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No wonder those cats are mad—you're wearing a leopard-skin Loincloth!
"Beware, beware the Bight of Benin. Where one came out, fifty went in."

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 jungle's inhabitants don't make it any better. There tend to be hostile natives, cannibal tribes, and cat-, and lizard-people. It's also home to spiders, scorpions, centipedes and other dangerous arthropods, both the normal-sized and giant variety, poisonous and large constricting snakes, tigers, leopards, and other large cats, aggressive monkeys and apes, some of which are gigantic. The jungle's lakes, rivers, and swamps are full of hippos, crocodiles and piranhas. There are even dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in extreme cases. Even the plant life is liable to try to take a bite out of you, and let's not even mention what the local fungi can do. And even the nonliving environment is full of danger, from sand traps to waterfalls with sharp rocks on the bottom.

If you're a Jungle Princess, you will most likely be a Damsel in Distress who spends the majority of the story almost being eaten or tied to a stake until the Tarzan Boy Nature Hero comes. After all, this is a great place to be Captured by Cannibals.

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.

See also Swamps Are Evil, Don't Go in the Woods, and Jungle Opera. Closely related to River of Insanity. Sort of like the Thirsty Desert, though the similar names are coincidental. For places commonly depicted this way, see Darkest Africa and the less urbanized versions of Holiday in Cambodia. See also Jungle Japes for jungle-inspired video game levels. If you're an author; see Write a Jungle Opera


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Comic Books 
  • D.R. & Quinch: Parodied via the planet Ghoyogia, where the saliva-trees digest you alive and the terrible diseases have terrible diseases.
  • Robyn Hood: The Hunt: Robyn is imprisoned in a Deadly Environment Prison surrounded by a hungry jungle.
  • In Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom, Clark Kent and Kara Zor-El travel to a distant alien world and explore a strange jungle. Although Superman assures Supergirl that it is a safe place, every animal is a dangerous predator prone to attack him and his cousin, and nearly all plant life is poisonous.

    Fan Works 
  • A.A. Pessimal:
    • Bungle in the Jungle deals with a brief and nasty border war in Howondaland. Among other things, an Assassin most used to cities is utterly appalled when a colleague with far more experience of these environments goes into detail about all the things that could kill you or else leave you seriously inconvenienced.
    • Gap Year Adventures: The Heart Of Insufficent Light is visited by two backpacking holidaymakers.
  • The Flight of the Alicorn: The Impenetrable Lands are a gigantic, trackless stretch of jungle and swamp at the southern edge of the known world. Their name derives from the fact that no expedition has successfully crossed them — indeed, it's not even certain how large they are. The jungle's weather and wildlife operate entirely on their own, unlike the ones in settled lands that are controlled and direct with magic, and, after Rarity crash-lands in its depths, she finds it to be full of stifling heat, biting flies and dense, impassable undergrowth, and filled with dangers such as trees hosting colonies of flesh-eating insects and waters teeming with voracious predatory fish. However, it also home to things such as flowers with magical healing properties, prompting occasional attempts to penetrate and study it.
  • PokĂ©mon Reset Bloodlines: A sidestory titled "Shadows of the Jungle" takes place in one, where an expedition sent by Giovanni to Guyana in search of Mew leads the explorers deep into the turf of hordes of murderous Bug-type PokĂ©mon. The only thing they found was the leader's Apocalyptic Log, which told the story about how each one of the team members disappeared or was killed by the vicious bugs, until he himself ended up trapped in a pit to be devoured, as told by the final entry.

    Film — Animated 

    Film — Live Action 
  • The hostile, oppressive and unrelenting jungle, and the unseen horrors (real or imagined) lurking within it, is one of the things that gradually sends the conquistadors mad in Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
  • Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness, transposes the action to the Vietnam War, with the main characters traveling up a River of Insanity through Vietnam and into Cambodia. The jungle is depicted as an active threat to the American characters' minds, although the only actual danger it directly poses is a brief scene in which they are stalked by a tiger, but manage to escape with no loss of life.
  • 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.)
  • Force of Nature: The Dry 2 has a hungry temperate rain forest. The five women trek through deep, lush rain forest, slipping on rotting leaves, sinking into mud, negotiating swift currents, and constantly watching the dripping sky. The women's personality clashes are inevitably heightened, and then dwarfed by the vast sweeping landscape that threatens, at every turn,to swallow them whole.
  • Spanish film Gold (2017), based on a story by Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte, shows the effects of the Mesoamerican jungle on a bunch of Spanish conquistadores.
  • In Jumanji, in 1969, a young boy named Alan Parrish is sucked into the game, where he spends the next 26 years having to survive in a jungle where Everything Is Trying to Kill You. In 1995, he finally gets back out, but as they keep playing the game, the rest of the jungle starts to get out into the real world as well.
  • Jungle: The jungle comes across a living organism looking to devour Yossi. It even 'swallows' him twice: once in the river, and once in the quicksand. Kurt sums it up best:
    The jungle shows us what we really are. We're nothing. We're a joke. God fucked up.
  • Skull Island in King Kong. Everything there wants to eat you.
    • Softened a bit in Kong: Skull Island, which gives a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the native Islanders, and some of the local fauna - particularly the gigantic-but-peaceful sker buffalo - inspire more wonder and awe than terror.
  • The Lost City of Z is a biopic about Col. Percy Fawcett (played by Charlie Hunnam), a key figure in Amazon exploration and popularizing this trope in general. After a simple surveillance expedition, Fawcett becomes convinced he has stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient civilization that has been hidden under jungle foliage, a theory that he spends the rest of his life trying to prove, to the detriment of his career and reputation - although he was posthumously vindicated when those ruins were indeed found and cataloged. The Amazon is depicted as a place of constant danger and disease, but as Robert Pattinson's character says, "The jungle is hell, but one kind of likes it." Eventually Fawcett's exploration takes him down a kind of River of Insanity into a place of transcendent wonder that very much resembles the psychedelic final scenes of Apocalypse Now. Some critics who are more familiar with the real-life Fawcett, however, have complained that the film isn't crazy enough, since the real Fawcett was a notorious Cloudcuckoolander, and the film downplays both these tendencies and the stranger and less probable elements of his narrative. See below under Real Life for more.
  • The Lost Skeleton Returns Again features a number of hard-boiled monologues about the dangers of the jungle.
    My jungle... is the jungle. Not the house. With... chairs and things.
  • The oppressive nature of the jungle, with its ever present humidity and torrential downpours, is a major factor preying on the sanity of the Aussie soldiers in Vietnam in The Odd Angry Shot.
  • A running theme throughout the Predator franchise.
    • In Predator the film's portrayal of the jungle slowly moves towards this until the Predator invokes it full force by picking off the heroes one by one. As stated in the real examples, the actual shooting of the film was very tough due to the jungle conditions.
    The jungle... it came alive and took him.
    • Predator 2 describes the city setting as a "concrete jungle" portraying the dangerous city in much the same manner of the harsh jungle.
    • Predators has a massive jungle on an alien world made for the very purpose of hunting. It is cruel and harsh with danger lurking in the form of several Predators, alien animals and fellow "prey".
  • The Thin Red Line. The jungle is beautiful, oppressive, and indifferent to the sufferings of the soldiers.

    Literature 
  • Amazonia by James Rollins. Four years after all contact with an expedition into the Amazon basin, the lost expedition's destination, which holds the key to the cure to a worldwide plague, must be discovered at any cost. But the nightmare that awaits Rand and his team of scientists and seasoned U.S. Army Rangers dwarfs any danger they may have anticipated.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Loompaland is a Death World jungle — the Oompa-Loompas suffered from the double whammy of carnivorous predators, some of which could eat ten of them at a time, and unpalatable food (caterpillars, tree bark and beetles). (In the pre-Bowdlerised original text, they were black pygmies from Darkest Africa rather than Caucasians from a fictitious country.) Yes, their lives as Willy Wonka's secret workforce may be Happiness in Slavery, but when this was the alternative...
  • 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 Princess Bride: The Fire Swamp, 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.
  • CoDominium: The world of Tanith is a jungle world whose evolution is said to be over a million years beyond Earth's.
  • Conan the Barbarian: In "The People of the Black Circle", the eastern land of Khitai has jungles, where the natives and grey apes live, and the lethal 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.
  • Of the dozens of people on the two expeditions in Congo by Michael Crichton, only four are confirmed to have made it out alive (though some ran away earlier). A combo of this trope, a volcano, and Killer Gorilla.
  • The protagonist of Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series faces this when attempting to explore Africa in Conrad's Search for Rubber. 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.
  • 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.
    • For example, 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 planet Pyrrus in Harry Harrison's novel Deathworld 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 Girl from the Miracles District: The once-city of Sawa is overgrown with vegetation, full of creatures that want to kill you or turn you into one of their kind, and oversaturated with black magic.
  • 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...
  • Heart of Darkness: A search party is sent up-river into Darkest Africa to investigate the mysterious Kurtz.
  • Robert A. Heinlein
    • Glory Road begins in one, in Southeast Asia.
    • Tunnel in the Sky has a bunch of survival students stranded in an alien jungle in the early part of the story..
    • Space Cadet (Heinlein) has Venus as a swarming, hideous jungle in which humans cannot survive unprotected except at the poles.
  • The Hunger Games: A staple for the arenas at the Hunger Games.
  • The appropriately named David Drake story "The Jungle", set on a terraformed Venus which has become a Death World.
  • Joel Suzuki: In Secret of the Songshell, Joel, Felicity, Fireflower, and Darkeye have to travel through the Jungle of Darkness because they don't have the magic to get into the safe tunnel under the jungle. The area is infested with ferocious predators, including one creature that looks like a giant walking anglerfish, which breaks their mounts' legs before they manage to defeat it.
  • The Jungle Book: Invoked in "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 overgrown and swallowed the site completely.
  • Legacy of the Aldenata: In 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.
  • "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.
  • Non-Stop: As the inhabitants of a Generation Ship revert to savagery, the ship's bioengineered plants grow out of control, turning most of the ship into this.
  • One of the first "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 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.
  • Illustrated in very vivid detail many times by former United States Marine Corps Lieutenant Philip Caputo in his non-fictional account of The Vietnam War, A Rumor Of War.
    It took us all morning to cover the three miles between the landing zone and the village. Four hours to walk three miles, and the company had not once run into significant enemy resistance. It was the land that resisted us, the land, the jungle, and the sun.

    Everything rotted and corroded quickly over there: bodies, boot leather, canvas, metal, morals. Scorched by the sun, wracked by the wind and rain of the monsoon, fighting in alien swamps and jungles, our humanity rubbed off of us as the protective bluing rubbed off the barrels of our rifles.
  • Shannara:
    • 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 Heritage of Shannara: 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.
  • 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 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.
  • Tarzan's native habitat. While Tarzan is perfectly at home here, it tends to prove lethal to outsiders who attempt to intrude: especially if Tarzan does not want them there.
  • 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."
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Gaunt's Ghosts: 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. Ironically, the Untill's lethality makes it something of a safe haven from the forces of Chaos, who find it as impenetrable as everyone else.
    • Fire Caste features a Single-Biome Planet, Phaedra, composed of this. Appropriate, as this novel is a Recycled In Space remix of Heart of Darkness. The world is described in a character's journal entry as "Too lazy to be a death world, too bitter to be anything else." It is a place in conflict between the Imperium and the Tau, with only a few feral human inhabitants as natives with little strategic value to either side, where both sides send the incompetent or uncomfortable commanders that they just want to get out of the way. The conflict is stagnant quagmire in more ways than one, and almost as many people are lost slowly to infection, predation, or desertion as they are fighting the enemy.
  • The Zero Stone: The planet Jern and Eet escape to is this, at least where they land.

    Live-Action TV  
  • MacGyver (1985): The Amazon Rainforest is portrayed this way in "Trumbo's World". Trumbo is in a constant battle to keep the jungle from swallowing his plantation, and a swarm of army ants threatens to devour the everything in its path.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus: Parodied with the Forbidden Plateau of Roiurama, where strange primeval creatures still lurk in the dark, impenetrable forest, cut off forever from the outside world.
    No, no, no, next to that.

    Music 
  • Screamin' Jay Hawkins' song "Swamp Gas" combines this trope with Swamps Are Evil.
    The jungle's alive
    Things are crawlin' through
    Behind every leaf
    There's eyeballs peekin' at you
    Trees start to movin'
    The wind will not blow
    Somehow I worry
    But I really don't know

    Pinball 
  • Balls of Steel: The "Devil's Island" table is filled with erupting volcanos, cannibalistic natives, deadly spiders, and giant scorpions.

    Religion 
  • The Bible: While not a jungle per se, scripture features this during Absalom's rebellion. It's explicitly stated that the forest claimed more lives than the actual battle.
    2 Samuel 18:8
    8 The battle spread out over that whole region, and the forest devoured more troops that day than the sword.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons: In 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.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • In general, this is a common tropical spin on Green’s forests, as a natural result of Green’s love of untamed wilds, its profusion of ravenous monsters and gigantic insects, and its hatred of technology and skill in breaking it down.
    • The flavor text for the card "Ravenous Baloth", which depicts a massive reptilian predator, is:
      "All we know about the Krosan Forest we have learned from those few who have made it out alive." — Elvish Refugee
    • Zendikar is a 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 lost in it.
  • Numenera: The Caecilian Jungle is a large, star-shaped patch of rainforest at the northern end of the Beyond and home to a great variety of predatory beasts. Its depths are home to ruins and wonders — such as a frog-shaped temple that draws amphibians to itself, a miniature city and a garden of carnivorous plants — that draw a steady stream of explorers and expeditions, despite the fact there no one who ever went in has been know to come back out again.
  • Pathfinder:
    • The Mwangi Expanse consists of a stretch of trackless jungle covering a good third of the continent of Garund, and while the human and elven natives are cordial enough (if generally wary of outsiders), it's also home to apes who want to eradicate humanity, cultists of various demon lords, and a great variety of predators and giant insects — it's often noted as the one place on the surface world where one can reliably run into dinosaurs.
    • The Valashmai Jungle, a stretch of mountains and rainforests south of Tian Xia, is to the Mwangi Expanse what the Expanse is to the rest of the world and explicitly described as one of the most dangerous regions in the setting. The jungle is abominably thick, paths are swallowed by new growth within weeks, and the horse-sized insects and giant man-eating plants are the least of your worries compared to the local Kaiju.
    • Deep Tolguth is a giant cavern deep Beneath the Earth, with a false sun providing light to the thick jungle that covers its floor. It's home to immense populations of dinosaurs, who share the jungle with arthropods as big as they are, primitive tribes of humans and orcs, and the last city of the xenophobic, demon-worshipping xulgath Lizard Folk.
    • The Abyss has a few layers that fit this trope as well, as the Outer Planes' nature means they're under no obligation to restrict themselves to rational ecologies. Ahvoth-Kor, the realm of Angazhan, the demon lord of apes and jungles and one of the most popular demonic lords in the Mwangi Expanse, is a hellish rainforest watered by rains of blood and home to demonic versions of normal jungle predators. Gluttondark, the realm of Zevgavizeb, the demon lord of caverns, reptiles, predators, and the above-mentioned xulgaths, is a series of jungle-filled caverns roamed by dinosaurs, giant bats and Zevgavizeb himself.
  • In Rocket Age, most of Venus above the mists is covered in jungle full of dinosaurs, giant insects and horrifying diseases.
  • TORG: The Living Land 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.
  • Traveller: In the 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.
  • Warhammer: Lustria is the worst jungles in South America taken to eleven; most of the continent is covered in trackless swampland and rainforests teeming with swarms of aggressive insects stinged and bloodsucking alike, enormous carnivorous plants, giant snakes, and man-eating dinosaurs, all quite happy to kill you — unless the plagues or the ever-present crushing heat do so before they can (and that's without getting into the zombie vampire pirates on the coast). The only reason anyone ever goes there is to search for wealth and magical artifacts in the golden cities deep in the jungle. Pity that there's a race of killer dinosaur-people living there who take a decidedly dim view to people walking off with their sacred artifacts...
  • Warhammer 40,000: Catachan, the mascot for the Death World trope, is covered by a world-spanning jungle where everything is meat-eating, toxic, explosive and out to kill you. It's the recruiting grounds for the Imperial Guard regiment of Catachan Jungle Fighters who are all uber-manly, Rambo-looking soldiers who love every minute of it (at least, the 25% of Catachans who survive past age 10).
    • Selected wildlife includes the Catachan Devil (a centipede with jaws the size of a tank), Blood Wasps (insects that can eat a man alive), and the Catachan Barking Toad, a grouchy amphibian who responds to any disturbance by exploding, taking anything within a kilometer with it. It's been suggested in-universe the worse ones evolved from Tyranid organisms that lost contact with the Hive Mind and went feral.
    • There are several varieties of Man-Eating Plant on Catachan, every last plant is toxic, and the ones that can't directly kill humans worm their way through concrete, to the point where there are no permanent settlements on Catachan, everything has to be rebuilt every few years. It's possible the jungle itself is sentient and hates humanity.
    • The water is full of viruses and bacteria, to the point where Catachans are more afraid of disease than the plants and animals.
    • How horrible is the place? Well, at one point the planet was entirely cut off by Warp storms and under daemonic assault. When Imperial reinforcements could finally get through, the Catachans had taken care of the problem already.

    Toys 
  • BIONICLE has the "Forest of Blades", where soldiers have been captured and fused together with the trees, with their weapons jutting out. This is due to the presence of the Element Lord of Jungle, who kills all intruders who aren’t of the Jungle Tribe he used to lead.
    • The jungle of the isle of Mata Nui is crawling with all sorts of rahi. Many are hostile to the Matoran, and pose even a great threat to the Toa. Especially since Makuta is the one controlling them.

    Video Games 
  • The J. G. Ballard Botanical Gardens (AKA the Biodome) in Ashes: Afterglow evolved since the war to become an indoors jungle full of hungry Plant Mooks thanks to the radiation contaminating the water in the Badlands it's located in. The Dome is of the deadliest locations in the entire game, and having a loaded Master Blaster is very much recommended.
  • 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!"
  • The Donkey Kong games generally avert this in favour of Jungle Japes, jungles being the home environment of the Kong family. The Forest world in Donkey Kong Country Returns, however, has shades of this for its relatively high difficulty and general level of overgrowth, featuring trees much taller than those encountered in the Jungle world, forming a dark canopy over most levels. One level in particular, Muncher Marathon, could be called hungry, as it has the players running from an Advancing Wall of Doom in the form of a swarm of just-hatched spiders.
  • Several of the maps in Evolve fall under this. Truck sized herbivores will stomp you into a paste, smaller scavengers will gang up on you and rip you to pieces, huge ambush predators lurk in every sizable pond, and man-eating plants will devour you with one wrong step. And that's ignoring the gargantuan beast that's stalking you throughout the match, growing deadlier all the while.
  • EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: Marva Forest, home to the Duba people who are defensively territorial about their jungle. They also specifically disallow Zophy entrance. Unfortunately, they have permitted the Barracuda mercenary group to hide out in the caves deep in Marva, so it becomes necessary to fight through the Duba, their traps, the occasional irate snakes dropping from the trees, and Chief Duba himself to earn the right to pass through. Certain death, if the player characters weren't the World's Strongest Man, a pyramid witch, or a devil.
  • The jungles of the Rook Islands in Far Cry 3 are surreal, colorful and teeming with flora, fauna and fungi, to say nothing of the Ruthless Modern Pirates and Private Military Contractors. It's almost as if the islands themselves are trying to bring insanity and/or death upon those who set foot on them.
  • Gran Pulse in Final Fantasy XIII has a variety of climates, but fits the spirit of the trope.
  • Most of the Maguuma Jungle in Guild Wars 2 is not actually that bad; quite pleasant in fact, although there are a few places where you need to watch your step. On the other hand, the Heart of Maguuma to the west, the setting of the first expansion Heart of Thorns, is bordering on a Death World- filled with packs of hungry saurians, hordes of vicious chak, inhabited by several tribes of the froglike Hylek (some friendly, some xenophobic in the extreme) and, worst of all, patrolled by the Mordrem, particularly the deadly Mordrem Guard. This is the domain of Mordremoth, the jungle dragon. The jungle IS the dragon. And it is very hungry.
  • Mass Effect has a few of these, including Zorya and Pragia.
    • Pragia is notable in that the jungle consumes things in hours. Constant efforts must be made to hold back the explosive plant growth, and failing for as little as six hours means your carefully constructed building is now mostly consumed by plant life.
  • Guadalcanal in Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. It comes to a point that Conlin, the Player Character, mentions at one point that the jungle could very well kill him before the Japanese even come close.
  • In Rimworld, the Tropical Forest biome presents many challenges and not many advantages. Thick mud and choking undergrowth make moving around or building anything difficult, and if the predatory animals don't get your colonists, the rampant disease will - a talented doctor will be worth his/her own body weight in gold. The silver lining is it's just as deadly for any raiders who are foolish enough to come into your jungle home.
  • The jungle from Romancing Saga 3 is is nightmare labyrinth where you can get lose for hours to end because every exit randomly transports you to a new area. The key is following the different colored butterflies near the exits to your destination of choice. One false step, though, and you will be led to deeper into the jungle until you luck runs out and fall before the creature that lurks there.
  • 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.
  • Dxun, which appears in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and in related Star Wars material, is entirely covered in jungle and rainforest infested with a rich and varied assortment of vicious alien predators, and has a pervasive hot and humid climate that makes technology break down very quickly unless constantly maintained. It's not known as the Demon Moon for nothing.
  • There are many dangerous biomes in Terraria, but the Jungle is one of the nastiest to stumble into.

    Real Life 
  • This image of a jungle in the Western mind is Truth in Television that stems from the colonial times. A Japanese WWII veteran, interviewed in The World at War, claimed that Allied troops had far more fear of the Southeast Asian jungles than Japanese troops did.
    • Considering what happened at Ramree Island, the Japanese should have felt the same way.
    • It was a major problem for the British at first, particularly leading to defeat in Burma and Malaya. But commanders like F. Spencer Chapman, Bill Slim and Ian Stewart deliberately trained their men to regard the jungle as neutral, which led to success later in the war. Stewart's 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who spent months on end training in the jungle before the war, were the only British unit in Malaya to consistently defeat the Japanese. Chapman spent more than three years behind the lines working with the Chinese, and came to believe so firmly that 'the Jungle is Neutral', that he made it the title of his memoir.
  • Filming of Predator seems to have been a little like this. For starters, every member of the crew came down with a stomach infection from contaminated water.
  • 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.
    • A slightly different theory is that the jungle can't be colonized by humans without agriculture, and that all "strict" hunter-gatherer tribes that live in jungles actually do some kind of small-scale itinerant agriculture and livestock rising (fowl, pygmy pigs, dogs) or get extra food from sedentary societies through trade. If true, this would mean hunter-gatherers actually didn't colonize the jungles until a few thousand years back. Sadly, rainforests are as bad for remains conservation as they are for working archaeological digs.
    • The British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett was a formative figure in the pop cultural perception of the Amazon, with his fanciful travelogues describing an encounter with a gigantic anaconda, a tribe of what is either a South American counterpart to the Yeti or simply a very racist description of a native tribe, and the ruins of spectacular lost cities. As noted above, he was right about the lost cities, although he got a few of the details wrong: namely, he believed the civilization that built the ruins must have been a lost colony of a more "civilized" nation, such as the Vikings, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, or even the Atlantians), since there was no way the native South Americans could have built it on their own note . Fawcett was also very confident he'd find Living Dinosaurs in the Amazon eventually, although he never claimed to have seen them himself. This was likely part of the inspiration for The Lost World (1912) by Fawcett's friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Fawcett may even have coined the term "Lost World" in a letter. Fawcett is the subject of The Lost City of Z, described above under Film.
  • While technically rainforests, not jungles, big chunks of north-eastern Australia are like this.
    • Australian troops also fought in the Hungry Jungle in WW2, on the Kododa Track and other parts of New Guinea, Borneo and Bougainville. They later took what they learned there and brought it to the Vietnam War, where they terrorised the Viet Cong.
  • This is the reason why European colonization of Africa remained so limited for so long, even as the Americas and South Asia were successfully conquered. It was only with advances in pharmacology in the mid-19th century that Europeans, lacking natural immunity, had effective treatments for the diseases carried by mosquitoes and tsetse flies. For much of the 19th Century, West Africa was known as "the White Man's Grave."

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