Hungry Jungle - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Beware, beware the Blight of Benin. Where one came out, fifty went in."

When not a run of Jungle Japes, the jungle is a harsh and hostile place, frequently deadly for its denizens, but even more ferocious to outsiders no matter what gear they bring with them. This jungle is treated as a semi-sentient entity; a soup of consciousness composed of the ferocity of its native life and climate. And it hungers. It devours sane minds with its stifling and claustrophobic atmosphere, infecting all who enter with a slow, creeping madness in an effort to make them its own. This same climate breeds fetid decay and disease, which likewise infests the body. On top of this, the marvels of modern technology count for nothing. The humidity of the jungle devours advanced technology in a trice. Keeping anything working is a constant, day-to-day struggle to keep up with the jungle's ruination, which further wears at the sanity and morale of any who try it.

The only way out is to die or go mad. Here, you can't imagine there's a world beyond the jungle. The jungle boils everything down to its rawest, most savage form.

God help you if you have to fight a war here, which isn't unknown. Compare Darkest Africa. Also tends to be full of Big Creepy Crawlies.

See also Don't Go in the Woods. Closely related to River Of Insanity.

Examples:

Film

Skull Island in King Kong. Everything there wants to eat you.
Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness IN VIETNAM!
Apparently all of Pandora in Avatar. Made worse by having all the wildlife psychically linked to ~~Gaia~~ Eywa, which then goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge en masse. (Granted, the humans brought it on themselves, but still.)
The Thin Red Line. The jungle is beautiful, oppressive, and indifferent to the sufferings of the soldiers.

Literature

Heart of Darkness: A search party is sent up-river into Darkest Africa to investigate the mysterious Kurtz.
Star Wars: Shatterpoint features Haruun Kal, a planet covered in this kind of jungle. For Mace Windu, it comes to draw out and represent his own inner darkness. Felucia also tends to become this in the general Star Wars Expanded Universe.
- In addition, "Shatterpoint" is based on Heart of Darkness. The Haruun Kal jungle is literally hungry, containing an invisible and planet-covering population of sporous fungi that eat most of the futuristic technology common in the Star Wars universe.
Although it's a swamp, in Galaxy of Fear the somewhat drier parts of Dagobah are portrayed as this. It's an amazingly hostile place to everyone except Yoda. Years ago a survey team crashed there, couldn't leave, and over a period of years they were picked off, they had children, their technology broke down... The Children they left behind, malnourished and uneducated, are friendly and much better adapted, but they are always, always hungry.
Shows up in some chapters of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, especially the part with Mary-Anne.
- Actually somewhat inverted as well with Mary-Anne: "Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country - the dirt, the death - I just want to eat it and have it there inside me. That's how I feel."
Amazonia by James Rollins.
Robert A. Heinlein:
- Glory Road, begins in one, in Southeast Asia.
- Tunnel in the Sky focuses on a bunch of survival students stranded in an alien jungle.
  - Part of the time. The book is realistic in that it's not like the entire planet is jungle; they eventually move out to something that's more of a savannah, in part because there are distinct advantages to this relative to being in the forest.
The first two books of David Weber and John Ringo's Prince Roger series (March Upcountry, March to the Sea) and part of the third (March to the Stars) are set in a planet which is covered in Hungry Jungle.
The appropriately named David Drake story "The Jungle", set on a terraformed Venus which has become a Death World.
- Venus in much early science fiction is like this. Heinlein's Space Cadet has it as a swarming, hideous jungle in which humans cannot survive unprotected except at the poles.
- One of the first (and best) "Jungle Venus" stories was Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 short story "Parasite Planet." After a mud volcano destroys his isolated shack the protagonist must trek through a nightmarish jungle full of horrifying creatures such as "doughpots", "Jack Ketch Trees, and "trioptes"to get to civilization.
The planet Pyrrus in Harry Harrison's novel Death World appears to be like this, then the protagonist discovers that it's a local effect sustained by feedback between mildly telepathic wildlife and the colonists.
The varzea of the Viisiiviisii in Drowning World. Besides carnivorous animals (which do things like create sucking whirlpools in rivers and shoot toxic darts) and carnivorous plants (which move remarkably fast), spores and microplants and parasites will invade anyone who doesn't constantly try to clean them off, finding a way through even the best-sealed environmental clothing.
The second half of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust has the protagonist, Tony Last, venture into the rainforests of South America in search of a gothic city. He contracts a terrible fever, his incompetent companion scares off the native guides and gets himself killed. Tony is 'rescued' by the head of another tribe... who reports to the search party that Tony is dead, and keeps him in the jungle, forcing him to read the complete works of Dickens- over... and over... and over...
As the inhabitants of a Generation Ship revert to savagery in Non-Stop, the ship's bioengineered plants grow out of control, turning most of the ship into this.
While Midworld is the most obvious example, it should be taken as a given that any time Alan Dean Foster writes something with a jungle in it, it's going to be a Hungry Jungle.
In the novel Yellow Eyes, a second Posleen column tries to outflank the human defenders by going through the Panamanian jungle. Between the wildlife, the terrain, and the hostile natives, only one Posleen makes it through the jungle alive, who promptly surrenders, asking only one term: That he not be required to go back in there.
The world of Tanith in Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominion Universe is a jungle-world with its evolution said to be over a million years beyond Earth's.
"Leiningen Versus the Ants" and its adaptations take place in the Amazon. The jungle and its killer ants are viewed as invincible forces of nature by the natives.
In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The People Of The Black Circle" where the black lotus grows:
It was the dread figure of the black lotus that had grown up as she watched, as it grows in the haunted, forbidden jungles of Khitai.
The Inheritance Cycle has the Spine. While not a jungle, it's a range of mountains that the Big Bad apparently lost a third of his army in once.
The protagonist of Leo Frankowski's The Cross Time Engineer novel, Conrad's Search for Rubber, faces this when attempting to explore Africa. After the massive death incurred by both the explorers and the natives, Conrad vows to do no more exploration until he'd found a solution. His relatives from the future then proceed to come down from the heavens and give him a solution to his problems.
The Chronicles of the Kencyrath has the Anarchies, a forest tainted by ancient magic. At one point in "Dark of the Moon", a band of brigands follows Jame into the Anarchies. Only one survives to confront her as the bandits slowly get picked off by strange mushrooms, hills that absorb their sleeping forms, and weird creatures.
The Fire Swamp in the book/movie The Princess Bride, which is really more like a jungle than a swamp, and, let's face it, more like a fantastical deathtrap than a jungle. If the "lightning sand" and exploding geysers of fire don't get you, the giant man-eating rats will.
The Voyage Of The Jerle Shannara: The Crake Rainforest may not be alive and hungry but the Graak certainly is. The local Rindge avoid the place as much as possible for this very reason, and the entire region has a sort of Primal Fear vibe to it.
- The jungle of Morrowindl is as bad or worse, being a dank, swampy mess, infested by predators, mutants, and Shadowen, including the monstrous Wisteron. The Black Oaks of Southland aren't much better, and characters go out of their way to avoid them, courtesy of the hungry wolf packs that make their home there. In The Sword of Shannara this results in them screwing up and heading straight into the far worse Mist Marsh.
Tarzan's native habitat.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, much of the island. Virginia is abducted there, more than once, and the title men wander there after their escape.
The Gaunt's Ghosts novel Traitor General takes place on the planet Gereon. The Chaos influence drives the Ghosts team slowly insane, pitting them against each other uncharacteristically, and that seems pretty bad already... then they're forced to flee into the "Untill", a massive, unmapped swamp filled with moths so poisonous that merely brushing against them causes instant death.
Invoked in The Jungle Book's "Letting In The Jungle": when Mowgli discovers that the inhabitants of a human village are not only trying to hunt him down, but also plan to kill Messua, the human woman who adopted him, he calls the whole jungle down on the place. His animal allies make the village unlivable to the point that its inhabitants, robbed of their food stores and believing themselves cursed, are forced to abandon the place entirely, and in very little time the jungle has quickly overgrown and swallowed the site completely.

Live-Action TV

The Amazon is portrayed this way in the MacGyver episode "Trumbo's World".

Manhwa

The Hill from Kiss Wood. Now with exploding plants.

Tabletop RPG

In the Dungeons & Dragons module WG6 Isle of the Ape, the title island was exactly like this. Food and equipment rotted quickly. Filled with dinosaurs, cannibal natives and giant apes, it was made even worse because many spells simply didn't work there, making the party's spellcasters and magic items much less effective.
- Also, several layers of the Abyss (which has layers with pretty much every bad thing you could imagine and some you probably can't on them), and one layer of the plane of Carceri could qualify.
In the Traveller Double Adventure "Marooned/Marooned Alone", one terrain type on the planet Pagliacci is "Jungle". The players can encounter quicksand and the alien equivalent of army ants. If the water isn't filtered it damages the drinker, and each week the PC's must make saving rolls or suffer disease damage and/or equipment malfunction.
The Living Land in the TORG roleplaying game makes technology break down, dissolves any food if you don't eat it soon after killing or gathering it, is filled with fog that makes it easy to lose your way, and then there are the critters.
Catachan, the mascot for the Death World trope, in Warhammer 40000. It's the recruiting grounds for an Imperial Guard regiment who are all Rambo. (and there's even a direct Rambo Shout Out who's even more Rambo than usual)
Lustria in Warhamme Fantasy. Basically the worst jungles in South America taken to eleven. It doesn't help that there's a race of killer dinosaur-people who want to sacrifice you to a giant snake-god, either...
The card "Ravenous Baloth" in Magic: The Gathering. Its flavor text is:
"All we know about the Krosan Forest we have learned from those few who have made it out alive." - Elvish Refugee
- Zendikar is an entire world where nature is trying to kill you dead. Among other things.
New Horizon has the Narhhel jungle. It's mostly unexplored, filled with predators, and might have unknown technology embedded in them.

Toys

BIONICLE has the "Forest of Blades", where soldiers have been captured and fused together with the trees, with their weapons jutting out.

Video Games

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade has a map where the description is from the notes of a Commissar Caern, recording the final words of a trooper prior to his execution for treason, along the lines of "I can't take it anymore! This jungle's going to eat us alive!"
Dxun as portrayed in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Mass Effect has a few of these, including Zorya and Pragia.
Gran Pulse in Final Fantasy XIII has a variety of climates, but fits the spirit of the trope.
Shellshock 2 skirts this. It's about a zombie plague outbreak in the middle of The Vietnam War, so there are certainly a lot of nasty things lurking in the jungle, but it isn't really the jungle's fault. All the unpleasant stuff is ultimately of human origin, including the zombie plague.

Real Life

Truth in Television, or at least perception: a Japanese WWII veteran, interviewed in The World at War, claimed that Allied troops had far more fear of the south east Asian jungles than Japanese troops did.
- Considering what happened at Ramree Island, the Japanese should have felt the same way.
Filming of Predator seems to have been a little like this.
Many of the early Amazonian explorers seem to have experienced this—hideous fungal infections, hostile natives, trouble finding anything to eat, and everything else trying to eat them. A well-known (if now under siege) anthropological theory is that the Amazon is a "wet desert", in which civilization can never arise, and which dissolves the underpinnings of civilizations that try to migrate there.
- Hence subverted; remnants of a flourishing civilization have been found in the Amazon, hinting even that much of the "wilderness" was in fact cultivated and kept under check for centuries. The diseases brought by the Europeans destroyed it before a single Westerner could witness any of it.
While technically rainforests, not jungles, big chunks of north-eastern Australia are like this.
- Australian troops also fought in the Hungry Jungle in WW 2, along the Kokoda Track. They later took what they learned there and brought it to the Vietnam War, where they terrorised the Viet Cong.
Jonestown, Guyana is a prime example of this, where the Peoples Temple cult established an agricultural community under the leadership of Jim Jones. The malevolence of the place as a result of the events that happened there is pretty well-established, considering the mass suicide and murder that took place following Congressman Leo Ryan's visit, but several survivors attest to the fact that there was a particularly ominous thunderstorm there, the likes of which no one had ever seen, during the Congressman's visit.