Attack Of The Killer Whatever - Television Tropes & Idioms

Killer elevators? Yes, killer elevators.

Stephen King: Now for my 307th book, a couple... uh... is attacked... by a giant... uh... (looks at a desk) lamp monster! Oooooooo!
Editor: You're not even trying anymore are you Stephen?
Stephen King: (waving a desk lamp) Rawr! Rawr!
Editor: (sigh) When can I have it?

Family Guy

ALL ANIMALS V. ALL HUMANS. I trust you feel the immediate, primal clutch of this concept on your heart, and I can promise you that the duckbilled platypus scene alone will be worth the price of admission.

John Hodgman, The Areas Of My Expertise

If you can think of something, there's probably a B-grade horror movie about it trying to kill a bunch of people. You name it. Snowmen, ice cream men, Santa Claus, dentists, clowns, dolls, trucks, boats, lifts, chairs, computers, video games, clocks, toilets, vacuum cleaners, laundry machines (three of these, actually), condoms, rabbits, rats, robots, birds, bees, ticks, sharks, barracudas, flying fish, eggs, tomatoes (four-movie series; With a remake in the works), pieces of dry toast, leprechauns, triffids...

At the very least, if there's not a horror movie based around it, there's surely a horror short story or episode of an anthology horror series about it.

A caveat: if it's a killer animal, there's about a 70% chance that it'll also be giant. If it grows too large, it becomes Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever.

Often, the titles of such films will be quite self explanatory.

Compare Everything Trying To Kill You. Depending on the object/animal, can overlap with Nightmare Fuel. Depending on the execution, can overlap with Narm instead. Also can overlap with Our Monsters Are Weird if the object is esoteric enough.

Examples

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Film

The Leprechaun horror movie franchise, Lucky Charms commercials Gone Horribly Wrong.
The infamous Jack Frost movies (not the one with Michael Keaton), about a snowman whose snow is infused with the DNA of a murderer. Includes a scene where the titular snowman rapes and kills a woman in the shower with his carrot.
- That woman? Shannon Elizabeth. And now you know...the rest of the backstory. Good day!
Stay Alive is just one of many movies about killer videogames. One wonders how such a game gets out of beta testing...
- Strictly speaking, that one didn't until the very stupid ending anyway.
Killer Klowns From Outer Space — try saying the title with a straight face. This one was deliberately stupid, however.
In the Japanese Mind Screw horror movie Hausu everything from a piano to pillows to a lampshade, to the titular ''House'', all because the Auntie eats young female virgins to keep herself young while she waits for her boyfriend to come home from WWII. The little problem? He died in the war. She received the news but didn't believe it. Oh, and she's also dead.
Probably the quintessential "killer toy" movie is Child's Play, which earned four sequels.
The Gingerdead Man involves a serial killer coming back as a homicidal animated cookie.
- However, the killer in question is Gary Busey, so the monster is less terrifying than the person.
Somewhere in the region of 50% of Full Moon productions; they're most famous for milking the Puppet Master series (killer puppets) for all it's worth.
Classically bad horror movie The Car is almost impossible to be horrified by, simply because the writing constantly reminds you how stupid the premise is. It reaches its logical extreme when the protagonist tells his wife, "Lock the kids in their rooms... the car is in the garage."
- Which is a shame, because the actual car was a custom-designed genuinely evil-looking thing that deserved a better movie to appear in.
- A better example would be Christine, wherein it's actually scary.
- Another example (although not so good as Christine) is The Cars That Ate Paris, which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Don't get excited about seeing the death of the Eiffel Tower, though, as the titular 'Paris' is in Queensland, Australia. This troper particularly enjoyed the fact that the cars seemed to magically grow spikes, and that the lead car was a creamy-coloured VW Beetle. All it needed was the stripes and the number on the hood and we have Evil Herbie.
The infamous classic Night of the Lepus, in which a desert town is menaced by giant mutated homicidal bunnies. They didn't even use mangy-looking wild rabbits either; this a movie where people run in terror from cute and fluffy pet store bunnies.
- This editor found the film to be quite an amusing piece of corn while watching it as a child... Right up until he was traumatized by the several minute long sequence where they defeat all of the loudly screaming bunnies with flamethrowers.
The Burgess Meredith film Torture Garden featured a sequence about a killer piano.
The 1977 film Death Bed: The Bed that Eats ~~People~~ was about... guess what? A killer bed.
- Patton Oswalt has a very profane, very funny routine about this movie in which he threatens to write and produce a movie called "Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes People".
The Killer Shrews.
- Which looks even sillier than it sounds, since it's so obvious that the 'shrews' are actually Collie dogs in bad makeup.
1977 saw Kingdom of the Spiders, with William Shatner fighting billions of homicidal poisonous but normal-sized tarantulas.
There exists a "horror" film titled Strays that features people being killed by a pack of feral cats. Not giant cats, not mutated cats, just ordinary house cats.
- H.P. Lovecraft's The Cats of Ulthar had a similar premise. Although it was pretty cool.
  - And it was part of a Karmic Death, so it was all good.
- There are also 3rd Edition D&D housecats, which can, it has been famously point out, kill 1st level commoners.
Given some of the other examples on this page, the 1978 horror movie spoof Attack of the Killer Tomatoes seems almost sensible in comparison.
- ATTAAAACK OF THE KILLER TO-MAY-TOES!
- Dumber (and far more awesome) than advertised. But George Clooney was in the sequel.
Black Sheep, a horror movie about killer ... wait for it ... sheep. Though this one is a Horror/Comedy.
AlfredHitchcock's The Birds is an early example.
- Resident Evil: Extinction has flocks of killer zombie crows! Take That, Hitchcock!
Lennigen versus the Ants is arguably a part of this genre.
Killer Condom
- And the condoms were designed by H.R.Giger, creator of the Alien.
The title quote sounds like the method for creating Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies. All of them, each more So Bad Its Horrible than the last, are about the Attack Of The Killer Whatever, and the title is always the "whatever." Mosquito, Rottweiler, Boa, Python, Flu Bird Horror etc.
- Let's not forget they pulled this stunt twice with snakeheads. Although they seemed to be confusing snakeheads with crocodiles.
Japanese film ''Battle Heater' is about the rampage of a small electric space heater.
Snakes on a Plane could arguably follow this trope.
Frogs
Slugs
Squirm, with its masses of biting worms.
The Ring. Killer videotapes!
- Videodrome did it first. Snuff television gives you tumours!
The killer roach flick from the '80s called The Nest.
- Similiarly, Damnation Alley features killer cockroaches in one scene.
- As does Creepshow, which did it really well.
A killer electromagnetic pulse causes appliances in a suburban neighborhood house to go all homicidal in the film called Pulse (a film from the 80's)
- The creep factor on Pulse was way up, especially due to the shower scene, because none of the appliances seemed to really be doing anything unexpected. It's actually quite plausible that your sink wouldn't stop running, or your water heater would get broken and the temperature would rise to scalding, or the washing machine/TV could give you a fatal shock.
Attack of the Killer Refrigerator and, in a similar vein, a film titled simply The Refrigerator.
The Mangler, a killer laundry machine.
Monsturd, followed by its sequel RetarDEAD.
The Blob. Who wants to be eaten by 25 kg of killer marmite?
I saw a movie about a book that when anybody read it they vanished into the book and it added a new story or chapter. I can't remember what it was called so if anybody knows please list it. Good movie though.
- Some of the grimoires do this in Pratchett's Discworld.
- There's a short story in one of the Alfred Hitchcock story collections that uses that plot.
- I've also seen this in a Dungeons And Dragons adventure. The "library that turns patrons into books" has also shown up in both D&D and JAGS Wonderland.
'Monster House'. I mean, it's right there in the title.
- Also on the same vein the episode of Extreme Ghostbusters entitled "Home is Where the Horror Is".
- Before that Real Ghostbusters did it with "Mrs Faversham's Neighborhood".
The film The Lift is centered around a killer elevator.
The Rats (2002). A clan of evil rats overtakes a Manhattan department store and threatens to overrun the city. Proof that B-movies are not restricted to the 1950s.
- There was a similiar film called Deadly Eyes back in the '80s.
- And this, too, showed up in Dungeons And Dragons, as a sentient rat hive-mind called the Us.
- Another one Terry Pratchett has used, with the rat-king in The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. The titular rodents themselves (as well as Maurice, a talking cat) are all good guys, though.
- And, of course, there's Willard and its sequel Ben, both about killer rats.
Ticks horror movie where cat-sized ticks in a forest jumped on people and sucked them dry.
A short parody of Night of the Living Dead called... Night of the Living Bread.
- There's another parody with the same name; an episode of a Claymation TV series called Bump in the Night has the two main characters going up against a mutated, ambulatory, semi-carnivorous slice of bread, which they finally beat by flinging peanut butter at it while it's standing on the edge of a cupboard so it falls onto the floor and sticks.
Fishes. Sharks, yes, it goes without saying. For attacks of man-eating piranhas see the movie Piranha. Even flying fish can be turned into killers, eagerly propelling themselves out of the water and flying toward party-goers at a beach party to... bite their necks?
- But for normal sea-life transformed into vicious carnivorous killers, look no further than the Italian C-movie Plankton (1994) (a.k.a. Creatures from the Abyss, a.k.a. Sea Devils), where feeding on plankton poisoned by toxic waste has mutated fishes so that they can jump out of the water and eat sailors and a bunch of dumb tweens on a yacht. Nom, nom, nom.
1408. It's an evil fucking room.
- Which, on retrospect, isn't such an uncommon idea after all.
Come to think of it, Night Of The Living Dead. Dead people eat living people.
Razorback is a 1984 film about a large man-eating feral pig rampaging through the Australian Outback.
The natural insanity of humankind is perhaps exemplified by the fact that there is actually more than one movie about psychotic ice cream men. Something Awful reviews two of them. Both are somehow even more idiotic than they needed to be.
Of Unknown Origin is a surprisingly good movie about a New Yorker who's terrorized by a rat. Not a giant rat, not a horde of rats, not a superintelligent mutant rat. Just a big, mean, nasty, and EXTREMELY determined Rattus norvegicus, which figures his apartment is its territory.
Killdozer. Yes, an evil killer bulldozer. Sounds like the perfect date for Christine.
The Ruins: Attack of the killer plants.
The Shaft: Another killer elevator.
One-Eyed Monster is a film about a killer penis. I wish I was making this up.
- Someone has to do a double bill with this and Killer Condom...
I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle. A shape-shifting, murderous motorcycle terrorises Bob the Builder in Birmingham in this 1990 B-movie. Not quite Exactly What It Says On The Tin in that the titular motorbike is actually a demon-possessed Norton Commando, but still awesome.
Lightning Strikes: The Sci Fi Channel presents killer lightning.
- ...as opposed to the regular, non-killing type of lightning, I suppose?
Night of the Nematodes, that is all.
Frogs (kinda stupid since most of the victims meet their demise from animals other than frogs - turtles, lizards, snakes, spiders, alligators, birds, crabs and even butterlies!)
Grizzly - C'mon, what do you think?
Orca - Our adorable Shamu turned vengeful and bloodthirsty.
1977's Day of the Animals - Probably the KING of this trope! There are wolves, dogs, rats, snakes, hawks, owls, mountain lions, and bears! Oh my!
Eight-Legged Freaks - More of a comedy than a genuine horror film.
Attack of the Sabertooth Oh no! A crazy saber-toothed cat is running amok in the forest!
- Even more oh no! They somehow convinced John Rhys-Davies to do this movie!
Frog-g-g! - also about frogs, but played humorously with a mutated frog having sex with female humans.
Mae bia - Thai film about a family attacked by a deadly cobra.
Ice-Spiders - Genetically altered spiders escape from a nearby laboratory and begin killing and eating the humans at a ski resort.
Mammoth - A meteor, bearing an alien (of course), crash lands on a museum and resurrects the bones of a Mammoth. It rampages around and kills people by stepping on them. Beware his soul-sucking trunk of doom!
Killer Kitties:
- Strays (1991)
- The Uncanny (1977)
- Black Cat (1981)
- Eye of the Cat (1969)
The Red Shoes - South Korean horror movie about evil, possessed high heel shoes. See here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5CWrXqVE8c&feature=related
The Wig. When it comes to horror, there really is no limit on what the subject could be.
Hair Extensions
Cello

Close Film

Comic Books

Literature

The Day Of The Triffids. In the film version, The only thing that gives the immobile killer plants a fighting chance is the fact that the meteor shower on which they arrive also blinds nearly everyone on Earth. In the original novel, it's a bit more sensical, as they were, when fully-grown, just barely mobile... and the focus wasn't on them, but on the reaction of the survivors to the apocalypse to which the plants contributed, and the humans' attempts to cope. Not to mention that they didn't invade — people were farming them for their commercially-useful oil, then the strange blindness-causing meteor shower eliminates the ability to keep them from being a danger, and they started rampaging. Adaptation Decay writ large for the sake of a girl being menaced by giant asparagus spears.
- It's still a good movie, though.
  - And a far more faithful version was made for British TV in the 80's.
- It isn't the only Attack Of The Killer Whatever that John Wyndham wrote, either: Web, the inspiration for/prequel to the Arachnophobia movie(s) involves an island full of mutated spiders that are: a) more poisonous; b) have fangs/mandibles that are stronger and sharper than normal; c) more intelligent and d) have a rabidly cannibalistic, yet simultaneously highly co-operative society that apparently crosses species barriers. Oh, and some of them are as big as dogs. This troper wasn't particularly bothered by spiders before then, and it has taken many years to get even close to his pre-Web state
Stephen King seems to be the master of this:
- Maximum Overdrive, in which evil trucks conquer the earth. A Stephen King story, adapted into a really awful movie by Stephen King; in King's defense, he likes to poke fun at how badly he did ("I should know a bad movie when I see one, I directed Maximum Overdrive").
  - Also featured a scene in which a little boy was killed by a malevolent soda machine with the ability to spit out high-velocity cans.
  - ...I can't believe someone beat them to Dispensor!
  - You would think it would be impossible for a movie with an all-AC/DC soundtrack to suck. Assuming, that is, that you like AC/DC.
  - Apparently the test screen of a scene of a boy getting ran over by a steamroller actually made George fuckin' Romero throw up.
- Christine, the infamous story of a homicidal (and rather possessive) car.
- The Mangler, which was spun off into a trilogy of movie adaptations - that's right, three movies about a killer laundry press. It's immobile, too, so it comes down to people being stupid enough not to learn to keep from walking up to the damn thing. (Although Adaptation Decay is at work here — in fact, the original short story implies the thing does become mobile, in a Twist Ending).
- In various Stephen King short stories, he has had people attacked by novelty chattering teeth, paintings, a toy monkey, evil toads... Basically, if it can be seen as even vaguely creepy by anybody in the Western world, chances are it's killed somebody in a Stephen King story.
In John Byrne's Fearbook, a catalogue that arrives in the mail convinces people to kill others or themselves.
This troper recalls a Sadist Teacher in junior school reading the class a short story about a killer chess set.
And this troper remembers a short story about killer oatmeal(!!) that attacked by replacing the brains of the victim. What happened then was not so clear...
There is actually a book called Attack of the Killer Potatoes, according to the Other Wiki. The tomatoes should sue.
The political satire The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon. The rabbits are infected with a highly-toxic (to humans) strain of myxomatosis. Rather than trying to wipe them out however, the Australian government is more than happy to possess the most feared biological weapon in the world. Inspired the movie Night of the Lepus.
A mediocre local writer here in Singapore wrote a short story about killer hamburgers. Pissed at the protagonist because he switched his favorite food from burgers to fried chicken. At the end of the story, they Mind Control him in an unspecified manner in a form of You Are The Demons.
- They're mad at him for not eating them?

Close Literature

Live Action TV

Both Are You Afraid Of The Dark? and Goosebumps had suspiciously similar stories about killer cameras, and even got the same actor to play the same role in both adaptations.
- Both were more than likely inspired by an episode of The Twilight Zone.
  - Specifically, "A Most Unusual Camera".
- The Twilight Zone had a guy killed by an evil slot machine.
An animated sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus introduces the Killer Cars, which hide behind poles and jump on unsuspecting pedestrians. The cars are defeated "thanks to the miracle of atomic mutation" by an enormous bipedal cat, which displaces them as the town's reigning terror. This monster is then defeated by a giant hand. Animator Terry Gilliam intended this sequence to be a parody of 1950s monster movies.
- Another of the show's animations has a house roaming about the countryside, gobbling people up through its doors, until it is found by "The House Hunters" ("These are house droppings... fresh ones, too!") who slap a Condemned notice on it, causing it to collapse.
- A sketch in another episode revolved around killer sheep.
- And the Science Fiction sketch has a killer blancmange from Outer Space, which turns people into Scotsmen.
- And let's not forget the vicious gangs of "Keep Left" signs, which...
  - Right, stop that, it's getting too silly!
- And now: Attila the Bun.
- And then of course there's the killer rabbit from The Movie (which rips peoples necks out, causing their heads to simply fall off).
The Doctor Who episode "Rose" has Mickey attacked by a man-eating wheelie bin. "The Christmas Invasion" has the protagonists come under threat from a Christmas tree. Say what you want about the new series, this takes some nerve.
- And then there are the genuinely creepy ones such as attack of the killer statues and attack of the killer shadows. Which are both better than they sound.
  - Not to mention attack of the killer dress-shop mannequins. Shudder.
  - The 1971 episode Terror of the Autons has killer inflatable chairs and killer plastic daffodils.
  - This troper also remembers one with a Liquorice Allsorts monster from some point.
  - Would that be the Candyman from "The Happiness Patrol"?
Monster Warriors had to deal – among other things – with a giant carnivorous butterfly that hypnotised people with its beauty, a living and very hungry blob, living radioactive junk (not that kind), giant (again) cockroaches, predatory vines, an army of giant (but of course) frogs…Well, what do you expect from the show with a deranged and Brainwashed By Aliens ex-B-Movie director as a villain, anyway?
Spoof Horror show Garth Marenghis Dark Place has a telekinetic attack by various implements, including an attack by a whisk. A later episode has an attack by a killer set of bagpipes.
- This Troper thinks that set of bagpipes doesn't really need the killer prefix. Even normal bagpipes are deadly.
An episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer looks'' like Attack of the Killer Ventriloquist's Dummy for a significant portion of the episode, until it turns out that the dummy is a cursed monster hunter that mistook Buffy for the rather more mundane (well, mundane by Buffy standards) Killer Whatnot that cursed him in the first place.
This Troper remembers the idea Lampshaded on a late night airing of a student film on PBS entitled Night of the Living Bread.
An episode of 80s or early 90s American horror show called Monsters had an artist who owned a killer bed that ate his dates when he took them home, until he met a girl who had a killer fridge in her apartment, which then ate him. Played completely straight.