Engineer, that is) isn't just a monster; he's the most evil character in the entire franchise. However, this is certainly the view of the Engineers themselves, who seem to believe in something fundamentally wrong with humans that needs to be wiped clean.
  • James Cameron's Avatar is a perfect example of this trope played with. The human RDA are intruding on Na'vi land and destroy the home of the Omaticaya tribe in order to acquire Unobtainium, and follow a rigid, aggressive schedule for this. On the other hand, the RDA tries to negotiate with the Na'vi, and even when they do attack they try to be "humane" first (i.e. hitting the Na'vi with gas and trying to intimidate them into leaving) and avoid bombing them from orbit because they want to minimize local casualties. Then the gloves come off, RDA destroys Hometree, killing hundreds of Na'vi in the process. When the Na'vi assemble an army for war, the RDA tries to destroy the Tree of Souls to break their spirit. Selfridge, the corporate head of the RDA, reacts to destroying the sacred Na'vi site with the same apathy that one would associate to accidentally swatting a fly, though he does appear significantly more disturbed when they take down Hometree. In fact, he and the other officials look downright horrified at the violence, and go out gracefully at the end, following the Na'vi victory.
    • In the case of Selfridge, He likely was simply indifferent to the Na'vi, as many real-world humans are to animals, without being malevolent or sadistic. To his point of view, the Hometree was just a tree, albeit one sitting on top of the biggest deposit of Unobtainium in hundreds of miles. As he points out, there's plenty of trees around, and to his narrow way of thinking there was no reason they couldn't just get up and leave.
    • Quaritch is a standard Colonel Ripper in the end. It seems that after the escape of Jake's gang, Quaritch takes over control at the RDA base, The Plan to destroy the Tree of Souls is his brainchild.
    • Jake Sully and his gang are a inversion of this trope; showing there are humans who are not only truly sick of the atrocities committed by their corporation, but also actually work to stop it with their own power.
    • The entirety of this trope overall is complicated when the state of Earth itself is revealed through dialogue and background material: war-torn, exhausted of resources, and polluted almost to being uninhabitable with companies like RDA having an iron grip on the populace. The only chance for humanity to survive seems to be colonizing other planets, but the catch is that it requires Unobtanium, which is vital to building colony ships, hence why the metal is so valuable. In short, humanity isn't just acting out of malice or some sort of misguided Manifest Destiny, they're on the brink of extinction and desperate for a solution, but unfortunately their mining efforts are headed up by people who just couldn't give a damn and are likely the ones responsible for the sorry state of Earth in the first place.
    • The movie provides quite a disturbing meta-example. Humans in-universe may be unwilling to resort to outright genocide or orbital bombardment, but such suggestions arise in movie reviews and discussions with alarming frequency.
  • Cloud Atlas: Played straight, subverted, invoked, played straight again, and discussed at length. Arguably, the degree of truth to this trope is the main theme of the novel.
  • This is the basic premise of Deadgirl. Human behavior is far more depraved and horrifying than any scary monster the imagination can conceive. The victim in the movie is a zombie.
  • District 9: A ship full of aliens gets stuck on Earth after it breaks down over Johannesburg. Humanity pens them into a concentration camp while the nations bicker over who has to take care of them. Eventually, a MegaCorp is entrusted with the aliens' welfare, and takes control of their ship away from them, arbitrarily restricts their reproductive rights, denies them the use of alien names and exploits the technology on the ship for their own use. Let us list the ways Humans Are The Real Monsters aside from the aforementioned squalid concentration camp and tech stealing:
    • Whenever they find an alien nest in D9, they torch it with a flame thrower and laugh at the popping noises that the alien larvae make as they boil.
    • They set up a firing range and they shock the main character (who is the only human who can use alien tech) to get him to pull the trigger on the gun they strap him to. Then they bring in a new alien gun and repeat the process many, many times in order to test the effects of each weapon. Cries of "I'll pull it! I'll pull it!" are ignored, and they never once see if he'll keep his word and pull it without the shocks.
    • The MNU literally uses the aliens as target practice. They test weapons against living aliens to judge their effectiveness.
    • They spread Blatant Lies about the aliens that most people take at face value. One being that the aliens don't care for their young. They love them just like a mother loves her child Have a poor grasp on the concept of property It has more to do with the fact that most of them are starving, and have a perfectly good grasp of it. Yet another is that as a species they enjoy destroying things (tying into their lack of the notion of property) and cite the fact that a group of them derailed a train, supposedly for fun, as evidence. The alien "Christopher" comments on his blog that in reality the group of aliens were an organized resistance group who derailed the train as an act of sabotage directed against the South African government, which had hired MNU to administer D9, in retaliation for repeated abuse by MNU. Although they started to enjoy it, what with the whole "not telling people why they did this, so people just think they did it for lulz".
    • Gangs from Nigeria move into D9 to get the alien weapons, for which they trade food to the starving aliens at exorbitant prices, unless they decide to simply take the tech, kill the alien, and then sell the alien's organs as a sort of "herbal remedy" that they claim cures all illnesses. The Leader of the human gangs seems to believe that eating the aliens will one day allow him to use their technology, though he also seems to enjoy it too.
    • When the human main character starts turning into an alien after a concentrated dose of Applied Phlebotinum, his fellow humans plan to dissect him while alive and conscious in order to learn how to give all humans the ability to use the alien tech (which only activates for the alien's biology, including the main character's hybrid form).
    • Our main protagonist is the one good one, right? No, he's no more sympathetic to the aliens until he begins mutating. His motivation is more "save my own ass" than "For Great Justice," though he does come to care beyond that as time goes on.
    • Basically, it's a rare movie whose ending leaves many viewers saying they hope that word gets back to the aliens and they come back and death-ray the crap out of humans.
  • In the French-Canadian cult TV show Dans une galaxie près de chez vous (In a Galaxy near you), it was already established that earthlings (read: Humans) were Jerkass morons who wrecked their own planet. In the two movies, we see: Plot Device anglophones coming from nowhere threatening to exterminate a tiny civilization of cave-dwellers already terrorized because of the sounds of an underground waterfall, Aliens vomiting at the simple mention of the word "earthling" and a failed Write Back to the Future attempt because of ridicule in the internet. To be fair, the only ones in the crew who never have a Jerkass moment is the dumb-as-rocks pilot and (outside of the reveal episode) the half-alien radar operator (who is played by one of the head writers) and both like to use the Constantly Backstabbing scientist as a punching bag (like everyone else for that matter).
  • In the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), an alien shows up and tries to give humanity a machine that would allow for interstellar communication. And how do the humans respond? By shooting him. After he recovers he spends some time observing humanity and eventually decides to show he means business by disabling all human technology on the planet (with a few exceptions, he left alone planes in flight, hospitals, and the like) for a short period of time. Then the humans shoot him again, this time killing him. He gets better, scolds them for being so violent, and essentially says that if humanity keeps this up the interstellar community will have no choice to put them down in order to prevent humanity from carrying its warlike ways out into space. Both the original and the remake try to paint human actions as irresponsible, rather than outright evil. See also: Humans Are Morons.
  • DC Extended Universe:
  • Extinction (2018): Despite their humanlike apperance and intelligence, Androids were treated as third grade citizens by humans. Humans started the original war 50 years ago out of fear that the Androids would rebel against them someday. And now, humans are the ones invading Earth and trying to exterminate all the androids.
  • This was entirely the point of Godzilla (1954). Not only was the titular monster In-Universe awakened by the actions of mankind (a hydrogen bomb) but the whole movie is an allegory for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This trope is the very reason why Dr. Serizawa sacrifices himself whilst using his deadly Oxygen Destroyer to kill Godzilla, the fear of mankind wielding the level of power his mind has created is simply too great.
    Dr. Daisuke Serizawa: Ogata, we human beings are weak creatures. Even if I burn my notes, everything is still in my head. As long as I'm alive, who can say I wouldn't be coerced into using it again?
  • Gorgo: The entire conflict of the film is all the fault of the greedy human, Joe, who captures Gentle Giant Gorgo and tries to have him exhibited as a circus attraction as well as those supporting, which draws the ire of its colossal mother. Only the young idealistic Sean/Shaun tries to do anything to help the young monster, begging people to set it free, and as usual Adults Are Useless and would rather keep it trapped and profit off of it, even when it becomes imminent that mommy is coming and that there's only one way to stop her. At the end of the film, despite the destruction, Gorgo and its mother prove that neither is truly an evil monster as they both leave for the Ocean once reunited. Far away from mankind.
  • Harry Potter:
    • While there’s plenty of dark monsters like the Dementors in the Wizarding World, the most consistently destructive and truly evil faction are the still quite human dark wizards and their Fantastic Racism such as Voldemort and his followers the Death Eaters, the latter of whom were given tall pointed hoods in the fourth movie.
    • Spoken word for word in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Fluffy Tamer Newt Scammander, when describing how his magical beasts have been accidentally let loose on New York: “They’re currently in alien terrain surrounded by millions of the most vicious creatures on the planet, humans”. His outlook is proven correct as the real antagonist of the movie the human wizard Grindelwald, is far more brutal and terrible than any monster Newt has inside his suitcase. Not to mention the abusive Does Not Like Magic Mary Lou Barebone, who is just as vile as Grindelwald but is a completely human woman.
  • The Happening, aside from the whole "plants are pissed at us" thing, has a very subtle passing reference to the trope. Right after the unfortunate scene with the lawnmover, the protagonists run past a billboard advertising homes. Set on top of the billboard is a smaller line: "You deserve this!"
  • Hellboy II: The Golden Army: At the beginning of the film is mentioned that the humans and the fairies have been waging war for a long time because humans were so power-hungry. In order to keep the peace, the fairies first had to create the "golden army". But even during the film Hellboy, and all persons who are not ordinary humans, are treated badly by humans. In one case, Hellboy kills a creature that was the last of its kind to save a human baby and humans still treated him like a monster.
  • Hidden: A family has spent months hiding underground from the menacing "Breathers" on the surface. It ultimately turns out that the Breathers are soldiers looking to kill anyone infected with a strange virus, like the family.
  • All film adaptations of The Island of Doctor MoreauIsland of Lost Souls, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) — present the monstrous animal creatures created by Doctor Moreau as sympathetic and victims of Moreau's cruelty (albeit in many cases with beastly savage behavior, but due to instincts and no malice) showing Moreau as the real monster instead. Whether the other humans are equally malicious or more benevolent depends on the adaptation.
  • The aliens in It Came from Outer Space (1953) believe humanity's xenophobic response to their hideous form will inevitably lead to conflict, so they attempt to repair their spaceship secretly. Unfortunately their covert actions only increase the belief among the protagonists that the aliens are up to no good. Ironically while both aliens and humans are seen acting out of fear and suspicion, neither side is portrayed as particularly unreasonable or malevolent under the circumstances.
  • In Jumanji, by far the most dangerous and genuinely evil thing that comes out of the game isn't the lion, the crocodiles, the monkeys, the stampede of elephants and rhinos, the killer plants, or the big spiders, but Van Pelt, a very human hunter who simply wants to hunt and kill Alan. Not to mention the fact that Van Pelt is aided in his pursuit by greedy gun shop owners who are just as human as he is.
  • Shere Khan from The Jungle Book (2016) is a firm believer in this. He's even outraged at the idea of adopting a human boy into the jungle.
    Shere Khan: I can't help but notice there's this strange odor today. What is it, this scent that I'm on? I almost... I almost think it was some kind of... man-cub. [spots Mowgli]
    Akela: Mowgli belongs to my pack, Shere Khan.
    Shere Khan: Mowgli? They've given it a name! When was it we came to adopt man to this jungle?
    Akela: He's just a cub.
    Shere Khan: [shows his scars] Does my face not remind you of what a grown man can do? Shift your hunting ground for a few years, and everyone forgets how the Law works. Well, let me remind you. A man-cub becomes man, and man is forbidden!
    • Unfortunately for Khan, his logic becomes quite a bit more shakey when it is revealed he got those scars from the night he killed Mowgli's father and is the reason Mowgli was stranded in the woods in the first place.
  • A Central Theme of Jurassic Park (and it sequels to Anvilicious extremes) is this. Yes, a lot of dinosaurs are monstrous predators, but literally the only reason that these ancient creatures walk the earth again is because of arrogant humans like John Hammond (who's much less whimsical and far more malevolent in the original book) playing God and trying commercialise and in later films weaponise creatures that should be respected and left extinct. This trope is lampshaded by Ian Malcolm while he, Alan and Ellie debate the ethics of the park with its owner Hammond himself.
    John Hammond: I simply don't understand this Luddite attitude, especially from a scientist. I mean, how can we stand in the light of discovery, and not act?
    Dr. Ian Malcolm: What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.
  • The major theme of King Kong is that man is the monster. Kong never asked to be brought to New York and paraded as a spectacle, that was entirely man’s doing. The 2005 film plays this up the hilt as shown with his quiet moments with Ann, Kong is a beautiful creature whom is only acting how any animal would in that situation. Likewise in Kong: Skull Island, the titular ape only attacks the human characters because they were callous enough to denote seismic bombs around his home. Hank Harlow a WW2 pilot who’s gone native on the island calls Monarch out for their carelessness.
  • This trope is the ultimate nature of George A. Romero's Living Dead Series. The Zombie Apocalypse is, more than anything, a way to provide pressure on the humans, who ultimately turn on each other.
    • Night of the Living Dead (1968): Faced with walking, flesh-eating, corpses outside, the humans inside are too busy bickering and quarreling with each other to mount any credible defense. The sole survivor, who makes it through the night only by luck, is promptly shot and nonchalantly dumped on a fire as yet-another zombie by people who can't be bothered to check he's still alive. That fact said survivor who was shot out of fear also happens to be black doesn’t help at all.
    • Dawn of the Dead (1978): Humans are so quarrelsome and irresponsible that they cannot mount any coordinated offensive against the living dead. The protagonists prefer to mindlessly hole up inside a mall and just let the world go to hell outside.
    • Day of the Dead (1985): The last remnants of humanity are just animals trapped in a cage. The scientists and civilians just want to drown themselves in hedonism one last time, the military are depicted as psychotic maniacs, and the most sympathetic character is a zombie that has been given some semblance of human intelligence back.
    • Land of the Dead: Arguably the most Anvilicious of depictions, where one gets the sincere feeling that we're supposed to be rooting for and sympathesing with the zombies.
    • Diary of the Dead: Awkwardly shoehorns it in as the final comment from a surviving main character.
    • Survival of the Dead: The most subtle of them all, and could almost be argued as being free from it, except for the fact we once again see a cluster of survivors wiped out because they're too busy squabbling even in the face of a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • In Maleficent, the human king attacks the moors, where the fairies live, alledgedly to kill the "monsters", although the fairies just want to live in peace. Then, after the title character wounds the king in defense of her people, he demands that revenge be taken for this. Not all humans are portrayed as evil, though.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • The antagonists of films like Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther (2018) and Black Widow (2021) aren’t aliens, robots or inter-dimensional monsters, just human beings driven by greed, power, prejudice and hate. For all the evil that exists in the Marvel cosmos or the greater multiverse, few can match the horrors committed by humanity itself.
    • Spider-Man: No Way Home features the death of a major character (Aunt May) — except, unlike most of the other main characters, who died fighting great cosmic forces, May is instead killed by one very evil but still ultimately human man: Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, who forced her beloved nephew Peter to watch as he did it. This guy is far from the most powerful villain in the Marvel multiverse, but the Goblin's sheer cruelty and malevolence far eclipses even the likes of Thanos for how utterly senseless it is.
  • Agent Smith in The Matrix gives "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Morpheus in which he claims that humans are more similar to viruses than mammals, because they exploit the world and drain it of all possible resources rather than instinctively seek out a natural equilibrium with their environment.
  • The message of the movie Monsters, the alien creatures are actually peaceful and is the US Army the one doing more damage and making them angry.
  • This is played with in The Monster Club, where the idea of humans being the real monsters is used to show how they are as capable and amazing as monsters rather than showing them to be inhumane and cruel when compared to what they perceive as monsters. The anthology film ends with the vampire Eramus giving a speech on how humans are capable of being very terrifying and destructive to their own kind, mainly calling attention to all the creative ways they've come up with killing people when they lacked such monstrous features as fangs and claws. The other monsters at the club are so impressed by this revelation that they go along with Eramus's request to make his human guest, a fictional incarnation of horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes, an honorary monster and club member.
  • In The Monster Squad, the kids remark on how Scary German Guy knows a lot about monsters; SGG remarks that come to think of it, he does. As the boys leave, the camera lingers on his forearm, showing a tattoo which Nazis administered to Jews in concentration camps.
  • Lampshaded by Kermit in The Muppet Musicians of Bremen after he introduces the four protagonists, the titular animal musicians, and the antagonists, their abusive owners.
    Kermit: (to the viewers) "You may have noticed that the heroes in our story are all animals, and the villains are all people. I hope none of you takes that personally."
  • In Pan's Labyrinth, even the terrifying Pale Man, a child-eating monster with eyes in his palms, is utterly eclipsed by the Francoist, sadistic and trigger-happy Captain Vidal in sheer monstrousness. This is hammered home by the fact he's the one who kills Ofelia in the ending. The novelization mentions that The Fair Folk have rules and logic and humans don't.
  • Played with in the original Planet of the Apes. The Ape elders believe this; their sacred scriptures include a scroll which reads "Beware the beast Man, for he is the devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, or lust, or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him. Drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death". And given that the ending of the movie reveals the Ape civilization emerged from the ruins left after humans destroyed their own civilization in a nuclear holocaust, it's hard to argue with them. However, what we see of the Apes' society suggests that they're actually just as bad as the humans used to be, and it's only their technological limitations that keep them from causing the same damage.
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes is even-handed somewhat in the conflict between human and ape characters, but still a lot of the plot is kicked off by the humans being dicks to the apes with very flimsy justification.
  • Ed Wood naturally overdid it in Plan 9 from Outer Space, with an alien screaming, "All you of Earth are idiots! You see? Your stupid minds, stupid, stupid!", crossing over with Humans Are Morons who opt to fight and kill the aliens who are only trying to warn them about the dangers of creating the "solarbonite bomb." Then again, the aliens' plan of warning was a Zombie Apocalypse. Consisting of three zombies — one wonders what the first eight plans were.
  • Psycho Goreman: Luke, an adolescent boy who's scared that he might have awoken his grandmother's ghost, asks his parents if monsters are real. His father says that he's always found that humans are the real monsters, so yes, monsters are real. His mother is not impressed by her husband's parenting. Later, Luke's sister Mimi takes this message to heart when she becomes Drunk on the Dark Side.
  • In The Return of Hanuman, most of the divine beings in Swarglok wouldn't dare to reincarnate to Earth because in the modern times Earth is dangerous, with dangerous humans. Despite of that, Hanuman still believes that there are nice people remaining on Earth.
  • Return of the Living Dead 3 has the humans torturing the zombies so cruelly that it almost has the viewer rooting for the zombies.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): In stark contrast to Sonic, an alien hedgehog who is ultimately revealed to be very friendly, Robotnik is a cruel, sociopathic, rude, abrasive, and power-hungry Mad Scientist. Tom even lampshades it during the climax, remarking that Sonic knows more about being human than Robotnik ever will.
  • The humans in the film version of Starship Troopers are brainwashed fanatics living in a fascist dystopia moving out into the galaxy and slaughtering the Arachnids for territory to expand into. Then again, in this case the Bugs aren't any better. Note that the only one of those things that isn't in the book is the fascist dystopia, and Robert A. Heinlein considered genocidal expansionism a necessity.
  • Star Wars:
    • The franchise often invokes this particular concerning The Empire who both the films and expanded material show are A Nazi by Any Other Name. Being an entirely human faction that actively and violently detest non-humans e.g in A New Hope the Imperial Officer running the cell block reacts in disgust at Chewy and refers to him as a “thing”. Spin-off shows like Andor exhibit how the Imperials are cruelly capable of slowly ousting people from their native lands and only just barely acknowledge the customs of different cultures in a Wants a Prize for Basic Decency move. The Empire is also run by a human Sheev Palpatine, a Person of Mass Destruction powered by The Dark Side yes, but still (more or less) a human man.
    • The human members of the Senate from the Prequel Trilogy are meant to empathise this trope, with the anti-war advocate George Lucas himself admitting as such and comparing the likes of Palpatine and Finis Valorum to Real Life controversial American presidents and senators. Even Anakin’s “You’re either with me or against me” from Revenge of the Sith was a direct nod to George W. Bush’s similar infamous phrase during The War on Terror.
  • In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cameron employed this theme to demonstrate how humans turn into killing machines. For example, Sarah Connor almost becomes "a Terminator" at one point in the movie, and the T-800 flat out says that it is "In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves", meaning that, in the end, humanity is the ultimate "Terminator". Even John Connor himself is not immune to this; the future John shown at the beginning of the film is deliberately shown slowly scanning his eyes across the battlefield...just like a Terminator.
  • Ultraman Cosmos: The First Contact: There is only one monster in the entire film, the Don Dragon, and he is a Non-Malicious Monster who spends much of it's screentime hibernating. Meanwhile, the alien invaders, led by Alien Baltan, are revealed to be Invading Refugees after losing their home planet in a nuclear wear, and their leader, Dark Baltan, is only trying to find a new home for the Baltanian children. They do not have hostile intentions to attack the Earth either, and a means of communication is possible between the humans and the Baltan leader. So the biggest source of conflict comes from the military led by General Ripper Commander Shigemura, who deliberately order missile attacks even when non-lethal solutions are present, resulting in causing the harmless Don Dragon to go on a rampage and instigating Alien Baltan to invade Earth as a form of retaliation. It gets even worse in the climax: after Ultraman Cosmos had killed Alien Baltan in an attempt to save the humans, Shigemura, who had sneaked away into a military vehicle after his poor judgements had nearly doomed the city, still remains persistent in his stance at believing "All aliens should be destroyed..." and tries to launch a nuke on Ultraman Cosmos, one that can potentially destroy the entire not-yet-evacuated city in the process.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: While only briefly talked about, because of The Sentinels' extreme programming in the Bad Future: they are not only driven to wipe out Mutantkind, but to also kill any Humans that supported the Mutants, and any Humans that could give birth to future Mutants. By the time the films events roll around, there is only a small population of Humans left that aren't on the Sentinels' hit-list that represents "The Worst Of Humanity" and are the ones actually calling the shots in this dystopian world.


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