Terrifying Pet Store Rat - Television Tropes & Idioms

The protagonist opens the cupboard in a haunted house and, terror of terrors, there's a rat inside. Everyone involved screams at the sight of the filthy diseased vermin. Except it looks like it's been recently bathed and brushed. And instead of fleeing or acting aggressive, it's looking expectantly at the actors for a treat. In really egregious cases it might even be white or multicolored instead of brown like a wild rat.

This is a Terrifying Pet Store Rat. While the animal in question is often a rat, it also applies to spiders, snakes, and anything else the audience is expected to react with fear or revulsion toward, despite the animal reacting like a pet. Spiders will saunter calmly over people instead of racing along in a panic. Snakes will crawl onto people's shoulders, staring them in the face comically instead of hissing and coiling defensively. In particularly bad cases "angry" dogs may have dubbed in growling while their tails wag.

This is generally caused by the fact that wild animals are really hard to work with. A wild rat might panic and flee realistically, but getting it to sit still long enough to for the actors to show up is a challenge, as is anything involved in moving it. So a tame ball python that barely moves is a better choice than a deadly jungle snake, especially since no one will notice the difference anyway. Strangely, this often isn't averted with CGI, as fast, complex movements are expensive to animate. Very often crosses over with Misplaced Wildlife.

This is a stock feature of horror movies, they often wander in the background for ambiance, act as a Cat Scare, or provide a Why Did It Have to Be Snakes? moment when a protagonist has to get past them. In severe cases, the central threat of a horror movie may fall into this trope. The main thing making this trope is that the animal is neither threatening nor believably wild.

Examples:

Graveyard Shift, a movie based on a short story about killer rats by Stephen King, uses several scenes of rats sitting placidly along the rafters staring at the characters in a way reminiscent of The Birds. Fortunately the movie shifts the actual monster to a giant bat.
Disney's The Haunted Mansion movie at one point has the son need to get past spiders to get into the mausoleum. The spiders are harmless tarantulas (orange-kneed, I think) and they're tame enough that he can move them with his hands.
- However, he is arachnophobic, so no matter what spider they used, he would still be frightened by it.
Hilariously done in the exploitation film The Gestapo's Last Orgy, where a woman is threatened by being hung over a pit of flesh eating rats... played by gerbils.
Nazi: If I didn't take my hand out, they'd strip it down to the bones in a minute.
The Cinema Snob: Yeah, sure. If your hands were made of windblown seeds and grain.
Played effectively in Willard, since the rats are supposed to be tame, well-groomed, and friendly because Willard takes care of them. It's just that they'll kill if they're told to.
The Indiana Jones franchise does this extensively. Especially in Temple Of Doom.Indy and Shortround nearly die while Willie refuses to reach into a crevasse filled with harmless stick insects and millipedes to shut off the death trap they're in.
- Willie freaks out because she's a fussy, high-maintenance load, not necessarily because the bugs are supposed to be dangerous. Indy isn't fazed by them at all.
- Kingdom of the Crystal Skull lampshades the use of non-poisonous (or at least less-poisonous) scorpions in movies. Mutt gets attacked by a largeish scorpion, and Indy says, "The bigger, the better...If you get bitten by a tiny one, don't hesitate to bring it up."
Played for Laughs in Team America: World Police where some "panthers" are clearly house cats.
Played for Laughs in South Park when the town is overrun by giant guinea pigs and other "guinea" animals such as rabbits and dogs, the animals in question are simple shots of pet animals shuffling about benignly in cute outfits, which have been digitally inserted into the animation.
- Also spoofed with the Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka, which isn't even a real frog, just a stuffed toy on a string.
Bones uses this from time to time when a corpse is found infested with animals eating it.
- Frequently when they find a decaying body in the sewer covered in rats, none of which show the slightest surprise or interest in the living humans walking about.
- In one episode they find the victim surrounded by possums. Again, no possum shows any hint of non-familiarity with humans.
- In another episode the dead Victim of the Week is surrounded by "feral" stray cats, which sit about and let themselves be picked up by animal control.
There's a History Channel documentary on the Black Death that uses hooded (white with grey or brown heads) rats in its scenes of flea-infested rodents carrying the Plague into port. Granted, they look a bit grubby, but their coat-pattern mutation is still conspicuous and unlikely to survive in the wild.
- Not to mention that the rats who contributed to the Black Death were black rats (Rattus rattus) not brown rats (Rattus norvegicus, the rat you're more likely to encounter on the streets or in a pet shop)
The English-speaking production of 1931's Dracula didn't even have the nerve to use real pet-store rats, but opossum and armadillo stand-ins.
Night of the Lepus. The infamous Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits movie. The rabbits look like a menagerie straight from a pet store (to be fair, there're only a few lops) which are mostly shown running through miniature sets in slow motion or in extreme close-up, smeared with red paint and backed by dubbed growling.
The Killer Shrews uses dogs in bad costumes to play the shrews. As you might guess from the quality of the effects, the dogs were not trained well enough to act scary either.
The Stuff uses a great dane which is apparently threatening its owner if it doesn't get more of the titular substance. It wags its tail throughout the scene while dubbed in growling plays.
Life After People, if not using Conspicuous CGI for the rats.
The Amazing Spider-Man uses this with lizards, who lead Peter into the sewers after Conners and participate in a fake out scare where they make Peter think The Lizard is coming.
Chopping Mall has snakes and spiders get loose in an actual pet store. They aren't played as dangerous, but they make it challenging for the heroine to stay silent while being stalked by killer robots.
In the beginning of The Mummy Returns, Evy and Rick are in an ancient ruin and encounter some snakes. They're Terrifying Pet Store Snakes; in an overlap with Misplaced Wildlife, some are tricolor milk snakes, which are known for having warning coloration similar to that of venomous snakes but are not known for living in Egypt.
- The venomous snakes they mimic aren't exactly from Egypt either.
A whole Terrifying Pet Store Rat swarm confronts Daniels in Shutter Island when he begins climbing the cliff face to the cave. Not only are they obviously well-groomed and curious about his presence, but the first one to appear is clearly dropped into view of the camera rather than climbing or jumping down to the rock.
Cujo tried to avert this by having the Big Friendly Dog's tail restrained to stop it wagging, which would have made it rather difficult to take it seriously as a savage, rabid monster.
Shamelessly invoked on various Animal Planet shows these days such as Fatal Attractions and Swamp Wars, the latter of which goes on endlessly about the evil scaly monsters infesting the Everglades while treating us to ostensibly terrifying stock footage of a Corn Snake!
The Food of the Gods uses this with its swarm of giant rats. They tend to stare around in a perfectly tame way looking for a treat. The rats' leader is even a white rat. It doesn't help that since they're just superimposed on miniature sets, they have no reaction to the human actors whatsoever.
On Criminal Minds, some well-groomed rats gather to investigate a bound captive whom the Killer of the Week had left to be devoured alive. They crawl on the bound man's lap and occasionally touch his bare skin with their forepaws, but remain obviously calm and friendly, even when rescuers break in and start shoving them away with an unrealistic delicacy.
In possibly the Ur Example, some of the rats in the 1922 silent film Nosferatu were obviously hooded rats, a pet store variety.
"Manos" The Hands of Fate has the Master's "devil dog," which on-set was the friendliest dog in the world.