It Can Think / Live-Action Films

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• In the horror film Animal, the monster pursues the cast to a cabin in the woods. At first it seems that it's simply a bloodthirsty beast, but it gradually becomes clear that the creature purposely herded them into the cabin to trap them and pick them off one by one.
• Army of the Dead: the zombies in this film come off as surprisingly fast, smart, agile and organized when the team faces them, as noted by Lily "The Coyote".
• The Killer Gorillas of Congo. Even more apparent in the original Michael Crichton novel where the apes use stone clubs, cross an electric fence by dropping a tree on it, and were able to guard the mines they guard for hundreds of years because they taught their descendants how to do it. They still have enough animal in them, however, for the protagonist's normal gorilla pet/companion/ally to fool them into not attacking her teacher/owner by acting like he's her baby.
  Munro: "I think they're smart — they're too damn smart."
• Creature from the Black Lagoon: The titular creature leaves no doubt about his planning abilities when he builds a dam out of branches to keep the team from leaving the titular lagoon.
• Creepshow 2 has The Raft, a segment where some teens are trapped on a raft in a lake where a carnivorous Blob Monster waits in the water to devour them. The longer the war of attrition against this thing goes, the creature reveals itself to be more and more intelligent: it lays ambushes, hides under the raft to trick them into thinking it's gone, uses spaced-out attacks to keep them on constant alert to wear them down physically and mentally, and even holds off on more effective attacks like rocking the raft or squeezing up through the slats to trick them into false senses of security. in the end, when the last teen has managed to escape it and makes it to shore, it simply leaps out of the water to devour him — it could have come up onto the raft and killed them any time it wanted but it simply didn't, raising the possibility it was merely toying with them the entire time.
• In Cube, this is applied to a structure instead of a monster, but it still fits the purposes of the trope. The protagonists openly wonder if the Cube is watching them and calculating. According to the sequels, there are human operators.
• Dance of the Dead: Two zombies carjack Jimmy's pizza van while he is arguing with Kyle. Also, one of the zombies at the prom still manages to spike the punch.
• Part of what makes the werewolves in Dog Soldiers so dangerous is that they're considerably more intelligent and strategic than most werewolves in media. Throughout the film, the werewolves demonstrate this several times, including...
  • Taking a cue from Aliens' Xenomorphs, the werewolves cut the power to the house before their first major assault, since they can see in the dark, and the humans can't.
  • When Joe is firing at one with a shotgun during the aforementioned assault, it snatches the weapon out of his hands and tries to shoot him with it.
  • After being stabbed through the abdomen with a sword and escaping, the infected and transformed Captain Ryan ambushes Cooper in the cellar, and he seems more interested in beating the shit out of the private his human form despises with good old fisticuffs, rather than just eating or infecting him; and he nearly succeeds in killing Cooper by pinning him against a support pole and trying to force the tip of the sword through Cooper's mouth, until Sam intervenes.
• Deep Blue Sea: There's an underwater facility housing intelligent sharks. The sharks pulled a Batman Gambit on the humans, herding them around so they'd flood the complex and sink it low enough for the sharks to escape! They even (possibly) learned how to turn an oven on while one of the humans was in it.
• At one point late in Deep Rising, the monsters start herding the remaining humans towards their feeding area. This is because the monsters aren't giant worms but the tentacles of an intelligent octopoid. At several points, it sure is taking its sweet time creeping out its prey before actually eating them. Later, when Finnegan comes face to face with the creature, it grabs him with one of its tentacles, then inquisitively brings him up to its face to inspect him.
• Exists: The Bigfoot seems like a mere raging beast at first, but it proves to be quite intelligent and a cunning opponent. It proves emotionally intelligent too; once it sees Brian is truly repentant for accidentally killing its child, it lets him live and leaves peacefully.
• The lions in The Ghost and the Darkness figure out the traps set out for them and evade efforts to shoot them. The real-life Tsavo Maneaters were notoriously hard to lure into traps, many times going around the traps set by Col. Patterson and striking at the vulnerable workers
• Godzilla has shown a surprising amount of intelligence in several films.
  • Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster: We find out here that Godzilla and Rodan are both much more intelligent than the earlier films let on, able to hold a fairly complex psychic conversation with Mothra and explain their stances on initially refusing to fight Ghidorah just to save the puny humans that keep shooting them in the face with missiles. Up until now they were generally treated as mindless animals lashing out instinctively, rather than self-aware beings with opinions and agendas.
  • Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II: Godzilla gets curbstomped in the first fight with Mechagodzilla where he mainly used his Atomic Breath which didn't effect Mechagodzilla. During the rematch, he only uses his atomic breath for a Beam-O-War before rushing into melee and beating Mechagodzilla down. He only starts using it again when Super Mechagodzilla is formed and stays out of melee range.
  • Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla: One of the larger showings of Godzilla's intelligence in the Heisei Era: he's the one to figure out Spacegodzilla's absorbing cosmic energy through his crystals and the city's tower and they need to be destroyed in order to defeat him. He also figures out that Spacegodzilla's shoulder crystals are his Achilles' Heel and start targeting them, prompting MOGUERA's crew to comment that he's much smarter than they thought.
  • Godzilla (1998): When Godzilla is tailed by three helicopters, he successfully managed to fool them into thinking he is hiding in a skyscraper, cue him bursting from the building behind them and initiating Curb-Stomp Battle. The final helicopter is destroyed when Godzilla crouches low to avoid being seen by it before devouring said helicopter whole. During the battle in the Hudson River, while being attacked by three U.S. Navy submarines, Godzilla swims straight at one of the subs, using the dorsal spines on his back to rip open the sub's hull, leaving it dead in the water and helpless as the torpedoes the Navy fired at him smash into the crippled sub, destroying it. When the protagonists are fleeing from Godzilla, he moves ahead of them and takes out the bridge.
  • Shin Godzilla: During his engagement with the JSDF, Godzilla pauses before turning away from its original path. The JSDF commanders and politicians think it's a sign the defense is working. Cue Godzilla walking over to the bridge the JSDF HQ is by and then kicking said bridge on top of the HQ. It promptly resumes its journey to Tokyo's heart.
  • See the Multiple Media folder on the main page for MonsterVerse examples.
• Gremlins: A lot of the problems arise from the human characters fatally underestimating the Gremlins' intelligence. After the evil Mogwai are spawned, they trick Billy into feeding them after midnight by sabotaging his digital clock, and on several other occasions they damage equipment to cause accidents, like cutting the brakes of a police car. Stripe knows full well that water creates more Gremlins, so he jumps into a pool when Billy pursues him, and also knows how to operate tools (he attacks Billy with a pistol and a mini-chainsaw).
• Harbinger Down: The crew wonder if the monster is intelligent, and at that exact moment the power goes out. It's also bent the drive shaft, immobilizing their ship in the ice. The creature was originally a cosmonaut involved in an experiment Gone Horribly Wrong, so it's likely the creature has simply maintained it's intelligence.
• The Host: The monster is some sort of horrifically mutated fish-tadpole creature, but it's shown displaying remarkable cleverness at multiple points. It plays dead while being shot at to trick the shooters investigating its "body" close enough for it to retaliate and then pretends to run away so it can double-back and charge its attackers when they pursue, it feigns being asleep when Hyun-seo and Se-joo are attempting to escape its lair so it will catch them out in the open, and even uses a dollar bill as bait when ambushing its human prey.
• In the 2007 film remake of I Am Legend, Robert Neville ends up caught in a trap similar to the one he used, with his mannequin friend as bait, watching an infected man hold back a team of infected attack dogs until the sun sets...
  • The alternate ending also shows that It Can Feel. The creatures are only attacking to get back their friend.
• In the Tall Grass: When he first enters the grass maze, Travis tries to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find his way back by tying pieces of long grass into knots. As soon as he's out of sight, the grass undoes the knot.
• It Follows: Hugh warns Jay that "It" is "slow, but not dumb". While "It" seems to just mindlessly chase victims, in the climax, the heroes try to trick "It" into following Jay into a swimming pool so they can electrocute "It". "It" notices the trap and instead starts throwing things at them.
• Jaws. The shark hunters finally realize that the shark is hunting them.
• Jumanji. The ominous drumbeat that draws people to uncovering the board game heavily implies that it wants to be found. It's stated outright when the young Alan and Sarah first play.
  Young Alan: Uh, oh. The game thinks I rolled...
  Young Sarah: What do you mean "the game thinks"?
  • The monkeys are smart enough to learn how to drive a car and to fire guns.
• In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, it even changes its form to a retro videogame console to better catch the attention of its next players. It does this explicitly after the young gamer rejects its board game form to play video games, showing that this isn't a natural evolution of Jumanji, it made a decision.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Muldoon in Jurassic Park (1993) demands that the Velociraptors be killed as they're far too intelligent; testing the electric fence for weaknesses (but never the same spot twice, "They remember," he warns) before they were moved to their high-walled prison. They seem to realise when the power is cut and claw their way through the electrified wire at the top. Even Muldoon underestimates their intelligence — as he's stalking one Velociraptor, another ambushes him from the side. His last words are a genuinely admiring, "Clever girl...."
  • "You sure the third one is contained?" "Yes, unless they figure out how to open doors." Cue Raptor learning how to open a door in the very next scene...
  • Done even more explicitly in Jurassic Park III, where it's implied the raptors' intelligence is improving. At one point, two characters are pinned behind a mesh door by a raptor. After trying in vain to get at them, it looks up at the gap between door and ceiling and begins climbing the door. There's another scene where the raptors leave one injured man alive and hide nearby, waiting for the other humans to come out of hiding to help him. That's not even mentioning the revelation that the raptors have their own language.
  They set a trap. They actually set a trap.
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park: It's not so much that they are outwitted but rather that they were distracted. Like any animal, they have an instinct to investigate any strange noise they hear. That doesn't excuse them from not learning, which any intelligent animal would do from its mistakes.
  • Jurassic World continues the tradition: the I. rex demonstrates much more intelligence than anyone realized when it tricks the humans into opening a door so it can break out by clawing up the walls like it climbed them and cooling itself so the thermal cameras can't find it. Once it breaks out, it's able to not only remember a surgery that it had years ago, but somehow deduce that the surgery was to implant a tracking device into it (despite never having been tracked via the transmitter before), and clawed out the tracking device in order to use it as bait for an ambush. Owen's four imprinted raptors are also shown to be incredibly intelligent, such as following complex training routines on a daily basis, outwitting a team of heavily armed InGen mercenaries, and strategically Tag Teaming the I. rex to take her down. Rexy the T. rex recognizes Blue as an ally in her fight against the I. rex, and defeats it by shoving the I. rex toward the Mosasaurus' pool. Rexy immediately backs away to avoid being eaten herself.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom: As a creature made with DNA from the I. rex, the Indoraptor inherited the smarts. When Wheatley shoots him with tranquilizer darts, he pretends to be knocked out to get Wheatley to come too close. He also figures out how to open a window, something his raptor siblings couldn't figure out in the previous film.
• Discussed in Komodo.
  Oates: I think these things are getting smarter.
  Denby: Either that, or we're getting dumber.
• Kong: Skull Island: The Skullcrawlers are largely shown as single-mindedly ravenous, but there are a few moments that indicate they have some intelligence beyond simply devouring everything that moves. The most notable example is when Cole attempts to perform a Heroic Sacrifice by covering himself in live grenades and offering himself up to be eaten to kill the alpha Skullcrawler. However, the beast realizes something isn't right, and instead of eating him, it swats him aside with its tail.
• Life (2017). Due to being composed of multipurpose stem cells, the alien organism becomes more intelligent as it assimilates more mass. However, the degree of intelligence it shows even before consuming any organic matter is frightening; starting with it breaking out of its glovebox by using a tool to cut through the glove.
• Romero's Living Dead Series gradually hints that zombies were slowly gaining more intelligence or could even learn things:
  • Night of the Living Dead (1968): The very first zombie that appears in the film uses a brick to break the window of Barbra's car when she locks herself in. Then later on, when Karen is discovered by her mother, Karen is eating her father as she has become a zombie. Creepily, Zombie-Karen had enough intelligence to grab a spade and stab her horrified mother repeatedly before presumably eating her.
  • In Dawn of the Dead (1978), as Peter fights the zombies off to get in the helicopter with Francine, one of the zombies had the smarts to wrestle the weapon away from Peter (and did the same with Roger earlier in the film). After the two remaining survivors take off, the mall plays its closing time theme. Every zombie in the mall shambles toward the exits as if they remember the purpose of the theme.
  • Day of the Dead (1985): Captain Rhodes is seriously freaked out when the Mad Scientist demonstrates that zombies can remember certain behaviors, even how to use objects from their previous lives as humans. Such as a veteran-turned zombie recognizing the bars on his collar and remembering to salute an officer... or how to use an M1911 .45 pistol.
  • In Land of the Dead, the zombies' intelligence has reached an all-time high. The leader of the zombies, Big Daddy, learns how to use an automatic rifle (and teaches a female zombie how to use it), the zombie horde learns to ignore the "sky flowers" (fireworks) that the humans use to distract them, and one of the undead prove mentally competent enough to chop the hand off of a soldier who has just pulled the pin on his grenade. The ending is a remarkably hopeful example of this trope, since the zombies look at people who are still alive... and keep on shambling forward, taking no interest in attacking them. Apparently, they became smart enough to get over their bloodlust.
  • Unofficial spin-off The Return of the Living Dead runs with this as well. Turns out that zombies keep a lot of their brainpower; it's just overwhelmed by the constant agony of decomposition (that's why they eat the brains). Tar Man uses a chain winch to rip open a closet door when a victim hides behind it, demonstrating puzzle-solving abilities, and they're capable of enough speech to fake distress calls to lure additional victims (the famous "Send more paramedics" line).
• Inverted in Nope. The Reveal of the true nature of "Jean Jacket", the UFO stalking and abducting the main characters, is kicked off by OJ realizing that its behavior only makes sense if it's not a spaceship flown by intelligent beings, but a simple-minded solitary predator. It isn't stupid, but it is a Space Whale that clearly doesn't have much of a strategy apart from eating safely and defending its territory. OJ and Emerald, who make their living as animal trainers, exploit this to lure, trap, and defeat Jean Jacket.
• In Pacific Rim, Kaijus get a few scenes demonstrating their intelligence. A list of what they have been shown to do: Use tools to their advantage, play dead, attack the heads of the Jaegers to specifically kill their pilots, use teamwork to take down multiple enemies and also try to kill an individual human that is a threat to their mission. Justified in that they turn out to be bioengineered weapons rather than merely rampaging beasts as previously thought, and the aliens who built them have been gradually improving the kaiju just as the humans have been improving the Jaegers.
• Comes up in varying degrees throughout the movie Phase IV. It's known from the beginning that the ants being studied by the scientists are inordinately intelligent, but as the film goes on they display a startling level of intellect and adaptability. At one point, the scientists spray poison onto a strip of land to kill a group of ants and create an impassible barrier between themselves and the insects. They wake up a day later to find that the ants had not only developed immunity to the poison and recouped their losses, but had constructed a series of reflective platforms designed to direct the desert sun onto the scientists' lab and overheat their machinery.
• Comes up in the Planet of the Apes reboot films:
  • In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the SWAT troopers have a brief Oh, Crap! moment when they realize that the apes are capable of using tactics like flanking and using cover. Good tactics.
    • This is an homage to a similiar scene in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, from the original series.
  • In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the humans are horrified by the realization that the apes can talk, that they know how to use guns, and that they understand Gunboat Diplomacy.
  Dreyfus: They're just a bunch of apes!
  Malcolm: (regarding the huge army of apes standing outside the settlement gates) Do they look like "just a bunch of apes" to you?
• In Resident Evil: Extinction, to assuage worries of possibly never being able to go out into the open world ever again, Dr. Isaacs injects several zombies with a serum made from Alice's blood to enable them to think and remember. It sorta works; the zombies are now capable of using items such as cell phones and a camera, but also become more dangerous because not only did the serum not remove the zombie's cannibalistic instincts, but it also made them faster and angrier.
• The unfortunate campers in The Ruins realize the plant-like entity they're trapped with is mimicking their voices to lure them into a trap. It also mimics a cell phone ringtone further inside the ruin because it knows humans will go to that noise. When it learns of one girl's strong desire to cut herself (to get rid of vines she thinks are inside of her), it proceeds to repeat her own Madness Mantra back to her until she snaps.
• Believe it or not, this comes up in Shaun of the Dead. The zombies still retain shadows of their former personalities. Zombie Phillip turned off the music he hated (right after Shaun told his mother that the Phillip she loved was gone forever). Shaun keeps Zombie Ed chained up in the shed to play video games with. Zombie Pete somehow got all the way to the Winchester like Shaun told him to (except he wasn't feeling any better).
• In the film version of Starship Troopers, the humans just quickly assume that the Bugs are dumb, mindless animals ("I find the idea of a Bug that thinks offensive"). However, the humans learn their lesson once the Bugs spring a massive trap and repel the initial human invasion force. It's later revealed that they are being led by extremely intelligent "Brain Bugs", a leadership caste. Keep in mind the war began when the bugs hit Earth with an asteroid from the other side of the galaxy and hit a population center to boot (although this is heavily implied to be a lie for propaganda purposes).
• In The Thing from Another World the scientists find that their reanimated alien is a plant, not an animal. A reporter finds the idea of an "intellectual carrot" mind boggling but is told there are plants on Earth (like the Telegraph Vine and the Century Plant) that have a "kind of thinking". He's also told that intelligence in plants is older than "... the animal arrogance that ignores it." Of course, the chief scientist keeps saying the alien is wiser than us, confusing intelligence with wisdom.
• In The Thing (1982), a remake of the above, the American crew of Outpost 31 pretty much collectively shits their pants when they realize how smart the eponymous Thing is. Everything from destroying blood samples to leaving false evidence as who has been impersonated to not assimilating obvious candidates to picking off the smartest members of the camp who could come up with ways of identifying it, culminates in trying to shut off the power so it can freeze again for a rescue team to discover it, while at the same time killing its human enemies in the brutal Antarctic winter.
• This continues in The Thing (2011), the prequel of the above, with the Norwegan scientists. The thing quickly proves itself intelligent enough to not only clean up evidence of an attack, but to also lie about seeing a different person acting suspiciously and leaving the bathroom with cleaning supplies to not only deflect suspicion, but lull its potential victim into trusting it. It's also smart enough to not attack the others with it on the helicopter, knowing to wait until they get to their destination so it can spread, and only attacking when it realizes they're not leaving. In the end, one is even clever enough to try to slip around the "it can't replicate non-organic matter" test they've been using by making a point of wearing its victim's earring — the only thing it miscalculated on was its intended victim being observant enough to notice the earring was on the wrong side.
• Tremors movies:
  • In the original Tremors movie, the Graboids can not only think, but learn very quickly, to the dismay of the citizens of Perfection. Though they start out just grabbing at whatever's walking around, and smashing through things, later on they dig a trap, and the last one even figures out both the dynamite-on-a-string trick and the loud-noises-as-a-distraction trick. When the characters are waiting on roofs for help to hopefully arrive, the worms start digging under the foundations to sink the buildings into the ground. Val still manages to outsmart "Stumpy" with some very fast thinking.
  Val: This thing ain't smarter 'n us.
  • Zigzagged in Tremors 2: Aftershocks, where the Graboids metamorphose into the next stage of their life cycle, three-foot-tall raptor things called Shriekers. Earl, who's dealt with the Graboids before, keeps mentioning their learning abilities as explanation for why the power and communications are suddenly cut off, and their escape vehicle's engine is destroyed. Later on, however, it turns out they were just attacking whatever was displaying heat. As Grady puts it, "You mean they're acting so smart because they're so stupid?" Later though, the Shriekers show intelligence, forming a ladder out of themselves to get up onto the roof the heroes were hiding on.
  • In Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, El Blanco, an albino Graboid that can't transform into a Shrieker, has gotten smart enough to understand that Burt can't kill until it comes onto his property. Though, on the positive side the ending and the following series shows that because he's so smart but can also get full due to being sterile, it's ultimately possible to 'train' him in a sense so it's possible to co-exist with him.
  • During the climax of Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, one of the "dirt dragons" attacks and consumes the punt gun that Hiram just used to kill one of its brethren; an onlooking Juan then asks in stunned disbelief if it did that on purpose. Later, it (like Stumpy above) shows that it's learned to avoid noises being made in an attempt to distract it from attacking the trapped Fu Yen.
• In Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, the first generation Werewolves, unlike the second generation Lycans, are unable to return to human form. Most consider them mindless, feral beasts, but they begin to bide their time, set up ambushes, and even set up crude booby traps like digging pits in the road to trap carriages. After Lucian makes contact with them, he finds they are able to understand orders and work with the Lycans whether or not they are in human form.
• In the movie Wyvern, the title monster proves itself far more intelligent than a simple animal. It destroys cars and intentionally uses them to block the interstate to keep its prey from escaping. It opens its attack on the town proper by knocking out the town's power and communications and continues to destroy any it can find. And later in the movie it uses one seriously wounded but alive victim as bait to try and lure the others out. Justified, as it's implied it's actually the child of Hel from Norse mythology and thus less a dragon and more a divine entity shaped like one.

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