When Trees Attack

Maybe when the winter days get short, the trees can get hungry.

— GURPS Space

Mobile, quasi-sentient-and-upward trees aren't necessarily evil, but they're often hostile, because that's scary.

This is the third type of tree listed in Diana Wynne Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Variations include, as quoted from the book:

1. Prehensile. These will grab you with their branches and try to eat you.
2. Mobile. These will quietly move about and get in your way. They may also try to eat you. In extreme cases they will attack buildings.
3. Poisonous. Avoid any drippings from these.
4. All these things at once. Run away.

These tend to contribute to Gaia's Vengeance and may populate an Enchanted Forest. A Plant Person or someone with a Green Thumb may summon these in battle. When facing these, killing it with fire is recommended. A good source of Paranoia Fuel: as something innocuous you see all the time, it really shouldn't be fighting.

Moreover, if you think about it, the concept of a mobile, fighting tree is actually a lot more worrisome than it might sound. For one thing, humanity has built a lot of stuff out of wood — like houses and boats. Notice a common theme? Those things are built to last. (And likely, a sentient tree won't be too happy knowing humans turn its kin into chairs...) Imagine a being, made entirely out of that substance, who dislikes you and has strength proportional to that toughness. An ambulatory tree would pack one hell of a punch — and that's not even taking into account how much the thing would weigh, or the sheer number of limbs (in both senses of the word) they have, or how it would be almost impossible to harm due to it simply lacking organs, bones and blood...

Hostile trees are also a source of humor, partly because of the absurdity of something seemingly so innocuous and ignorable striking fear into the hearts of men, and partly because "tree" itself is a mildly Inherently Funny Word. If you're lucky, they'll turn out to have more bark than bite.

Compare Plant Aliens and Treants (which need not be hostile, but fit this trope when they are) and Man-Eating Plant. If you see lots of these as Plant Mooks, it might indicate that you are in Mordor or a Garden of Evil or on a Death World. If your trees are attacking you, it may be a sign that they're epileptic. Or not... If the "trees" are actually just people wearing foliage to disguise themselves, see Mobile Shrubbery.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In a "Fruitsnackia" commercial called "Camping", the fruit-snacks Larry, Linus, and Llyod are sitting by a campfire next to a huge fruit snack tree. A fruit snack snake suddenly slithers from above the tree and they freak out, even causing Larry to Faint in Shock. A fruit snack bear comes out of the forest and slurps the fruit snack snake like a spaghetti noodle. The bear roars and apparently wakes up the fruit snack tree who then promptly grabs and eats the fruit snack bear. The fruit snack campers breathe a sigh of relief. Their lives are saved right? Not quite. The fruit snack tree suddenly blows out the campfire, leaving us with the sight of the trees' eyes and toothy grin and the campers' terrified eyes. The commercial ends with the tree eating the campers from behind.

Anime & Manga

• Berserk: At the beginning of the Lost Children chapter of the Retribution arc, Guts encounters a tree that had been used as sacrificial grounds for so many years the faces of the dead appeared on its trunk. At night, it awakes and wreaks havoc upon the bandits who'd been camping underneath it due to the presence of Guts' brand.
• The Big O: An evil Heaven's Day tree serves as a Monster of the Week in one episode.
• Digimon: Several mon species resemble tress of varying levels of animosity. The most prominent are Cherry/Jureimon, Puppetmon's Dragon and noted for persuading Matt/Yamato to turn against Taichi in Digimon Adventure, and the generic mook species Woodmon, from which Cherrymon evolves.
• Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics: A group of evil trees appear in "Jorinde and Joringel", brought to life by the witch who holds Jorinde hostage. The trees chase Joringel through the woods. When he loses sight of them and thinks they are gone, one of them sneaks up behind him and eats him. Luckily, it's revealed to be All Just a Dream as Joringel wakes up in a bed right after the tree eats him.
• Inuyasha:
  • Ninmenka us a youkai in the form of a peach tree who devours humans, particularly favoring the flesh of sages. Possibly based on a creature from real Japanese mythology, this charming demon is also referred to as the Tree of Human-Faced Fruit. The name comes from its fruit, which bear ugly human faces in response to all the people it has eaten. Humans can eat these disgusting things to gain demonic power and longevity, and a Ninmenka that has eaten enough sages can produce a fruit of true immortality.
  • A less hostile tree youkai named Bokusen'on also appears once in the series to give some exposition on Inuyasha's full-demon side. Though peaceful, he's presumably still pretty badass since his branches were used to craft the unbreakable sheaths of Tessaiga and Tenseiga. He's also how Myoga passed Tessaiga to Sesshomaru by hanging it on Bokuseno'on's face.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Steel Ball Run: Sugar Mountain's Stand takes the form of a tree and imposes a dangerous effect of being absorbed into it if anyone is unable to fulfill the use of the items they were given or try to escape with deception.
  • JoJolion: Downplayed with The Gingko Trees. The trees aren't fully sentient or malicious since their Stand ability only works by creating a pathway with their leaves and sending any person to a location instantly. But this provides some cons in the area to use the trees to trick nearby civilians for extortion money.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: One of these appears in the first season and has the misfortune of facing both Nanoha and Fate at the same time. It dies a quick death.
• In Naruto, the original form of the Ten-Tails is the World Tree. It became a rampaging Beast after its Chakra-laden fruit was stolen by a woman who wanted to use its power to end war. It reverts to its original form during the Final Battle.
• Negima!? (second season): In the manga, the first Star Crystal-based Monster of the Week takes the form of a prehensile tree that captures Konoka.
• No Longer Allowed in Another World: The first monster Sensei encounters is Death Tree, a monstrous tree that grabs anyone who gets close to it and drains the life out of them.
• One Piece: The Seducing Woods is made up largely of mobile, sentient trees. The forest got its name from luring visitors in with its smells of desserts and appealing look, then trapping them by having the trees move about so the visitors never escape. When some of the Straw Hat Pirates find themselves in the Seducing Woods and discover the secret (that the trees are mobile), their immediate solution is to destroy as many of these trees as possible so as to limit the trees' capacity to trick people.
• In Origin: Spirits of the Past, the Genius Loci forest uses freaking DRAGONS composed of foliage to attack its enemies.
• Pretty Cure: A tree-based Monster of the Week appears in every installment of the franchise.
• Ranma ½: A cursed cherry tree grows in the Kunō Family Estate. When Kunō tries carving his name and that of the "pigtailed girl" on its trunk, it comes to life and absorbs him, leaving him as a man-faced ambulatory tree that hunts down any pigtailed girls to ask them for a date.
• Sailor Moon: The Makaiju (the Doom Tree/Tree of Life in English). In the same arc, its keepers send out a Cardian that takes on various characteristics of a cherry tree, and lurks within one before striking. A tree from Rei's shrine also becomes one when infused with a Demonic Seed thanks to Kaolinite and transformed into a daimon named Mikuji.
• Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle: Yggdrasil, though mostly in the original light novels (in the anime, it resembles a giant skull with branches sprouting from it). It has an incredible variety of dangerous abilities, including regeneration, adapting to resist any attack and grow even stronger, eating Drag-Rides to incorporate their weapons for its own use, and implanting its seeds into people to strengthen and control them. It can be controlled and is used by the villains on the two occasions it appears.
• The Voices in the Dark short manga "Smashed" features one of these. The characters become addicted to some strange "honey", only for each of them to be squashed flat whenever they try to eat any of it. The narrator travels to a distant jungle to find more of the stuff, only to discover it's not actually honey at all — it's the sap of a bizarre tree that can teleport its branches around the world to swat anyone who tries to eat its sap.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters: Yugi and Celtic Guardian get attacked by an entire forest. Fortunately, he's able to Kill It with Fire.
• YuYu Hakusho: The Sinning Tree is a demon tree that traps its prey in an Ironic Hell until it has drained all of its life force. Kurama uses this on the Nigh Invulnerable Elder Toguro to give him a Fate Worse than Death.

Asian Animation

• Motu Patlu: In "Time Machine", while Motu and Patlu are in the Stone Age, they are attacked by a big tree with a face.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering: Aggressive plants of various types are a staple of Green, the color of the natural world.
  • The Treefolk, Dryad and Plant creature types, while not inherently hostile or homicidal in the game's lore, are most often represented this way due to the game's focus on battling. One specific treefolk, Crabapple Cohort, has flavor text detailing it exacting its revenge upon people who picked its apples. Some elementals also end up in this area.
  • There are various creatures and spells — such as Awakener Druid, Rude Awakening and Liege of the Tangle^note  the Tangle is the forest part of Mirrodin, covered in living copper trees — that, while not walking trees themselves, can turn lands you control into vengeful armies of creatures that can curbstomp dragons and eldritch abominations. While any land can be turned into this, the Green nature of these cards generally implies the animation of forests.
  • Stirring Wildwood, in which the entire frakking forest snatches your pteranodon rider out of the air and smashes it into the dirt. Unlike other such cards, it does not need an outside trigger to do this, but can "awaken" itself of its own accord.

Comic Books

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In the Season 8 comics, Xander and Dawn have a run-in with a bunch of talking, mobile trees with flaming limbs. Xander, bemused, asks if they got caught in a "legend blender".
• The DCU:
  • In "Atomic Knights", a botanist in the post-World War III world found a large species of bird's-foot trefoils (a bean-producing plant) that could walk around, communicate telepathically, and obey commands. Unfortunately a mishap convinced them humans were their enemies, and they fought back. They could also throw pods that burst with poisonous gas.
  • Blue Beetle: In one issue, Jaime Reyes is attacked and nearly killed by living trees, mostly because his suit refuses to harm nature despite the obvious and immediate danger it posed. (It has no problem with harming anything else, just plant life.)
  • Swamp Thing. Particularly good example when someone tries to kill him and it is generally pointed out, "Has anyone ever managed to kill a plant by shooting it in the head?"
  • Green Lantern (1941): In one of Alan Scott's stranger adventures, he and sidekick Doiby Dickles shrink down to microscopic size and discover a world of walking, talking trees called Mossboles. The Mossboles are stealing food from the other inhabitants of the micro-world, who had been stealing Doiby's goldfish in order not to starve. Yeah. Anyway, in the end, Alan discovers that the trees just want to eat some dirt, which doesn't exist in the micro-world, so he enlarges them to full size and turns them loose in the forest. Problem solved.
• The Lost Boy: The main villain in Nate's time is The Vespertine, a humanoid tree monster who is determined to get its hands on the magic key Nate and Tabitha have.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Guardians of the Galaxy: Groot. His teammates include a raccoon and a bunch of (other) aliens. The same is true for everyone else from Groot's species, one of them even tried invading the earth.
  • Man-Thing: Man-Thing fights one of these infected by a spirit of pure hate, and is one himself in the movie based on him.
  • X-Men: Black Tom Cassidy used to be a guy with a walking stick that he could shoot death rays from. Then he got turned into an Ent. He's since gone back to being an Irish guy with a goatee and cane.
• In Soulsearchers and Company #5, the Soulsearchers are attacked by grove of sentient, semi-mobile trees known as the Parliamentrees when they are travelling through the fairy tale forest.

• Zombo: On the Death World, the trees are as sapient and hostile to human life as the rest of the planet. Ramped up later on when a tree monster disguises itself as a giant christmas tree to eat the survivors of a crashed ship.

Comic Strips

• Peanuts:
  • In an early 1985 Sunday strip, Snoopy encounters a walking tree while playing golf, which runs about to position itself to block golfers' shots:
    Snoopy: Sometimes I think that as soon as I hit a shot, a tree runs out and stands in front of my ball.
  • The Kite-Eating Tree is usually just a tree that Charlie Brown has the bad luck of continuously getting his kite caught in, but sometimes it is shown literally eating the kites, thinking to itself, and grinning. While the Kite-Eating tree does seem to sadistically enjoy eating Charlie Brown's kites, eventually Charlie Brown seems to enjoy it once he realizes that he's the only kid in the neighborhood who flies them and without him the tree would starve.
• The Far Side:
  • One strip has a logger getting grabbed by a grove of trees, who start arguing about what they should do to him (such as cutting him in half and counting his rings).
  • Another has an angry tree who has grabbed two kids with its branches: "So! The little sweethearts were going to carve their initials on me, were they?"

Fan Works

• Better Bones AU: Brokenstar, transformed into the guardian tree of SkyClan, kills many of the Kin by deliberately crashing down on them in the rewritten Hawkwing's Journey.
• Chains of Reality: Subverted. Clyde believes that this us going to happen when Silas warns that Royal Woods will be in danger, but instead The Undead start rising from their graves.
• Cindy's Story: There's an offhand remark about Chelsea and Alexis getting kidnapped by Woodmain, a fanmade Pokémon resembling a tree.
• Consequence: The Menoa Tree helps Vanora and Verja escape from Du Weldenvarden by making the trees subdue Arya and Firnen.
• Elementals of Harmony: In My Little Praetor, Twilight Sparkle's Arboreal Abode winds up getting turned into a shapeshifting monster.
• I Don't Want to Be a Tree Anymore: The trees of the Everfree Forest are aware, capable of communication, and live lives dominated by absolute hatred of everything else — the birds and squirrels that eat their seeds, the larger animals that break and bruise them with their passage, the traitors growing in parks and orchards in civilized lands that were once forest, and especially the ponies that turned vast primordial wildernesses into pastoral fields. This is an impotent hatred for the most part... but, if sufficiently motivated, they can slowly begin to move...
  I never knew trees could hate.
  
  I never knew anything could hate as much as the Everfree trees hate.
• Lupine Tree: Lumber Jack, a sapient tree that feeds by killing animals and feeding on their decomposing remains, gets downright murderous if an intelligent creature enters his grove. He manages to control himself and not hurt Rarity, but Tirek isn't so lucky.
• A Minor Variation: Twilight Sparkle is in constant connection with plants, and can therefore do this when she wants to. It even extents to dead wood, allowing her to animate Ponyville's town hall at one point.
• The MLP Loops: In one Loop, Twilight's Arboreal Abode comes to life and kicks Tirek back to Tartarus.
• 1000 tearz or deth: A tree that proclaims itself the "demon of emoness" comes to life when our "heroes" stand in the forest. It doesn't do anything, though.
• Opening Dangerous Gates: A demon possesses a redwood tree and terrorizes a forest. It also spawns smaller, mobile tree demons.
• The Palaververse: The post on Corva mentions the death of the Fifth Cormaer: "ambushed and devoured by a carnivorous tree".
• In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, it is revealed that a tree monster was among the protections around the Gaunt Shack, but it's already down by the time the heroes get there.
• Pokédex: Trevenants are able to animate and command normal trees, using them as armies to fight off human encroachement.
• The Samurai in the first Holiday Special of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines accidentally kicks a Snover and makes it cry. Then he gets chased by a bunch of angry Abomasnow.
• In Tealove's Steamy Adventure, the final Giant Mook the heroes face is a mobile pear tree. Which inspires the line: "Cower! And dis' pear!"
• Through the Well of Pirene: While traveling through the Everfree Forest, Daphne, Naomi and Marcus are attacked by a copse of mobile, aggressive trees and vines.
• Downplayed in Rocketship Voyager. While in the ship's Air Garden, Captain Janeway is grabbed by a Soviet bioengineered carnivorous plant and has to be freed by Agritech Keshari, who explains that their natural prey is much smaller, usually tree snakes or small birds—they're kept on board for pest control and carbon dioxide conversion.
• Transcendence:
  • Adelina can summon Treants with her druidic powers.
  • Druantia displays a much more impressive version of this by freeing the Ancients of Dire Maul from their corruption and directing their attention towards the demons.
• The Twilight Child: One chapter briefly features a walking tree... made of custard. Which tries to eat ponies. Discord is responsible for this one. The fact that it's made of custard is what gives Twilight the most difficulty.
• Worm Grand Order: Blasto creates a huge tree that grows out of control and attacks people. Paul Bunyan shows up to cut it down to size.

Films — Animation

• The Care Bears Movie: A spell-possessed tree tries to kidnap Kim and Jason.
• DC Showcase – Constantine: The House of Mystery. While experiencing The Many Deaths of You, John Constantine tries running away from the demons who keep killing him, only to run into a tree and knock himself out because he's too busy looking over his shoulder. His next turn in the Ground Hog Day Loop he dodges the tree, takes out his pursuers and declares victory. Then the tree grabs hold of John and eats him.
• Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters: Godzilla is, unlike other incarnations of the monster, a botanical organism, and has ruled the planet for 20,000 years after driving humans off of its surface. When they do come back, they battle him and manage to destroy him with explosives, only to find that the Godzilla they fought was a relatively tiny offspring, and the real Godzilla had grown to the size of a mountain!
• My Little Pony: The Movie (1986): One of the obstacles the ponies face on their way to Flutter Valley is animated trees that fling sharp thorns from their branches.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas has a singing, walking tree with hanged skeletons dangling from it. It never actually attacks anyone, but most inhabitants of Halloween town are only meant to scare rather than harm.
• Tarzan (2013): Tarzan and Jane are attacked by mutated trees flailing at them with their branches as they enter the meteorite chasm.
• Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town had the Winter Warlock trap Santa and his penguin buddy using Killer Trees.
• Shrek the Third: Some living trees show up in Prince Charming's army.
• The Simpsons Movie: During his spirit quest, Homer is smacked around by "epipha-trees".
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The titular princess thinks she's being menaced by these, but it's just all in her head as she panics.

Films — Live-Action

• Babes in Toyland features Gumps, animated trees with faces who capture travellers in the night and escort them to the Toymaker.
• Big Fish: Edward is attacked by trees while walking on the path in the forest alone on a road which had a warning sign, but he knows he doesn't die that way, so they let him go. He ends up in the town of Spectre right after that.
• The Brothers Grimm: Violent perabulatory trees are one of the many hazards in the forest.
• The Cabin in the Woods: One of the monsters in the horror staple roster is the Angry Molesting Tree. When all the monsters break loose, we see its branches grab a guard and pull it offscreen, presumably to stick its sticks where they don't belong.
• A Chinese Ghost Story: There is an evil tree demon.
• Color Out of Space (2020): At the film's climax, the sheriff is suddenly killed by a tree animated and mutated by the Color, which snatches him off the ground before shoving a branch through his head.
• The Crawlers features a variant in which the accessible, visible part of the tree is harmless: it's their roots that have achieved mobility and strangle, crush, whip, or grow right through hapless victims.
• Cthulhu: The protagonist nearly runs over something on a backwoods road at night, but we only see a glimpse of a spooky leafless tree. A similar creature later tries to reach him in his prison cell — these scenes were however cut to a minimum due to Special Effect Failure. Presumably the creature was meant to be Shub-Niggurath (The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young) from the Cthulhu Mythos. Most likely it was meant to be one of Shub-Niggurath's Dark Young, as they are usually described as looking like walking leafless trees, only the "branches" are actually tentacles.
• Evil Dead:
  • The Evil Dead (1981): The infamous Rape Trees attack one character and start ripping her clothes off. Sam Raimi has since said he went too far with that.
  • Evil Dead 2: The evil-possessed trees return in more violent, but less lusty, form. The whole forest eventually comes to mobile life and lays siege to the cabin in the woods.
  • Evil Dead (2013): Mia is bound and choked by the trees, leaving her badly injured but not raped. She is instead raped by the Deadite itself, which looks like a giant thorny leech and enters through her nethers.
• In The Gods Must Be Crazy, Steyn ends up in a firefight with a terrorist. While trading fire, he suddenly notices that the sap from the tree the terrorist is under is highly caustic (a single drop makes him frantically wipe and scratch at the spot). So he riddles the tree with bullets, causing it to rain sap. This incapacitates the terrorist, who is writhing on the ground in pain, almost clawing his skin off. The police, when they arrive, are able to wash away the sap with water.
• The Guardian (1990) features a dryad-like witch who sacrifices babies to a living tree. One scene features a chainsaw-wielding guy going mano-a-treeo and winning.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): Groot is normally a Gentle Giant tree, but if you make him angry he will become a most dangerous one.
• The Happening involves killer trees. They are releasing a neurotoxin that makes people violently suicidal.
• Harry Potter has the Whomping Willow, which violently beats down anyone who approaches it.

• Jumanji: One of the game's cards causes giant plants with grappling tentacles to spring up and spread out across the neighborhood. We don't actually see them catching people, but one did drag off a police car. Later a poisonous barb shot from it fatally wounds Judy.
• From Hell It Came: The movie is about an evil and (barely) ambulatory tree.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, trees are prominently featured as villains' theme of sorts - Belial's teleporter looks like tree roots, the Witch Queen uses tree branches as Combat Tentacles and the Black Death-spreading Plague Tree is, obviously, a tree.
• Little Shop of Horrors has Audrey II as the main foe. Though not quite a tree, the potted plant is easily the size of one by the time all is said and done.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers:
  • Treebeard and the Ents are walking, talking trees (tree shepherds). When Saruman's troops tore down a sizable portion of the nearby forest for fuel, the Ents destroy his entire operation in a few hours.
  • The Huorns in the Extended Edition clean up the Uruk-hai survivors of the Battle of Helm's Deep brutally and effortlessly.
• Maleficent has Maleficent call on the forest she lives in to help her fight a human army, which causes a number of tree-men, tree-boars, and a tree dragon to come out and kick the humans' asses.
• In The Man Who Could Work Miracles, a poorly worded command from Fotheringay causes a rose bush to attack Constable Winch.
• Morozko: Baba Yaga has an army of attacking trees, who are a bit cowardly.
• The Navy Vs The Night Monsters: The eponymous Night Monsters are mobile tree stumps that secrete acid.
• Poltergeist: The living killer tree. It almost eats a kid.
• The Ruins had killer vines that grew more ridiculous over time. Before long they were able to mimic sex noises to inject paranoia into the couples.
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: The Enchanted Forest concealing the portal to Ta Lo is a Mobile Maze made of bamboo that moves at great speed (for bamboo). Pockets open and close moving through the forest, which one must stay in while turning at the right times to reach Ta Lo. If you fail, the bamboo can effortlessly crush a car, and the forest is said to "eat you".
• Trees: A "Great White Pine" serves the same role as the shark from Jaws in killing and attacking people. Apparently, this isn't an uncommon creature. The sequel, Trees 2: The Root of All Evil, has killer Christmas Trees attacking the town.
• Treevenge is about a group of vengeance-happy Christmas trees.
• The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy and the Scarecrow pass through an orchard of apple trees — possibly created (or animated) just then by the Wicked Witch.^note She is briefly seen observing the two from behind one of the trees Squeeing in delight, she picks one only to have the tree slap her. Challenged by the tree, she starts explaining, and all the trees start talking at once. Then the Scarecrow (the smart one of the group) tricks them into throwing apples at her, by snootily insulting them and disparaging their apples. Dorothy gets the apples, and in the process, discovers the Tin Woodman.
  Tree: How would you like it if I was to come along, and pick something off of you?
• Womaneater had a man growing a human-eating tree in his basement and, true to the title, feed women to it.

Gamebooks

• Choose Your Own Adventure: "The Magic of the Unicorn" features an ent-like witch of the woods in one of its bad endings.
• Fighting Fantasy has plenty, from hostile Tree Man which attacks players with its two main branches, to blood-sucking strangleweeds and plants with vines that sneak up on and choke the player.
• Star Challenge: In Mysterious Moons, a Negative Space Wedgie can send you to Andromeda. If you end there you may find plant-like aliens, unhappy because you mined for fuel their planet and who state that mitochondria are actually entities that control lifeforms that have them.

Literature

• Twenty First Century Chronicles: In Castle on Venus, there's a forest of alien trees on Venus theorized to have been brought there by a comet. Some of these trees can uproot themselves and act as animals. They're not sapient, though. While they're non-carbon-based, they don't shy away from trying to consume humans. Sure, they spit them out after determining that we don't taste right, but it's usually too late for the victim. They're also very aggressive and attempt to destroy any manmade structure, including the road that goes through the forest. One of the popular vacations on Venus is the safari, which involves seeing and, possibly, hunting some of the animal-trees.
• Alan Dean Foster::
  • Humanx Commonwealth: Several nasty variations of this trope populate Mid-World.
  • ''Spellsinger': The giant mushrooms of the Muddletup Moors prey on travelers with an empathic attack that causes their victims to simply lose the will to live, then absorb their nutrients as they decompose. There are also pine trees that sometimes drop exploding pine cones that act like land mines when unsuspecting animals kick or bite them.
• Belgariad: In Nyissa, there's a species of tree whose fruit is lethal and whose bark is poisonous to the touch, besides which the tree itself takes a sadistic pleasure in luring unsuspecting victims and feeding on them. Ce'Nedra, a dryad, collapses in screaming horror when she reads its thoughts. Polgara makes a point that systematically burning trees like that one is one of the very few things she and Salmissra agree on.
• The Boats Of The Glen Carrig: The first section involves a land full of prehensile-branched flesh-eating trees.
• Bones of Faerie: Due to the war with the faeries, the world is filled with enchanted trees and plants that try to attack and kill humans.
• The Book of Atrix Wolfe: An oak tries to bury Talis underground.
• The Books Of The Cataclysm: The Big Bad is Yod, a tree-like god or Eldritch Abomination that inspired the myth of Yggdrasil the World Tree. Yod has almost completely consumed the universe and it's only in one single time-stream that Yod hasn't totally devoured the cosmos.
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The dryads and other sapient trees, particularly in Prince Caspian, where awakening the sleeping trees is an important plot point.
  • According to Mr. Tumnus, the White Witch actually uses trees as spies.
• Chronicles of the Kencyrath: The willow trees can move autonomously much like the Old English legend. They generally don't attack humans, but do cause a fair amount of collateral damage including one poor soul who has a willow wand try to root itself in his flesh.
• David Drake has a thing about killer plants. The Jungle and Redliners both feature trees that will try to kill you in one way or another; in fact, there are several different ways a tree can kill in Redliners, including exploding to fling out armor-piercing spikes, spraying those who come too close with a fast-hardening (and acidic) sap, the bark turning out to be tentacles....
• Deathworld: The entire ecosystem of Pyruss is hostile. The brain bits seem to be some overly psychic plants. Blowing them up just makes the ecosystem angrier.
• The Dresden Files: In Summer Knight, one of the villains sends a plant monster after Harry. He calls it a chlorofiend, because saying "plant monster" sounds silly, but no one understands what he's talking about so he has to revert to calling it a plant monster. Murphy kills it with a chainsaw.
• The Cleric Quintet: In the second book, Cadderly is able to convince the elves to attempt the ancient and nearly forgotten ceremonies to awaken the trees so as to battle the orc invasion. Needless to say, the ceremony works. Unfortunately, the enemy quickly realizes that the trees are like siege towers, powerful and huge but also slow and flammable.
• In The Edge Chronicles, Bloodoak trees catch passerbys with their vines and drop them into the mouth they have on top.
• Eden Green: One of the alien species encountered is a parasitic vine that infests trees and attacks those who come near. The main character 'affectionately' nicknames them 'Whomping Willows'.
• The Elric Saga: The path to Mordaga's lair is protected by a grove of 49 Elder Trees, each of which holds an imprisoned soul. When anyone approaches, the trees release countless leaves which drift toward the intruders, latch onto their flesh, and start sucking their blood. The trees can also lash out with sharp, sturdy branches.
• Galaxy of Fear: Spore has an encounter with the vesuvagues, carnivorous trees with mobile, strangling vines.
• G. K. Chesterton has a short fairy tale (The Tree of Pride) that tells of a time when all trees were this way. Then one of them started to eat the birds that nested in it...
• Great North Road: The bullwhip trees on the planet St. Libra have long, coiled up branches that can whip out and hit a person. The whole planet is also conscious and not too happy about humans being on it.
• Harry Potter: The Whomping Willow, while firmly rooted in place, is extremely limber and highly territorial. Harry and Ron learn this the hard way in Chamber of Secrets when they crash Arthur Weasley's Flying Car into it. It comes up again in Prisoner of Azkaban when the Dementors make Harry fall of his broomstick during a storm — it ends up flying into the Willow, which tears it apart. Lupin mentions that it was planted during his own schooldays because he's a werewolf, and the tree was to conceal the tunnel he used to get to the Shrieking Shack every full moon where he could safely transform. Students used to play a game where they saw how close they could get to it — this stopped after one of them nearly lost an eye.
  Snape: ...And you did considerable damage to a Whomping Willow.
  Ron: Honestly, sir, I think it did more damage to us.
• Heralds of Valdemar: In one story, when Tarma thinks about making a fire, a sapling pulls itself up by the roots and runs away. Tarma shudders to think what its great-grandmother might do to someone wanting to build a fire.
• In The Green Knowe Chronicles, the ancient tree Green Noah that stands on the grounds of Green Knowe was afflicted by a gypsy curse which caused it to be possessed by a demon, allowing it to sometimes prowl around at night in search of victims (including, supposedly, the witch who cursed it). It almost gets its leafy limbs on protagonist Tolly until Divine Intervention causes it to be struck by a bolt of lightning and destroyed.
• The Illearth War features Caerroil Wildwood, a sort of male dryad. Fleshharrower's army is eventually swallowed up by the forest under his command. Since the Land is in many ways a darker, edgier version of Middle-Earth, unlike Fangorn he demands a price for his assistance.
• Into the Bloodred Woods: Esme's failed attempt to heal a dying Greta results in the growth of a massive tree semi-inhabited by her spirit. Said tree protects Ursula's encampment by devouring any of Albrecht's forces when they attempt to enter the woods.
• The Iron Teeth: Mimics disguise themselves as trees and prey on creatures that get too close. They're not actually moving trees though, they're somewhat like giant stick bugs or crabs that have symbiotic plants and leaves growing from them.
• Jakub Wędrowycz: One story features sapient walnut trees. They can't move, but due to radiation from the Chernobyl incident their walnuts have mutated into brains, so they can communicate via Telepathy and Mind Control people, and intend to Take Over the World. They try to enslave the protagonist, but he slyly slips them some weedkiller, then comments that their plan was doomed to fail within a few months anyway — walnuts fall off in winter.
• In the Juniper Sawfeather novel Whisper of the Woods, Ronnie makes fun of the idea that a treant is anything other than an ordinary tree. The tree gets revenge by creating a ladder of thorns to lure him into climbing twenty feet up. Then it stabs him with the thorns, knocks him to the ground with a branch, and kicks him away with its roots. Ronnie survives with multiple broken bones and a concussion.

• Lensman: Worsel the Velantian almost comes a-cropper from this fate in Galactic Patrol. Attacked by four tentacular beings and overwhelmed, he finds his telepathic command ability is useless. Lensman Kim Kinnison has exactly the same problem trying to save him, and resort is made to sharp objects. Authorial exposition clarifies the issue for the reader.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The Ents, though they aren't so much overtly hostile as simply reclusive. They do get pretty riled up over Saruman cutting down their ancient forest to fuel his war machines. They also tend to distrust dwarves for carrying axes. To give you an idea of how badass the Ents are — Trolls, one of Sauron's stock Giant Mook troop types, are corrupted imitations that are weaker versions of Ents.
    Pippin: It was staggering. They roared and boomed and trumpeted, until stones began to crack and fall at the mere noise of them [...] Round and round the rock of Orthanc the Ents went striding and storming like a howling gale, breaking pillars, hurling avalanches of boulders down the shafts, tossing up huge slabs of stone into the air like leaves. The tower was in the middle of a spinning whirlwind. I saw iron posts and blocks of masonry go rocketing up hundreds of feet, and smash against the windows of Orthanc.
  • Then there's the Huorns of Fangorn Forest; they're otherwise ordinary trees that have partially awakened and become "entish" — they drag dark mist around them, so you can't really see them move, but from the descriptions it seems that they have the speed of a bullet train when they get riled, and they are quite capable of annihilating an entire army of orcs without trouble.
  • Old Man Willow, an ancient tree living in the Old Forest near the Shire, is implied to be a particularly nasty Huorn, though he may just be a different being of a similar type, since he seems to have supernatural powers wider in range and scope than a typical Huorn... or else just a greater inclination toward evil. The other trees of the Old Forest are just as hostile, if less active — they deliberately try to get travelers lost in the forest, sway and whisper to each other even when there's no wind, and at one point tried to invade Buckland by planting themselves close to the protective hedge on its border so they could lean over to the other side until the hobbits cut down and burned them.
  • According to Tolkien's letters, he partly created the Ents and Huorns because he was disappointed in the way Birnam Wood travelled to Dunsinane.
• Manly Wade Wellman: Killer trees show up in several stories. One Silver John novel, The Old Gods Waken, had the Man In The Oak, a kind of undead tree-spirit, as its main villain, along with a grove of literally bloodthirsty thorn vines. He also did several short stories that featured evil trees.
• Men in Black: The Green Saliva Blues: The plot of this Expanded Universe novel involves the Zahurians, tree-based aliens that vacation on Earth and feed on just about any flesh-based life form, slicing up the creature (or person) with their roots and absorbing everything. Amusingly enough, the light from the Earth's sun is dangerous to them, as it eventually turns them into real trees (plum trees!).

• The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks: While not a tree, Jason's plant (grown from one of the titular plant's seeds) is pretty hostile at times, to the point where it actually attacks people who get within range. Fortunately, Norman is able to tame it.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Princesses Don't Play Nice has the final battle involve a big undead tree attacking the players by stabbing its branches at them.
• Sesame Street: One book features Cookie Monster discovering a cookie tree and trying to eat its cookies. The tree then grabs and menaces him until he apologizes for being greedy.
• Short and Shivery: The titular character in "Crooker Waits" turns out to be a sapient yew tree, which attacks the hero as he tries to make a midnight trip to his sick mother. Luckily for the hero, the plants he receives from three old women fend it off and ultimately kill it before it can finish him off.
• Solar Pons: "The Adventure of the Grice-Paterson Curse" features a creeper plant that is able to reach its vines through a window to strangle its victims.

• The Star Fox: Humans trekking across an alien world find themselves in a forest that attacks them. They hypothesize various evolutionary possibilities — though one admits they are trying to look for a naturalistic explanation.
• Time Out of Time: In The Telling Stone, during the battle at the Travelers' Market against Balor and his forces, the trees rise up from their resting places and come to the marketeers' aid.
• In Tinker, the carnivorous and mobile black willow trees are one of the apex predators of the Elfhome ecosystem.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, one of the biggest villains, Thorn, has turned himself into an ambulatory tree that towers over even the tallest Wild creatures, has oodles of magic power and is hell-bent on destroying human civillization.
• The Underland Chronicles: Lots of the plants in the Jungle are carnivorous.
• The Venom Of Argus by Edmund Cooper features an alien tree with long tentacles that harpoon prey and take it to the tree's mouth to be swallowed and eaten.
• The War Against the Chtorr: Shambler trees and their carnivorous tenants harvest an area, then move on at a rate of a kilometer a day. "A Season for Slaughter" goes into unsettling detail explaining how such a tree could walk (it has to virtually become an animal) and how it feeds.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Gaunt's Ghosts: The trees of Tanith were mobile, although very slow; the danger was that no path would remain in place. This is suggested to be Chaos taint. Although Tanith was lost the day the regiment Gaunt's Ghosts, Tanith First and Only, was founded, its member make marvelous scouts because of their ability to manage in these woods.
  • Horus Heresy: In Horus Rising, the planet Murder has trees on which the aliens throw dead bodies before they eat them. The trees themselves cause horrific storms that trapped a company of Space Marines on the planet. Fortunately, one Marine was so horrified by the desecration of the corpses that he blew up some trees, causing the storms to die down and so revealing they were behind the storms.
• The Wayfarer Redemption: To eradicate the monstrosities and madmen unleashed by the Timekeeper Demons, the heroes use female Banes who became living trees to smash them while resurrected Icarii archers pepper them from the air with an unlimited supply of arrows.
• The Wheel of Time: The Blight has prehensile but otherwise immobile trees, which are also poisonous — of course, everything in the Blight is poisonous.
• The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood, features hostile willows. They do not move visibly, but the narrator perceives them as malevolent and hostile entities and when he and his companion sleep beneath them, they experience a night's worth of nightmares, fearful noises and the impression of the trees moving around them.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The fighting trees.
• Xanth: A lot of trees are beneficial (a lot of stuff Grows on Trees), but some plants are actively hostile. Tangle trees, for example, grab living things in their prehensile branches and devour them.
• The "brainy trees" (as Rontal dubs them) in Exiles of ColSec are completely off of Jones's list; they're sapient but sessile. They are, however, telepathic and able to call the native humanoids to their defense...to say nothing of being able to mess with psychically-sensitive humans such as Samella.

Live-Action TV

• The Adventures of Sinbad: In one episode, the heroes face deadly trees that can walk.
• Angel: One episode has a demon tree that captures people with its vines and drains their body fluids.
• The Aquabats! Super Show!: The MC Bat Commander and Eaglebones Falconhawk find themselves trying to tie a ribbon to the top branch of a tree in "Überchaun!". The tree comes to life and attacks them; eventually Eaglebones summons The Dude to tie the ribbon, and the tree becomes dormant.
• Doctor Who:
  • The series has had these (in "The Keys of Marinus") and various other bits of plant-related mayhem over the years (e.g. "The Seeds of Doom" and "Terror of the Vervoids").
  • "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" has sentient Christmas trees. They turn out to be good, but are rather nightmare-inducing before you find this out.
  • "Knock Knock": Felicity gets grabbed and eaten by a tree in the garden (animated by the alien Dryads) when she attempts to flee the house.
• Haven: "Roots" has trees that extend their roots like tentacles to tear people apart. They were animated by The Power of Hate between the feuding Keegan and Novelli families, and revert to normal when they make peace.
• Legends of the Hidden Temple: The "Dark Forest" room has trees with face-like holes and arm-like branches. Contestants have to reach inside them to find the key to the next room, but are warned that they might be possessed by the spirit of a Temple Guard. Needless to say, "might" means pretty much always, and it's blind luck whether or not the contestant picks the right tree to avoid being grabbed.
• The Mighty Boosh: The Hitcher has an "evil tree" minion in one episode.
• Saturday Night Live: An early skit, "The Killer Christmas Trees", played like a horror movie — opens with Garrett Morris singing an a capella "O Tannembaum" while a fir tree skulks up behind him, and impales him through the chest.
• Star Trek: Voyager : A mild version appears in an episode where it's played for laughs. Captain Janeway buys an alien plant without realising it's prehensile, and is highly surprised when it grabs her while she's watering it.
• The Ultra Series has plenty of tree-based kaijus, including the giant artichoke monster Kendoros (Ultraman Leo), kaiju Aloe vera Zora (Ultraman 80), Gijera with its mind-controlling pollen (Ultraman Tiga), Jagira, an offspring of Gijera (Ultraman Dyna), and lotus-eater brainwashing tree monster Sorichira (Ultraman Mebius).
• The X-Files: "Schizogeny" appears to involve trees killing people. However, this being The X-Files, a fair amount of what is going on and why is left up to the viewer.

Music

• Brentalfloss' "Final Fantasy With Lyrics" includes the following line, set to an image of an oak with Brent's face:
  Draw your sword and stick it in trees that have human features!
• Iron Maiden: The cover of Fear of the Dark has Eddie as a tree monster.
• Rush: The Maples screaming "OPPRESSION!" at the uncaring Oaks, in "The Trees".

Myths & Religion

• English folklore has the rhyme "Elm do brood, and oak do hate, but the willow walks when you travel late". Oak coppices were thought to be full of Oakmen, vengeful fairies who fed travellers poisonous fungi. Willows were thought to uproot themselves after dark, to walk behind travellers and mutter.
• In Welsh mythology there's the story of Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees), in which the enchanter Gwydion animated the trees of the forest to serve as his army. There's a poem about it in The Book of Taliesin.
• In Japanese folklore, the jubokko is a youkai created when a tree grows on the site of a battlefield where massive casualties were suffered. Having gained sentience and a taste for human blood from the blood-soaked soil, the jubokko grabs anyone who gets too close and drains them of their blood, leaving the body to be pecked at by scavenging birds.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: Balance: The Raven uses the Gaia Sash to create aggressive vines, poisonous thorns, and, at one point, a Treant called Trent.

Print Media

• In 1874, New York World reporter Edmund Spencer released an article about an allegedly-carnivorous tree from Madagascar, to which a native tribe sacrificed women in exchange for a narcotic nectar. Although solidly debunked some years later, subsequent periodicals and authors kept right on repeating accounts of the "Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar" until at least 1932, long after it was verified that both the tree and the tribe had never existed: Spencer'd made up the story by exaggerating the characteristics of the familiar Venus fly trap.

Pro Wrestling

• Marutambo, the one-branched tree of Kaiju Big Battel. He's more so a man who was horribly mutated into a nearly indestructible bark monster.

Puppet Shows

• Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons: The Demon Resurrection Tree, it uses roots and vines to grab onto victims, and slowly digests them from the inside out. Liquifying bones and causing bouts of extreme pain over several weeks. Nankung Chu is only temporarily saved from this fate by being physically separated from the tree, but it somehow is still eating him on a metaphysical level, and will eventually die to it. And then it becomes a Plant Person after absorbing the Archmage of Hell, and fusing with him and his hate and its desire to finish eating Nankung Chu.

Tabletop Games

• Deadlands: In Lost Colony, the Century Trees inhabit the Toxic Jungle on the planet Banshee. They're mobile, they're named for their height (over 100 feet tall!) instead of their age, and they don't like you.
• Dragon Dice has the Treefolk, an entire race/army of sentient, mobile trees and their Naiad and Dryad allies, animated by Mother Nature as a last ditch effort against the forces of Death.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Monsters: treants, quickwoods, hangman trees, etc. These can get really creepy, like the death's head tree, which resembles a willow that sprouts screaming, biting human heads as fruit (each of which is the head of one of its victims) and the seedroach, whose "seeds" are animated cockroach-like constructs of woods that sting living beings and turn them into new Seedroach trees.
  • Another enemy, the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, only looks like a tree stump with a rabbit sitting on it... but if you get too close to it, it will grab you and try to eat you.
  • Ravenloft: Something in the soil of the Demiplane of Dread turns all plant-creatures that grow there into homicidal killers, even if they'd otherwise be good guys. There are vampiric undead treants there.
  • Eberron is a setting where all the NPCs are of relatively low-level, so that the player characters are the ones who kick ass and take names. The most powerful NPC in the setting? A level 20 druid who's an awakened tree.
  • Someone once jokingly mentioned a treant Ninja. But think about that for a moment. In its home turf, you're looking at a huge, deadly, practically invisible creature that can kill you one by one without anyone knowing what it is. Basically, The Blair Witch Project.
  • The deadliest example of this trope in D&D is probably the odic, a tree-possessing evil spirit so powerful that you can lose levels just by getting close to it.
  • Dragon:
    • #123: A coconut ent. So, <Bonk!> the movement rate isn't a big issue anymore.
    • #156: Killer spruce are a variant of the common conifer that don't tolerate any other living thing near them, and will try to kill anything passing by them by beating them to death with their branches. About fifteen percent of these trees also have needles laced with poison.
  • Heroes of the Feywild features the Hamadryad as a player character race. They're basically standard Dryads that are (for one reason or another) no longer bound to a specific tree, but still have the "plant person" look. An earlier book also released the "Wildkin", although that's more along the lines of "when shrub-elves attack".
  • Ironthorns are trees about the size of an apple tree, with leafless branches resembling nothing so much as a tangle of vines or tentacles covered with poisonous thorns. When a passing creature gets too close, the ironthorn snatches it with its branches and impales it on its thorns to feed off of the body.

• Gamma World features numerous post-apocalyptic varieties, both as attacking monsters, and a racial option during character generation.
• Godforsaken: Sapient trees look like normal trees until they reveal their true nature, with limb-like branches and faces in the bark of their trunk. With effort, they can uproot themselves and walk about, but usually do so only when no one is looking. The origin and temperament of sapient trees varies; they might be haunted trees possessed by spirits, trees animated by magic spells, or ancient mythical beings. Some are peaceful and noble, but others are downright wicked and cruel.
• GURPS Fantasy Bestiary: Fairy thorn trees shoot volleys of envenomed thorns at anyone who walks by them, inflicting their targets with a variety of psychological malaises such as selfish egotism or intense jealousy of others. It's not know why they go through the trouble of doing this, although some speculate that they remember when trees covered the land before humans came along with axes and fire and resent humanity's advance.
• Legend of the Five Rings has the Morei no Oni, a tree-shaped demon. By themselves, they aren't that tough: they can't move, and their attacks are neither fast, nor accurate, nor particularly damaging. However, they drop seeds that look like grains of rice, and if anyone accidentally eats one, the seed will eat that person from the inside out and eventually sprout as a new Morei no Oni from the corpse. And supposedly the forces of evil like to slip these seeds into bags of otherwise good rice. Enjoy your dinner.
• Mage Knight miniatures has the Tanglewood Spirit, and later, the Oak Warrior and Oak Mage. If moving trees are scary, how about a tree that casts spells?
• Pathfinder:
  • Several animated plants amply fit this trope when turned hostile. As most are evil, predatory or just highly territorial, they're all easily provoked into a fight. Treants tend to turn violent at any intrusion in or damage to their forest, frost firs and mosslords are actively evil and, in the latter's case, bear a genocidal hatred for civilization, hangman trees are predators who attempt to strangle passerbys with their vine-like branches, heartrot trees are natural plants corrupted into plague-spreading and malevolent horrors, and sards are enormous, crawling and lightning-wielding trees created as living weapons by the rulers of the First World.
  • Copsewights are undead trees, slain by and reanimated by supernatural blights. The resulting undead is mindlessly aggressive, seeking to kill blooded creatures that come near it and to spread its plague to other trees.
  • Several creatures, such as green dragons and treants, can animate trees to aid them in battle.
  • A forest blight's domain is often full of plant creatures allied to the ooze. To aid them, the blight's cursed domain grants fast healing to all plant creatures within it and boosts any healing they may already have.
• Talislanta: Poisonwood trees. They don't attack, but don't touch these things if you value your life. Don't get shot with a poisonwood arrow either.
• Star Wars: The tabletop RPG introduces Darth Rivan, Sith Lord and sapient plant.
• Warhammer:
  • The Wood Elves of Athel Loren have access to a number of such creatures in their armies:
    • Dryads disguise themselves as beautiful human or elven women until an enemy comes close, then shift back to their true forms as terrifying tree monsters and tear them limb from limb.
    • Tree-kin are created from the souls of dead Elves fashioning hulking bodies from dead wood and gnarled beaches, and march alongside their living kin in times of war.
    • Treemen, which are pretty much the same thing as Tolkien's ents, are created when powerful spirits merge permanently with living trees and are among the mightiest creatures in Athel Loren, living only to protect it and to bring terrible vengeance on anyone who would threaten or despoil their woods.
  • The Living Deadwood Staff, a creation of an eccentric necromancer known as the Daemon Harborist of Tilea, allows its holder to crate undead, mobile trees.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Bloodsedges are a type of tree that feeds on living animals by grabbing them with its branches and holding them against its trunk, where powerful acids quickly turn it into fertilizer. A copse of these things can devour an entire war party passing through them, and the Wood Elves believe them to be holy protectors of the wild.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Spiker (seed turns you into another one) and Brainleaf (spikes you and you turn into a zombie) are both horrifying, but non-sentient. This hasn't stopped at least one account in the lore of the Imperium seeding an Ork world with the things to keep the planet unusable.
  • Feculent Gnarlmaws are hideous, twisted trees with fang-lined mouths running vertically down their short, stocky trunks and only a few gnarled, leafless branches hung with bronze bells and spouting clusters of tube-like tentacles. They mostly grow in Nurgle's garden of plagues, but germinate in the physical world when an area becomes particularly corrupted by daemonic pollution.
  • There are several other deadly plants in the 40K galaxy, some typical carnivorous plants, others more unusual. The official website has a nice article about them, complete with rules for using them in games.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Treemen from above are now clan-leaders of an entire faction of tree-folk called the Sylvaneth. Aside from the Treelords, Tree Revenants, Dryads, and other tree-people, they also have about six different ways to spawn forests on the battlefield, which react violently to non-Sylvaneth interlopers and even more violently to magic cast near them. Oh, and they can be moved around by Sylvaneth magic, taking anyone within the forest along for the ride.
• The Witcher Role Playing Game: When fighting a Leshen, it's more accurate to saying you're fighting the whole forest. Trees, plants, animals - everything becomes directed to kill you.

Theatre

• Macbeth subverts this trope. Birnam Wood going to Dunsinane is not the trees themselves attacking, but rather soldiers disguising themselves with foliage.

Toys

• BIONICLE: The Morbuzakh and its Beta Test Baddie Karzahni are plant monsters with the ability to grow mile-long vines, and the Morbuzakh can even spawn mobile, spider-like "saplings" and bombard others with giant seeds that create mini vines upon impact that wrap around their target. It's more of a generic monster, whereas the Karzahni, while immobile, is a genuine Plant Person.

Video Games

• Age of Mythology has a god power that animates trees well-suited to tearing buildings up.
• Age of Wonders: In Shadow Magic, the Elves get a Treeman. "Concealment" there means that if this wall-crushing behemoth stands in a forest, foes will not see it until it's one step away.
• Amagon has a Devil Tree as the boss of Zone 2.
• Ancient Domains of Mystery has an entire level crammed with extremely tough walking trees. It's possible to get through the level slowly by waiting for them to move at random and fighting the few hostile ones... or by just smashing your way through it with brute force. Using fire attacks (which they are weak to) will make ALL the trees attack you.
• Ape Escape: The first game has vehicular trees in the forested levels that certain monkeys operate, initiating a small boss fight. The Trees are rooted to the spot, and can be avoided by staying outside the range of their flailing branches.

• Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland has the Spirit Guardian of the Forest of Ent.
• Athena: The boss of the first world is a giant tree that lobs projectiles and lashes out with its branches in an attempt to kill the titular heroine.
• Battle for Wesnoth brings us Woses, similar to Tolkien's Ents in personality, but more like Huorns in appearance. They're easy to hit, but pretty tough (if vulnerable to fire), can hide in forests to potentially ambush enemy units that stray close, and they regenerate.
• The Black Heart: Hashi, especially when using his ultimate ability, is a misanthropic and homicidal Nature Spirit resembling a humanoid tree.
• Blood West has the Mother of the Roots, a sentient tree growing in a pool of blood. She's a Stationary Boss whose sole attack is using her spiked roots to attack you, but she'll need to periodically absorb the blood she's growing in - at which point her bark opens to reveal a heart-like organ for you to shoot at.
• Bloodline Champions has a bloodline called the Thorn, which are more or less monster trees.
• Brigandine includes a man who's been sorta absorbed into the roots of a tree.
• Castle of Illusion: The first stage boss in the Genesis version is a living log that jumps out of the tree it's resting in and rolls towards you. The Master System version just has a tree as the first boss. The remake adds an explanation of sorts; the narrator refers to this boss as the "Grumpy Old Oak"; so apparently it was attacking Mickey either just because it was a grouch, or because Mickey woke it up or something.
• City of Heroes: The Devouring Earth has animated trees (Bladegrass, Razorvine, Deathblossom) and big animated mushrooms (Fungoids, Deathcaps) among its ranks.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn has Blossom Trees. While harmless on their own, they emit gasses that create Tiberium crystals, which are incredibly toxic to all forms of life on the planet.
• Crystal Castles has enemies called "Nasty Trees", which get more ornery as you progressed from level to level.
• Dante's Inferno has an area called the Wood of the Suicides. In it, a number of trees drop fruit that produce an area attack when they hit the ground, the effect of which on Dante is to cause him to try to kill himself unless the player mashes a button enough. Its effect on enemies is to stun and damage them. There are often points to attack to make them stop, though, and after you find out that one is Dante's mother, Dante gained the ability to use the fruit himself.
• Dark Devotion: The Anomaly, the boss of the Graceless Forest, is a mobile tree with three heads and spidery legs. It has magical powers and attacks by sprouting vines and thorns.
• Dark Souls:
  • Darkroot Garden has plenty of Demonic Foliage, and they sometimes like to hide in the ground to ambush you. There are also the sort-of mobile (they can rotate) Possessed Trees, but they can barely move and can't even attack, and just exist to block alternate paths.
  • Dark Souls III: The Curse-Rotted Greatwood is a huge tree that the locals used as a garbage disposal for curses. The curses gave the tree unnatural life. Midway through the fight, a pale arm bursts out of the tree, implying that something is incubating within it.
• Death Smiles has Whroon, the Forest boss, who is basically a massive version of the hostile apple trees from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
• The second-to-last boss of Demon Front, a giant tree monster called "Devil Heart", who can drop projectiles from above the players in increasingly massive quantities as the battle continues. It can also summon Man-Eating Plant mooks as backup, including oversized Venus flytraps that chomps on the player, and flowers that spit bullets.
• Diablo III: Subverted. The Wood Wraiths are actually fully mobile beasts who have evolved to look like trees and foliage in order to ambush prey and have nothing to do with plants beyond appearance.
• Disney's Magical Quest has club-wielding tree stumps called Stump Thumpers in the last segment of the Dark Forest before the boss.
• Don't Starve:
  • If you cut down too many evergreen trees, there's a chance that a nearby tree will become a ferocious Treeguard, monster shaped like a humanoid tree that will then try to kill you. Fortunately, planting new trees may cause a Treeguard to stop attacking you. Similarly, the Shipwrecked DLC includes Palm Treeguards, which spawn when you cut down palm trees and will try to kill you until you pacify them by planting coconuts to make more palm trees.
  • There's a similar mechanic with the Birchnut Trees. When you cut them down, there's a chance a nearby birchnut will "awaken" and become a Poison Birchnut Tree, an otherwise normal deciduous tree with purple leaves, a giant maw in its canopy, and a single eye perched on thin branches at its top. Unlike Treeguards, Poison Birchnuts are immobile, and attack by sending out waves of Birchnutters (small, mobile and aggressive nut-like creatures) and by attacking through the ground with their flexible roots. Like Treeguards, you can placate by planting Birchnuts to make new saplings, or by waiting a day or so until they calm down and turn back into normal Birchnut Trees.
• Dragon Age has sylvans, trees possessed by demons and spirits. They tend to lie in wait until someone passes by them, at which point they move to attack. The vast majority are mad, violent creatures that can cause sharp branches to erupt through the ground and impale smaller beings. A rare few seem benevolent and don't mean any harm to others.
• Dragon Quest: Treefaces and Treevils are common enemies. Both of whom are living trees.
• Dragon Unit have living trees lumbering around on their roots, who can attack you either with their branches or create Mini Mook tree-people. Killing one regular-sized tree-man turns it into three tiny ones.
• Dreamkiller have the Dark Forest stage, where it's filled with hostile, sentient trees. You are in a Dream Land of a patient with crippling Dendrophobia, after all.
• Dwarf Fortress: In pre-release versions, treants were planned to be units available to elves for warfare, but were eventually relegated to being fictional in-universe (showing up in artwork), and later removed entirely. The base game still has grimelings, something like Swamp Thing (though still a flesh-and-blood creature in the actual code). Treants are occasionally seen in Game Mods though, which tends to go about as well as expected given magma is the universal dwarven problem-solver unless the modder plans for that and makes them able to survive being immolated.
• The Elder Scrolls: Spriggans are particularly tree-like Plant People throughout the series. They have a Gaia's Vengeance tilt and are known as "Nature's Guardians." Depending on the game, they either must be killed three times before they'll stay dead or they come with a rapid Healing Factor that kicks in when they are near death. One of their favored methods of attack is to blend in with surrounding trees and plants, then ambush their unaware targets.
• Eastern Exorcist has the recurring Treant enemies, Plant Mooks resembling humanoids made of barks, with one of the bosses being the Treant King, a towering tree-monster.
• Endless Legend's Wild Walkers can make the Tenei Walker units, which are basically giant ent-like tree creatures that serve well as tough front-line troops. Like all other Wild Walker units, Tenei Walkers get even stronger when fighting in forests.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 3: Haunted Tree enemies, where the Monster Compendium says:
  An old tree possessed by evil. Can inflict stun and poison.
• Fall from Heaven: The Ljosalfar have "March of the Trees" as their World Spell (a powerful single-use ability). All forest tiles within the faction's borders (those unoccupied by enemy units) are transformed into Treants (10 strength) for five turns. After that, they turn back into forests wherever they're currently standing. It's only really useful if the faction is getting invaded and you lack defensive units.
• Fantasy Life has enemies that are basically walking trees in Elderwood and Tortuga Archipelgo.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy V: About halfway through the game, Exdeath, a powerful wizard who is the epitome of the Evil Overlord archetype, is revealed to have originally been a tree used to seal evil spirits. Eventually so much evil was sealed within the tree that the tree became sapient — and evil — itself, took a humanoid form, and set out to terrorize the world.
  • Many of the games have minor enemies that are trees or tree-shaped: the Treants from Final Fantasy IV, or the Dryad species from Final Fantasy Tactics.
  • Exodus (who is based off of Exdeath) in Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance appears as a summon monster.
  • Final Fantasy IX has the living avatar of the Iifa Tree, Soulcage, as a particularly nasty boss. Those who try to attempt the logically obvious "Kill It with Fire" will be unpleasantly surprised.
  • Malboros, recurring monsters in several Final Fantasy iterations, resemble giant trees with tentacles and huge toothy mouths. Frequently they rank among the toughest non-boss opponents in the game.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Sephirot the Fiend has the backstory of being the world's very first sacred tree. Five thousand years ago, a tree-like race that worshiped the tree prayed for salvation from the invading Allagan Empire, which caused the tree to become a six armed demon able to wield the power of nature and grow to colossal heights.
  • Final Fantasy Mystic Quest:
    • Early on, a boss is disguised as a tree.
    • Later on in the game is the King of the Forest, a giant tree that can walk and talk. The King is good, in fact you must go inside him and destroy the monsters poisoning him.
    • Not to mention the various tree-shaped regular enemies. The first, Mad Plant, is fond of putting the heroes into full-nelson holds. Yes, really.
• Gems of War: One of the troops associated with the Forest of Thorns is the Treant, a walking, talking tree. One of them is the main antagonist of the Forest of Thorns quest line, having been corrupted.
• Golden Sun: One of the first major enemies is King Tret, who normally isn't that hostile. Unfortunately, a Psynergy crystal impacted his trunk, giving him a vicious Split Personality that turns everyone within range into trees. Once that persona is under control (i.e. the heroes beat the sap out of it in a Boss Battle) and his injuries are healed, Tret gets his old self back.
• Guild Wars: Aggressive plants are a fairly common enemy type, ranging from small but annoying seed-things to full-blown mobile trees, often with spellcasting abilities.
• Gun Nac: The Wood stage has one of these as the boss.
• Golden Force: The forest level has a demon inhabiting a giant tree as a boss. It's a Stationary Boss whose main attack is by summoning spiky Vine Tentacles at you.

• Gryphon Knight Epic: One of the enemies you face is a giant mobile tree. One of its attacks is to extend its arms out and cover it with spikes.
• Half-Life: The trees that inhabit Xen attack anything that moves near them and, thanks to Good Bad Bugs, can be used to kill one of the ridiculously tough Gargantuas. It's speculated that the massive, impossible-to-kill Tentacles that are encountered in several portions of the game are their mature form.
• Heidelberg 1693: Johann Wilhelm, the first boss, is a human whose body is forcefully grafted into a massive tree, which he somehow has control over. And attacks you by Vine Tentacles when you approach. His human body is his sole weak spot.
• Heroes of Might and Magic: The Dendroid Guards and Soldiers. Slow, but strong, and their attacks leave their victims rooted in place.
• In Hocus Pocus, the bosses at the end of Episode 2. They are mobile and you can easily get cornered if you're not careful. Touching them means instant death.
• House of the Dead: One of the bosses in the third game, the Sun, is a large carnivorous tree with Combat Tentacles and human faces adorning its body.
• Illbleed: One of the boss monsters is a demonic tree that's taken over a lumber mill. Amusingly enough, when you first get to the boss it's undergoing repairs. Apparently, even in an Amusement Park of Doom attractions sometimes break down.

• Inscryption: Tree cards and other inanimate object cards usually don't attack, but if a card bearing the Leader sigil is played next to them, the sigil will grant its neighboring cards a single power point and allow them to attack.
• Kameo: Elements of Power: The first boss is one of these. He's named as Old Malwood.
• Kingdom of Loathing: In October 2009, thanks to the peculiarities of the in-game calendar, Arrrbor Day (an in-game holiday where pirates plant trees, hence the multiple r's) was just a few days away from the real-world Halloween. Thus "Arborween" was born: the Arrrboretum became the Shivering Timbers, with Halloween-themed trees (pumpkin trees, toilet-papered trees, the Underworld Tree, etc).
• King's Quest:
  • King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella had several screens' worth of the Type-1 variant, which would grab and kill you if you got too close to them.
  • King's Quest: Mask of Eternity has the Mandragor Trees, monsters found in the swamp that turn to regular trees upon beating them. They're immobile, but if you come too close, they'll attack you with their roots. And they can't be hurt by ranged weapons, which they will laugh off; the laughter is horrific.
• Kirby:
  • Whispy Woods, a boss in the form of a living tree who attacks by blowing air at you. Kirby Super Star introduces Twin Woods, which is basically two Whispys at once, and Kirby 64 adds mobile saplings named Whispy Woods Jr. Kirby Mass Attack introduces many relatives of Whispy Woods as enemies, namely Little Woods, Wicky Woods, Tower Woods, Floaty Woods, Wobbly Woods, and... Stumpee. Kirby: Triple Deluxe has Flowery Woods, a flower transformed by Taranza into a tree. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse has Whispy Woods take on a claymation form. Kirby: Planet Robobot has Clanky Woods, a roboticized Whispy Woods. Kirby Star Allies has Yggy Woods, an elderly cherry tree resembling Whispy Woods, and Parallel Woods, a counterpart of Whispy Woods from Another Dimension. Kirby and the Forgotten Land has Tropic Woods, a palm tree variation of Whispy Woods with a sick goatee.
  • Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe adds the Final Boss of the Magolor Epilogue: a gem apple that's been mutated by the Master Crown into a tree of limitless power, with the Crown taking the form of mistletoe on the tree.
• Krut: The Mythic Wings have a Tree Demon boss in the forest stage, resembling multiple logs all fused into a gigantic humanoid form towering over you.
• In Kult: Heretic Kingdoms, tree-based enemies can be fought in the forest. Unlike a lot of examples, these are more tree-stumps than full trees.
• La Pucelle had an overpowered demon tree for a boss. You can choose to go the easy way by going to a separate room to weaken it, or you can take the hard way and beat it down as it is. The hard way earns you a neat equipment at the end of the chapter.
• In League of Legends, Maokai the Twisted Treant is a tree brought to life by magic. His animation was not of his will, however, and more or less wants to find a way to return to his roots, so to say. There's also Ivern, the Green Father, though he's very unlikely to attack anyone if he doesn't have a very good reason; most of the danger he poses comes from his friends, which include his teammates and a giant stone golem called Daisy.
• Legend of Mana: At least one enemy is in the form of a walking tree, and the last boss is the Superpowered Evil Side of the Mana Goddess, the spirit of the Mana Tree.
• The Legend Of Pirates Online: Cursed Stumps are rare but powerful enemies that can only be found in the deepest forests or the most deserted islands of the Caribbean.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Some of the trees in the Dark World would spit bombs at you if you bumped into them... and then talk to you as if nothing happened afterwards.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Some trees, when approached, will reveal themselves to be mimics called Evermeans that uproot themselves and try to crush you. They're still trees, though, so they're easily cut down by axes and leave behind logs when defeated.
• Little Nemo: The Dream Master has Stumper, a tree stump that is trying to kill you. Oddly, it turns up in several underground areas.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The Battle for Middle-earth: The Fangorn and Isengard missions of the first game (both campaign). Ents (including the Treebeard hero unit) can also be trained as Rohan units in the first game, and as Elven units in the second.
  • LEGO The Lord of the Rings uses the Ents as well. You play as Treebeard (well, technically, Merry or Pippin sitting on Treebeard) in two levels, one where they first find him and head towards Isengard, and another where the Ents smash Saruman's machinery.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online has plenty of trees that will gladly uproot themselves and whale on you if you piss them off. All of them are Signature-level or worse.
• Lord of Gun have a giant tree-demon as the swamp level's boss. Firstly appearing as a normal-looking tree, albeit one whose bark have suspiciously human-like features, after you defeat all the surrounding enemies the demon then reveals itself as the stage's boss.
• Magical Vacation: The Holy Sapling boss of Magical Starsign is a gigantic tree monster that covers a good portion of both DS screens. Its main attacks are inhaling one party member (it has a face), gnawing on him or her, then spitting them out; and growing buds that bloom into flowers, then launching the petals at you. When you defeat it, it becomes a passive Man-Eating Flower.
• Meteos: These come in multiple flavors. The civilization on Planet Wuud, which consists of trees, and the civilization on Planet Florias, who are flowers. The inhabitants of Anasaze are likely cacti. Of course, since these are all different planets, they overlap with Plant Aliens too.
• In Minecraft, the Creepers are mottled green, have multiple legs but no arms, and according to Word Of God their hide feels like leaves. This makes them strongly resemble mobile, explosive plants. Notch has said that, were they real, their texture would be "crunchy, like dried leaves", basically meaning they're supposed to be concussive walking topiaries.

• Mortal Kombat: The Living Forest has talking trees that were (falsely) rumored to be able to eat the players as a special fatality. Midway took care of this oversight in their later MK games.
• Mother:
  • EarthBound (1994): The infamous Territorial Oaks, and their Palette Swap Hostile Elder Oaks. These, by the way, explode when you kill them. At the level you first encounter them, you usually survive only if you can press buttons fast enough to exit battle before your health meter runs out. Because of this, it's best to only fight them when they come in singles and, if other monsters are with it, to take it down last so that the damage doesn't count down for long before victory is declared, stopping the drain. And to make matters worse, they carry 1/128 items as well. Hope you enjoy pain, collectors!
  • There's also the Woodoh of the prequel, EarthBound Beginnings, and the Tree and Tender Loving Tree of the sequel, Mother 3. Most of them explode as well.
• Ōkami: Corrupted trees pelt you with rotten fruit.
• Overlord: The Elven hero Oberon, consumed by Sloth, merged with a giant tree that animates in order to attack The Overlord.
• The Other: Airi's Adventure: Underground Monkey tree enemies, such as Trees, and Withered Trees.
• Pac-Man World 2: Wormwood the ghost tree from Ghost Bayou creates a maze to trap Pac-Man and summons skeletons to handle him.
• Patapon: The third game has Treants, who normally don't move but, if you try to use fire weapons on one, it will wake up and start flinging fireballs at your army. If it happens to be a rainy day, they gain huge amounts of health regeneration.

• Plants vs. Zombies: While many tree-based plants exist in the series, the shooter games play with this trope more.
  • Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare: Two plants, Big Stump and Giga Torchwood, appear as bosses. The former has a club as a weapon and the latter a gatling flame gun attached to his arm. Giga Torchwood is able to set things on fire while Big Stump just beats up zombies up close. Torchwood was later condensed into a playable character class filling the role as The Juggernaut.
  • Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville:
    • The zombie campaign plot revolves around an invasive plant species (Dreadwood) that started overgrowing Z-Tech factory and destroying it in the process. It makes active attempt to fight the player off.
    • The Acorn class has the ability to transform into an Oak tree.
• Pokémon gives us Exeggutor, Shiftry, Tropius, Snover, Abomasnow, Phantump, and Trevenant. When you have an entire type of Mon devoted to plants there's bound to be a lot of these. Interestingly enough, Sudowoodo looks like this, but is actually a tree mimic made of rock. The weirdest yet may be the Ultra Beast Xurkitree, which acts very similarly to (and slightly resembles) a walking tree, yet is a living collection of electrical wires and zipties.
• Portal Runner: The Great Tree boss in the Dark Forest which attacks by shooting fireballs at you.
• Quest 64 and Quest: Brian's Journey both have a Treant. The former has a demonic looking tree, with a simple attack involving throwing around blades of wind. The latter looks more like a lively tree with lots of leaves, and attacks with some deadly rocks.
• Quest for Glory I: There's a dryad who is very protective of the forest, and if you kill or threaten the local wildlife she'll transform you into one of the local wildlife.

• REKKR: There's an enemy called Treebeast. it's a monstrous tree stump, and it shoots ghastly projectiles at you. They often disguise themselves as a normal-looking tree.
• RuneScape: The enchanted dead trees near Draynor Manor, and also in the Haunted Woods area; both places are controlled (or were controlled, in the case of the former) by Vampyres. This may or may not be a coincidence.
• Ryzom has an entire species of creature devoted to this trope, called "Intelligent Plants". Attack or otherwise mess with one, and they won't hesitate to kill you with their magic (as the Matis learned the hard way when they experimented on one such plant, the Slaveni).
• Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden contains a "Devil Tree" Mini-Boss fought near a gorge, with a glowing face and ability to lash out with roots or spew poison from a giant Foul Flower growing on it. Defeat said tree and it collapse into an impromtu bridge you use to cross the gorge.
• In Science Girls!, most of the enemies look like plants, and there's a Treeman boss. Subverted in that they're not biologically plants.
• Shining the Holy Ark: There are a couple of different (but similar-looking trees). You're walking along and suddenly the ground rumbles and a tree will grow in front of your face in the matter of seconds. It'll then proceed to attack you for... some reason.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey has Yggdrasil as having a Game-Breaker ability to manipulate time. Unfortunately, the people he stole it from are time travellers, and they eventually get it back, setting a Stable Time Loop in motion in which he always loses with the help of a Future Badass. Namely, you.
• Silent Assault has a fire-breathing tree as its penultimate boss.
• SMITE: Grover is a treant who serves as the mount of the god Sylvanus, and features as an axe-throwing support champion in Paladins.
• Stellaris: Apart from the possibility of a hostile empire or marauder horde using the tree portraits, there's also a possible event for a newly colonized world. In this event, trees migrate across the globe wrecking structures. This can be counteracted by burning the trees to the ground or creating a chemical formula to dissuade them. The latter option has the trees eventually figure out how to avoid your colony permanently, adding modifiers to social research but blocking off a district. The former option may result in some dormant trees waking sometime in the next few decades and begin actively attacking the colonists.
• Suikoden IV had a giant killer tree for a final boss.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario & Luigi:
    • Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has Fuzzbushes, small walking trees that spit Fuzzies at the Mario brothers, and the boss Trunkle, who could sprout smaller copies of himself, giving him Me's a Crowd powers.
    • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has Treevils, walking leafless trees that pelt you with dead branches. Like most plant-based enemies, Kill It with Fire. In Bowser Jr.'s Journey, Treevils are stated to have been regular trees that became monstrous after living for hundreds of years.
  • In Mario Kart DS's Luigi's Mansion track, the forest contains some trees that scoot about. They like creeping into the way of racers (making them more like trolling trees) but are otherwise harmless.
• Terraria has Everscream, Mourning Wood, Splinterlings, Plantera and various jungle/fungus related enemies.
• Thief: Throughout the series, the Pagans often uses tree-like creatures to guard various locations.
• Touhou has the Saigyou Ayakashi from Perfect Cherry Blossom, a demonic cherry tree. We never do actually get to see it in action because it is magically sealed by the body of its final boss, Yuyuko Saigyouji, and you spend the game preventing this seal from breaking; however, it is known to have killed many, many humans in the past. It's saying something about Touhou when a tree is one of the few truly evil beings in the entire series.
• Tsukihime: One of the twenty-seven Dead Apostle Ancestors is a forest that absorbed the blood of an Ancestor that Arcueid killed. It was named after the former Ancestor and became known as the "Forest of Einnashe". The entire forest gained sapience and was known to wander around, swallowing entire towns in its wake and tempting people to enter with rumors of an immortality-giving fruit tree. Being an entire forest, not much could be done about it for all of 800 years. That is, until Satsujinki came along... problem solved.
• Warcraft:
  • Treants and the larger Ancients are guardians of nature and common allies of the Night Elves. In Warcraft III, the latter type serve as their buildings and can be uprooted to fight or relocate the base.
  • The basic treants can be summoned from trees by the Keeper of the Grove hero. Neutral treants come in several varieties (all mobile, one poisonous, and one doubly prehensile as it can cause roots to erupt from the ground to immobilize and damage an enemy), all of them evil.
  • World of Warcraft: Balance druids can summon treants to fight for them, while Restoration Druids can become treants without any offensive capabilities but improved healing.
  • Treants are generic fighting machines in Warcraft, but in Defense of the Ancients there is a Treant Protector, a hero with one of the best strength ratings in the game — a tree that not only attacks, but causes the woods around him to attack also.
  • Kul Tiran druids, introduced in Battle For Azeroth, invoke this trope with their animal forms, which are all plant-based: roots for legs, branches for horns, and leaves for fur/feathers.
• Wario World: Tree Freak who is exactly one of these dangerous, semi-sentient trees and is fought three times in one of the levels.
• Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant has hostile trees as an enemy type, though they're largely unremarkable save for the spell-casting Halloweeches. An optional sequence involves the party being assaulted by seemingly half the forest in several waves of attackers.
• Xardion: Taken to ridiculous heights. The first area of the last level involves bomb lobbing flying/hopping trees trying to kill you once you land as you make your way to the planet's core. This is obviously the beginning of the Mind Screw section.
• Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana: Magamandra, the Ostracized Vile Tree.

Web Animation

• Chadam's dog Bella was crushed by a living tree that grabbed her with a branch before Chadam could get to her. However, it was Chadam's own magic that brought the tree to life, proven when the tree attacks Sandy when Chadam gets angry at her.

Web Comics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: Radical Land has helicopter head ents, "the most majestic of all creatures". They are basically walking trees with a helicopter for a head... and the helicopter has sunglasses.
• The Beast Legion, in Issue 03 Master Surya uses his magic to force the trees nearby, to attack Xeus.
• Bok The Neural: Almost all of dryads are looking to eat you.
• Dragon Mango: Peaches and Bleu Berry are captured by animated trees.
• Erfworld has Gumps, a type of forest-capable unit^note a pun on Forrest Gump used by the Royal Crown Coalition, shaped like giant, humanoid trees. There are also Tannenbaums, which seem to be pine tree-shaped, Christmas-themed Gumps.
• Geist Panik: Do not hurt Steve. You will regret it.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has "bound dogs", which are mobile trees whose roots are shaped into giant canines. They're said to be puppets or drones, not sentient creatures. There's also this more traditional tree-man.
• In Juathuur, the tree that Veithel turns into is able to move its large roots and swat at things. Veithel is also able to remanifest in a roughly humanoid form through the tree.
• Kiss Wood: The forest curses people so that every plant within it goes after them. It starts slowly but eventually giant roots will openly attack.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Durkon and the rest of the dwarves have a racial fear of trees, reasoning that Thor's lightning wouldn't strike them all the time if they weren't in some way deserving of it. His fear is justified when he encounters Leeky Windstaff, an evil druid with a small army of trees. In general, the dwarves hates trees to the point where they launch WARS against them. It's considered a major crisis when a tree root manages to break through the walls of the underground homes. It's also later revealed, when their Council of Clans find themselves in need of a new conference table, that they have a dedicated 'Treeslayer' unit in their military, who wield axes and ride on giant beavers and woodpeckers.
    Durkon: Just one tree has Colossal size, natural armor, damage reduction, hundreds o' hit points, and enough limbs ta make a dozen or more attacks per round.
  • Thor himself, on the other hand, finds this phobia ridiculous; he kept hitting trees with lightning because that's what lightning does, and the dwarves came to believe there had to be a good reason Thor was doing that. That being said, he's not shy about using the fact that dwarves war with trees to loophole around the "dies with honor" restriction of the dwarven afterlife.
    Hel: Infection! She's mine!
    Thor: From a splinter she got while fighting an elm!
    Hel: Trees are inanimate plants, you buffoon!
    Thor: Bravery knows no limits!

• Roza: One peril of the swamp is trees that move around and alter paths.
• Something*Positive: The Redneck Trees combine the Rape Trees from Evil Dead with the hillbilly rapists from Deliverance with horrifying results.

Web Original

• Mortasheen: There are a few, like the body-horror-inflicting Willoweird and the mostly-zombie-tissue Wormroot.
• Neopets: In the Tale of Woe site event, Mr. Krawley enchants a group of trees in the Haunted Woods to attack Gilly as she attempts to pursue him. The trees also showed up as Battledome challengers during the plot.
• Nightmare Beings: One user's dream features a palm tree-like creature with a single human foot, five fingers on each side of its face, and a Lamprey Mouth surrounded by multiple eyes.
• The Slender Man Mythos: Might be the true nature of the Slender Man.
• Tales of MU has the Green Men lurking in the forest around the campus. They're an example of type 4: prehensile, mobile, and poisonous, and yes, they will try to eat you.

Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: When Shake and Carl dump a vat of fryer oil in the woods, the trees take them to Wood Court. They also use Carl's skin as paper.
• Ben 10: Secret of the Omnitrix: Ben and co. are attacked by Floraunas (Wildvine's species). They look like living vines with a fly trap-like organ that hides their real head.
• Darkwing Duck: Recurring villain Bushroot, based on DC's Swamp Thing and Poison Ivy, can make any plant ambulatory and slightly anthropomorphic, including making trees into his muscle in crime.
• Doug: Roger scares◊ Doug with a story of punching trees in the forest.◊
• DuckTales (1987): One episode turns the Macbeth subversion on its head. When Scrooge goes to an island to retrieve a lost play of the local Shakespeare-analog, he's attacked by animated trees, among other dangers inspired by Shakespeare plays. They're actors in tree suits, of course, pledged with defending the lost play, which is actually quite horrible.
• Family Guy. Stay away from the Candy Tree — it feeds on children.
• Felix the Cat: In "The Professor's Instant Changer", Professor disguises himself as a tree using his Instant Changer device. Felix gets annoyed at the tree disguise and unwittingly whacks professor with a wooden stake, which allows Felix to reclaim his Magic Bag — but also prompts Professor (still disguised as a tree) to chase after him. Felix tries to counter him by turning his Bag into a buzzsaw, but Professor counteracts this by turning the tree disguise into a boulder, which quickly wears out the buzzsaw. Felix counters this in turn by lighting dynamite by the "boulder", with the explosion hurling Professor back to his lab.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: The Taking Tree in Billy's yard steals items and will only give them back in exchange for something better. It takes Billy and requires an extremely rare baseball card in return.
• I Am Weasel: One episode has trees attack humankind for destroying so many of them — Baboon's massive logging operation was the straw that broke the camel's back — so Weasel has to step in to make peace.
• Inhumanoids: The Redwoods are sentient trees who give assistance to the heroes every so often. Meanwhile, one of the primary antagonists is Tendril, a kaiju-sized shambling mess of vines that can grow clones of himself.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: One shows up, which Jimmy nearly relieves himself on during a Potty Emergency.
• Krypto the Superdog: One villain brings every tree in the city to life, hoping they will follow this trope. The scheme falls apart for two reasons: one) the trees actually appreciate the humans that take care of them, and 2) they are trees. They don't like moving around much and prefer being rooted to the ground.
• Little Bear: The Laughing Tree grabs people and won't let them go unless they make him laugh.
• Milo Murphy's Law: The Pistachions are an army of sentient pistachio trees created by an accident involving chemicals and plant fertilizer, whose successful overthrow of humanity can only be prevented by Time Travel.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Several episodes feature large, aggressive wolf-shaped tree-monsters called the "timber wolves".
• The New Adventures of Superman: In "The Tree Man of Arbora", a tree being brought to life near a meteor crater consumes enormous quantities of water
• Over the Garden Wall reveals in a quick Freeze-Frame Bonus that the Beast appears to be made of the Edelwood trees he cons the Woodsman into harvesting.
• Robot Chicken:
  • "Did I say Giving Tree? I meant RAPING TREE! But I'm sure he'll give you something. Like a BIG, THICK STICK UP YOUR FAT ASS!" Truly, the Giving Tree is not a chump.
  • "Say hello to the Kite-Eating Tree, you ugly son of a bitch!"
• Samurai Jack: Aku is not a tree per se, so much as he is an Eldritch Abomination that came from a cursed tree. In his most common form, his body makes wooden creaking and crackling noises whenever he moves, and his body language in general tends to be very stiff. His Shapeshifter Default Form is also very tall, while his Horns of Villainy resemble branches. The Scotsman even calls Aku a "tree-ogre" in Season 5 just before Aku disintegrates him.
• Sealab 2021: In "Isla de Chupacabra", one of these eats Stormy at the end of the episode. Considering the island also has the Chupacabras, the talking venomous hanging tree cobras, and presumably other horrors, it's an excellent example of a Death Island.
• The Simpsons mentions that trees cannot defend themselves — except for the Mexican Fighting Tree, of course.
• The Smurfs (1981): In one episode, Gargamel gets what he thinks is a good idea, using magic to bring the Great Oak to life in order to ask it where the Smurf Village is. Then he gets a bad idea, making it angry. Then he gets an even worse idea, doing the same thing to every other tree in the forest. Suffice to say, the chaos that ensues requires Mother Nature herself to fix.
• Steven Universe has the power to create sentient plant life to act as his guards. In one episode he accidentally creates sentient watermelon who end up beating his peers up.
• SuperMansion: The Earth Day Episode "World War Tree" had some trees come to life and attempt to wipe out humanity in retribution for how humans' activities had killed many trees.
• Totally Spies!: In "Nature Nightmare", the Mad Scientist Lasputin Zero makes intelligent trees in order to protect nature from humanity, creating an entire forest of them. They eventually go out of control, and plan to attack innocent people. The Spies eventually stop the trees by destroying the queen tree.
• Trollz: Simon used these in one episode to try and capture the girls. They were stopped when Topaz used a spell to make their roots grow and entangle them.
• The Unstoppable Yellow Yeti: Monster trees are a regular part of Monster Mountain, with one episode "Tree-ta" even seeing Rita grow one after Osmo and Gustav apply some special monster fertilizer to a pine sapling she found.
• Wakfu: The Monster of the Week in the second episode is a Treant causing havoc that Yugo heads out to stop.
• Winx Club: Season 6 has the Treant, ancient, human knights who shape-shifted into huge trees. Selina awakens these beings against Linphea. They keep Linphea's fairies and warriors hostage during the Winx's fight against the witches. Flora, with her new Bloomix powers, eventually stabilizes them by planting their roots back into the soil.

Real Life

• The manchineel: word of caution — try not to shelter from rain under this lovely looking windbreak of a tree. Blisters are the start of your problems. These were once used as a form of slow execution method: tie offender to one's trunk and watch them slowly die painfully of the various toxins. The conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon was killed by a dart covered in machineel poison; humans have always had an unfortunate but natural tendency to weaponize natural toxins that can be harvested.
• The Sandbox Tree. It is a poisonous tree. Its bark is covered with spikes. It grows up to 100 feet. Its sap is highly poisonous and corrosive. Its fruits are rather large and explode when mature, catapulting its razor-sharp claw-like corrosive-poison-laced seeds in a 300 feet radius with a loud bang. So, essentially, this tree has a 100m wide "Instant Death" Radius. If it could walk, it would enslave mankind.
• Y'ever get a papercut? They can attack you even after they've been cut down.
  'Round where I'm from, we call 'em "treevenge".
• When the death rate in New Guinea is broken down by cause, tree-related accidents come at the top of the list. This is mainly from people either climbing coconut trees to harvest the fruit and falling. However, a surprising number of injuries and deaths are from people napping or walking beneath coconut trees and having a ripe coconut fall on their heads. The trees can get up to 25 to 30 meters high, and the nuts can weigh up to two kilos. The impact force from a heavy coconut falling from one of the taller trees can easily crack a skull, and sometimes is fatal.
• Durian trees, found in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, are even worse: They potentially grow taller than coconut trees, have even heavier fruit which are covered in Spikes of Doom. A falling durian packs enough punch to straight up murder cows. Also, to add insult to injury, they stink to high heaven.
• The New World version is Brazil nuts. They're big and notoriously tough-shelled.
• In a less tropical version of the coconut example, you have the sugar pine. It produces enormous pine cones known unsubtly as "widowmaker" cones. Stand beneath them at your own peril.
• In the Land Down Under, there's eucalyptus trees which are Made of Explodium. What happens that the oil-rich Eucalyptus tree combined with the hot outback sun and a spark in the wrong place can combine to make the tree combust. They don't need to explode to kill you: several subspecies of eucalyptus also known as gum trees (or alternatively, widow-makers) have a tendency to shed potentially rather large branches, even on a completely still day. For some of these species, the bigger branches tend to weigh in at a good 15 pounds or so, so one landing on your head from 10 or so feet is a good way to meet your maker.
• Statistically speaking, you're about ten times as likely to die from falling coconuts as from shark attacks.
• More a bush than a tree, but the tumbleweeds that add local color to movie Westerns can actually be rather dangerous, as they can grow to the size of an ATV and are covered in sharp edges and thorns. In drought years when they tend to flourish, large swarms of wind-blown tumblers have caused drivers to crash by covering their windshields, and their dry, bristling branches are highly flammable, meaning if one gets blown through a campfire it can bounce along for miles, setting the countryside ablaze.
• Another native of the Land Down Under is the gympie gympie tree, which looks deceptively harmless. If you so much as brush up against any part of this plant — the stem, the fruit, even the leaves — you will immediately struck with some of the the worst pain you could ever possibly experience. This is because the plant is coated in very fine hairs tipped with silica pods that easily penetrate human skin, releasing a potent, pain-inducing compound. The pain from this is so intense that it's killed humans, dogs, and even horses either through shock or pain-induced suicide. This pain can last for months or even years, recurring from even the slightest touch or motion, because the hairs are small enough to get under the skin and don't break down in the body. And did we mention the gympie gympie sheds its hairs constantly, and they can be carried by the wind into your eyes and nose?
• Not a tree, but similarly massive and sturdy when compared to other freshwater flora: The giant water lily of South America is an aggressive slow-motion attacker of other plants, whirling its heavily-spiked stalks and buds to batter aside floating water-lettuce and clear space for said buds to unfurl. As its huge circular pads unroll, more spikes on the mega-leaves' undersides stab nearby floating plants or shove them whole underwater, inexorably excluding rival vegetation from the big plant's territory. Once established at the water's surface, its giant pads cut off light to any bottom-growing plants and algae nearby, leaving the victorious lily without competitors. Speed up footage of this happening, and you'll swear you're watching a furious Botanical Abomination at work.
• Another deadly Australian tree is the Bunya Pine. Sure, it may not seem that way at first and its nuts are even a delicacy. But for half of the year, people are in danger from falling pinecones. This may seem ridiculous to anyone familiar with North American or European pinecones, but Bunya Pines can grow up to over 10 stories in height, and the cone can grow to be the size of a large beach ball and weigh as much as the average toddler. As such, these suckers pack a much bigger punch than most other pinecones and have caused not only vehicle damage but both serious and fatal injuries. The only reason people can safely harvest the nuts of these damn trees is because they went and climbed up the pines before the cones are set to fall, which the native aborigines have done for decades.

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