Giant Squid

Squid, octopus, whatever... it wants to eat you.

"...Just so you understand exactly what it is you're dealing with: besides its eight huge tentacles, this thing has two whips. Each one is probably as long as this room and three or four feet thick. Those whips are covered with suction cups as big as this notepad. In the center of each cup is a claw as big as my fist and razor-sharp. The squid grabs and impales its prey with those whips and drags it towards its beak, shredding the flesh as it goes, and these things can shred a one-hundred-pound tuna in five seconds. Its beak is like an eagle's, only it's about fifty times bigger and can bite through steel. Now, you make a mistake trying to kill this thing, and it gets you first... you pray to God those whips kill you before you get to that beak."

— Whip Dalton, The Beast

Aside from being a plentiful source of low grade calamari ^note  Extremely low-grade; they use ammonia to help them stay afloat, and ammonia is definitely not good eats in most parts of the world., Giant Squid are just as appetizingly useful for their role as Sea Monsters roaming the deep, attacking boats full of Cutthroat Island extras and being an all round menace to the high seas.

As a real life species, giant squid are believed to have inspired Norse tales of the Kraken and as one of The Oldest Ones in the Book had a lot of overlap with the epic Kraken and Leviathan. After Jules Vernes's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Giant Squid became a much more of a monster in the vein of any other "Gigantic Animal" monster: much more explicitly a larger version of something already known, scientifically unstudied but explainable and belonging to a realm not yet fully discovered, in this case, the depths of the sea.

Being mostly tentacle, the Giant Squid has a variety of ways in which it may be depicted on screen. You might see only the tentacles, perhaps the top of the head occasionally peaks out of the water. A full body shot may be a climatic reveal and seeing the beaked mouth may be reserved for the death scene of some poor sucker being slowly dragged into it. Very often the tentacles almost seem to act as their own monster following the principle of only taking what is on screen as being real.

Authors, designers and illustrators not always being sticklers for accuracy, the trope Giant Squid includes giant octopuses and giant-sea-creatures-that-are-some-weird-hybrid-of-squids-and-octopuses, as well.

Subtrope of Sea Monster and Tentacled Terror. See also Giant Enemy Crab. The really big ones may also qualify as Kaiju.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In 2005 the UK Independence Party or UKIP, a Euro Sceptic party, decided to portray the EU as a Giant Blue Octopus attacking London with Combat Tentacles in this Party Political Broadcast.

Anime & Manga

• Doraemon
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil, an adventure taking place underwater, had the gang being menaced by a giant squid who destroys their underwater bunker and later tried sticking a tentacle through the windows.
  • Doraemon: Great Adventure in the Antarctic Kachi Kochi has Octogon, an ancient, tentacled monster in the ruins of Hyuga Hyuga that attacks the gang when they arrive.
• 3×3 Eyes: Elder Pael resembles a colossal squid the size of an airplane, with an incredibly elongated body and a prawn-like head. Justified, since Hyoma like himself can take mix-and-match forms thanks to their ability to merge and assimilate other creatures.
• Dragon Ball: During the Red Ribbon arc, General Blue swaps an arrow signal inside the pirate cave so that Goku ends up falling into a small grotto containing a giant, hungry octopus (who feels insulted when called a squid). The beast then tries to smash and eat Goku. Unfortunately for him, Goku fries him with a Kamehameha and eat some of his tentacles to regain strength.
• Byro's trump card in Fairy Tail is a potion that turns him into a Kaiju sized one, albeit with suckers on the outside of the tentacles.
• One Piece, being set in a world covered mostly by oceans, has the Strawhats encountering a Giant Squid early on in the stomach of a colossal whale. Later on they also encounter a Kraken, which is a gigantic orange octopus with several tentacles.
• In Soul Eater, a mutated giant squid emerges from a river in the Amazon to attack the heroes. It was apparently artificially modified by Arachne's magic to turn gigantic, ferocious and immune to sorcery.
• Among the various creatures in Toriko, we have the massive Megaoctopus (a beast seemingly composed of nothing but tentacles) and other squid and/or octopus-like beasties, ending up with one of the Gourmet World's strongest residents, the Yamatako Orochi, a truly colossal monster with a Lamprey Mouth and hydra-like tentacles tipped with living heads. There's also the King of the World of Souls, who's a Giant Squid man named "King Enma Squid".
• Yaiba: The revived monk Seikai Miyoshi transforms into a giant red octopus to fight (a pun on the fact that monks, due to their shaved heads, are often called "octopi"). Later in the story, Shingetsu merges himself with a giant squid, gaining Combat Tentacles with a Healing Factor and the ability to spit ink.

Comic Books

• Batman and the Outsiders: In her first appearance, the Marine Marauder uses a giant octopus to attack and ocean liner and drag Looker down to her undersea lair.
• The Franco-Belgian Comic series Les Petits Hommes features, during an escapade to Atlantis, a pair of squids attacking belligerent Atlantean and fishmen. Not giant squids per se, but for those Lilliputians they're quite the same thing.
• The Punisher: One arc centered around the sole survivor of one of Frank's raids. The guy had taken a bullet in the head a few years before and was never the same afterwards, having developed an obsession with Giant Squid (sorry, Architeuthis) and spending his free time scuba-diving the waters of New York City looking for one (yes, in the actual harbor. Even the other mafiosi know nothing about marine biology and can see the flaw in his reasoning). He's haunted by the ghosts of his fellow criminals who demand he avenge them, and very nearly manages it by luring Frank into a warehouse gunfight and blowing it up. He holds Frank at gunpoint on the docks and would have killed him... if it wasn't for an actual Giant Squid grabbing and eating him.
• Superman/Supergirl: Maelstrom: As exploring the mountains of an alien world, Supergirl runs into a flying alien squid. Its green body is several times larger than her, thorns protrude from its long tentacles, and unlike Earth cephalopods, its mouth has several rows of sharp teeth instead of a beak.

Comic Strips

• Occasionally showed up on The Far Side, usually in the role of the traditional household pet. Somehow, they never seemed to need water.
  • One shows a giant squid and a dog curled up together sleeping. Their owner tells his friend that "in the wild, they'd be enemies, but they do just fine if you get them as pups".
  • Another sees a man visiting his friend's house and appearing quite nervous at the giant squid eyeballing him. His friend tells him to remain calm as giant squids can sense fear.
  • In yet another strip, a woman is frantically calling an exterminator while a giant squid is eating her husband in the background. The exterminator's office ("Harry's Squid-Be-Gone") is empty, with a sign on the door that says "Back in a jiffy".
• Liō has one as a pet, and it likewise seems to do fine out of the water.
• In one story of Prince Valiant, the eponymous hero is trapped above a large, deep pool with an enormous octopus at the bottom trying to reach him. In another story, he is at sea with a small crew in a boat and is attacked by a giant squid.

Films — Animation

• BoBoiBoy: The Movie: When Kurita falls into the ocean, the contact with water enlarges the space squid into a giant Mechanical Abomination of a cephalopod that tries to kill everyone, but Gopal takes it down by turning the giant Kurita into calamari.
• Finding Dory: Dory, Marlin and Nemo have a brief encounter with a giant squid hiding in a shipwreck.
• Fire and Ice (1983): While swimming with Teegra, Larn is grabbed by some sort of giant freshwater cephalopod that tries to eat him.
• The Little Mermaid (1989): Ursula is already a rather large octopus lady, but this trope is truly invoked in the climax, when she grows enormous. When she dies, the way her tentacles clutch the wrecked ship while flailing looks a lot like old drawings of giant squids attacking ships.
• The Pagemaster: When Richard is reluctant to climb a ladder due to his fear of heights, Adventure coaxes him into going up by opening 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the passage on the squid attack, releasing it.
• Return To Never Land, the sequel to Peter Pan, replaces the tick-tocking crocodile with a giant orange octopus that makes popping noises with his tentacles.
• Rugrats Go Wild!: Angelica attempts to scare the babies into thinking a giant squid might eat them, though Susie says otherwise. An actual giant squid appears later on, though unlike most examples it turns out to be a Gentle Giant (just like the real animal).
• The Transformers: The Movie: Kup and Hot Rod are attacked by a giant robotic squid, which is part of the underwater Mechanical Lifeforms of the planet Quintessa.

Films — Live-Action

• The Walt Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea prominently features a giant squid that Ned Land (Kirk Douglas) goes against mano a mano (a mano, a mano, a mano...) with a harpoon.

• What are initially believed to be numerous worm-like creatures in Deep Rising that infested the ship and consumed the entire crew and its passengers actually turn out to be the tentacles of an extremely large squid-like monster at the end.
• In High Spirits, a haunted mural in the hotel becomes animated, and a giant squid appears to torment the guests. The child actor in the scene even says, verbatim: 'It's a giant squid!' before being snatched by the creature.
• Invention for Destruction: While inspecting the broken cable on the seafloor, Hart and his party are attacked by a giant octopus. The octopus kills the two pirates assigned to guard Hart, allowing him to sneak away to the tunnel.
• In It Came from Beneath the Sea, there is a giant radioactive octopus which features as the main threat.
• King Kong vs. Godzilla, War of the Gargantuas, and Frankenstein Conquers the World all featured a giant octopus that fights Kong, Gaira, and Frankenstein respectively.
• Kong: Skull Island: There's a short scene where King Kong fights an enormous cephalopod called a Mire Squid as a Mythology Gag to the giant octopus from King Kong vs. Godzilla mentioned above.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the Watcher in the Water is decidedly squid-like, with bits of octopus thrown in for good measure. In the books the description is a bit more vague but still retains most of the Giant Squid properties.
• A giant octopus is one of the creatures that the crew faces on the eponymous The Lost Continent.
• The Meg. Suyin's minisub gets trapped in the tentacles of a giant squid and is on the verge of being crushed when the eponymous megalodon eats it.
• Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Changing it to an Octopus was the closest to originality the film got.
• Roger Corman's first film was Monster From The Ocean Floor, and featured a female marine biologist vindictively hunting a giant squid.
• Monster Sea Food Wars, a kaiju spoof, sees a giant squid and octopus among a trio of monsters attacking Tokyo.
• Mysterious Island features what appears to be either a giant nautilus or ammonite which attacks the castaways when they're exploring the sunken pirate ship.
• The 2000 film Octopus features a submarine facing off with a gigantic, mutated octopus deep under the ocean. The sequel, Octopus 2: River of Fear, has the NYPD having to deal with a equally gigantic octopus that has made its home in New York Harbor.
• The Kraken from Pirates of the Caribbean. Though far bigger than any real squid (thereby really earning its Kraken title).
• Reap the Wild Wind featured John Wayne fighting and being killed by a rather silly-looking (but technologically impressive for the time) giant squid. It was made several years after Wake Of The Red Witch (see below). Perhaps the squid was avenging its cephalopod brother?
• The Road to Bali features a giant squid named Boga Ten.
• In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the Big Bad uses a Steampunk mechanical giant octopus to drag down a treasure ship so he can loot it to fund his Evil Scheme.
• Gezora from the 1970 Toho film, Space Amoeba, although he's technically a cuttlefish Kaiju. He's also tussled with Godzilla in some comics and video games despite never appearing in any movies with him.
• Star Wars: The Dianoga in A New Hope is definitely this. Some people In-Universe even call it "Trash Giant Squid".
• Italian movie Tentacoli features a giant octopus that was stirred up by an underwater tunnelling project, and developed a taste for humans.
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea has a gigantic octopus in it which attacks the Seaview. Also, an actual giant squid earlier attacked the divers repairing the transatlantic phone line on the ocean bottom.
• Wake Of The Red Witch, a black-and-white movie based on the novel Toilers of the Sea, featured John Wayne wrestling with and killing a giant octopus that had carried off a native diver minutes before.

Literature

• To be elaborate on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the crew of the Nautilus (and Ned Land) fight a school of giant squids after one squid wraps itself around the submarine and stops it in its tracks. It is the most recognizable element in the story — after Nemo and the Nautilus themselves — and is a standard fixture in any adaptation. It should be noted, however: some translations are a bit more ambiguous about the monsters' exact species, instead referring to them as "poulp" (an archaic term for cephalopods in general).
• In Pat Murphy's Adventures In Space And Time With Max Merriwell, Weldon Merrimax is killed by a giant squid.
• Animorphs: Seen as the cover morph in the twenty-seventh book, The Exposed. Rachel's shown as the morpher, but the whole team morphs squids in the book, having first morphed sperm whales to find the titular exposed Pemalite ship and the squids to reach the ship.
• Artemis Fowl is attacked by a giant squid in The Atlantis Complex.
• Peter Benchley's Beast, later adapted into a film starring William Peterson called The Beast, could roughly be described as Jaws with a Giant Squid (especially since Benchley wrote Jaws) with the giant squid attacking boats after foolish mankind overfished its normal prey and accidentally killed its young. Mankind's hubris concerning nature leads to him getting attacked by a wild creature? Naaaawh!
• At the start of Strands of Sorrow, part of the Black Tide Rising series, a Naval scout visits the San Diego harbor after the Zombie Apocalypse has been raging for several months. The masses of Technically Living Zombies have resulted in the bay's waters becoming infested not only with sharks, but also with Humboldt Squid, which are voraciously feeding on the masses of infected humans. The sight actually unnerves the watching Navymen, and one member who happens to have lived in the area notes that the beaches of Southern California may not be safe to swim in for the rest of his lifetime at the earliest, as Humboldt Squid are aggressive, intelligent predators who may even be capable of social learning.
• Dr. No: The titular character puts James Bond through a torture labyrinth ending with an apparent escape only to be attacked by a giant squid. Improbably, Bond wins.
• The Future is Wild:
  • 200 million years after humanity has gone extinct, the oceans have become home to the enormous 25-meter Rainbow Squid (other sources in the franchise say they grow up to over 40-50 m in length). However, despite being carnivorous they are actually gentle giants that use their incredible color changing abilities for dazzling courtship displays and to hide whenever predators are nearby, even if said predators are significantly smaller than it.
  • Much smaller but still quite sizeable itself is the rainbow squid's land-dwelling contemporary, the megasquid, larger than modern-day elephants and has evolved to have elephant-like traits and lifestyle.
• In Arthur C. Clarke's Ghost Of The Grand Banks, deep-sea diver Jason Bradley became world famous after he was hired to investigate an oil-rig dive crewman's report that a 100-meter octopus had taken up occupancy among the rig's seabed buttresses. The gargantuan octopus fled immediately when Bradley approached in his lighted hardshell diving suit.
• The giant squid from Harry Potter is a rare benevolent example. Living in the lake near Hogwarts, this giant squid is a friendly docile creature who likes to play with the students, since Fred and George were seen tickling its tentacles, accepts food from them and even saved one first year student who fell into the water. Writer J.K. Rowling joked that this particular giant squid is actually the Animagus form of Godric Gryffindor, one of the legendary founders of Hogwarts, still watching over Hogwarts to this day.
• Kraken kicks off with the impossible theft of the preserved giant squid on display in London's Natural History Museum (nicknamed Archie). Turns out there is a cult that worships giant squids as gods and offspring of the almighty Kraken, and by the novel's internal logic, the fact that the squid commands such faith means that is actually an extremely powerful entity, even in death.
• The similarly named Spanish novel Kraken: Atrapados en el abismo, by Luis Miguel Ariza, features an agressive yet surprisingly intelligent giant squid species.
• The Watcher of the Water which guards the gates of Moria in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
• Mermaid's Song: While searching for effron, Elan is attacked by a giant squid who drags her to his lair. She sings to him, causing him to relax and release her. The squid, amazed to hear a Merra singing that song for the first time in centuries, teaches Elan to cross-speak. He becomes her friend and teacher, and helps her train for the Choosing.
• The narrator of Moby-Dick has an encounter with a giant squid:
  Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
  As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed — "Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"
• Pirate Latitudes features two encounters with what is presumably a giant squid, which the characters call a "Kraken". The first one doesn't do much and is quickly forgotten. The second one is strangely aggressive, grabbing crew members and flinging them overboard. It also, for some reason, has bioluminescence.
• Sphere features a giant squid as a manifestation of a character's mind.
• In Skin of the Sea, the Omniran is a giant squid who was banished to the bottom of the ocean after hunting too many creatures. Now he serves Olokun, an orisa who was also banished for creating tidal waves to kill humans. When the Mami Wata break Esu out of Olokun's prison, Olokun and the Omniran battle with them to try to stop them.
• In Starlight and Shadows, the pirate ship Elfmaid is attacked by a giant squid, which protagonists Liriel and Fyodor manage to slay.
• Tales from the White Hart: "Big Game Hunt" describes the efforts of an eccentric professor to study the electrical circuitry of the brain. After using his research to develop robotic creatures, he then tries to use electrical stimulation of the brain to control the behavior of animals. The professor's work is discovered by a wildlife photographer, who tries to exploit it to film a giant squid. While their attempt is initially successful, the equipment blows a fuse, and the squid kills both scientist and photographer.
• In the Tempest (2011) trilogy, Tiamat's minions include two of these.
  • The Lusca is a giant blood-drinking octopus-like monster with twenty-three tentacles.
  • In Tempest Revealed, Tempest and her dad are attacked while surfing by Turisas, an octopus monster three stories high. Tempest barely manages to fight it off and swim to safety with her dad.
• Testimony Before An Emergency Session Of The Naval Cephalopod Command by Seth Dickinson has a scientist explaining to the eponymous Command why a giant squid—trained and enhanced to detect Soviet nuclear subs—has gone Off the Rails and is trying to start World War III. He points out that the Navy treating a giant squid like Flipper when it's actually a solipsistic psychopath is a bad idea.
• Way of the Tiger:
  • Book 4 has a Kraken guarding the tract of sea around the island where the magical Scepter and Orb of Irnsmuncast are kept. While it doesn't look anything different from a run of the mill giant squid, the lore mentions that's a foul creature of Nullaq, evil goddess of envy and poison, thus can be pacified with an amuler of her cult.
  • The last book has a series of massive, grotesque squid-like horrors used as living cages for the Keeper of the Forbidden Shrine, once again related to Nullaq.

Live-Action TV

• A really, really Giant Squid is worshipped as a god on a planet where the Doctor and Romana seek the Key to Time in the Doctor Who serial "The Power of Kroll".
• One of these attacks the research vessel Alton is cooking on in the squid episode of Good Eats.
• Once Upon a Time: Squid Ink acts as a recurring magical item used to temporarily freeze the user's target in place. In Season 3, Gold and Baelfire summon and kill a giant squid in Neverland to take it's ink for this specific purpose. Season 6 also introduces krakens as a similar but much more aggressive and menacing creature, almost looking like mutant giant squids.
• One episode of The Sean Cullen Show had a giant squid take over Sean's basement. It eventually kidnapped William Shatner and fell through a wormhole. Sean sang about it.
• Ultra Series:
  • In the Ultra Q episode "Fury of the South Seas", the characters visit a South Pacific Island where the locals worship a gargantuan octopus called Sudar and try to appease it with human sacrifice. Notably, it was brought to life using the Giant Octopus puppet from King Kong vs. Godzilla, Frankenstein Conquers the World, and War of the Gargantuas.
  • On Ultraseven, the mysterious Ultraterrestrials known as the Nonmalts attack humanity's ships and subs using a squid-like kaiju called Guyros, who is ultimately chopped up into calamari by Ultraseven.
  • Ultraman Taro and Ultraman 80 both featured cephalopod kaiju in bit roles. The former series' monster was Tagarl, who battled the Giant Enemy Crab Ganza, while the latter series had Daron, a minion of Gimyra who teamed up with Raburas to fight 80 in one battle scene.

Music

• Alestorm's "Death Throes of the Terrorsquid" is a song about... Pirates killing the terrorsquid.
• The Jonathan Coulton song "I Crush Everything" is sung from the perspective of a giant squid. It suffers from extreme loneliness, because (as the title hints) it can't touch anything without dragging it down to the bottom of the sea and destroying it. And it really hates dolphins. So, sad cephalopod.
• The Dreadnoughts' "Mary the One-Eyed Prostitute, Who Fought the Colossal Squid and Saved Us From Certain Death on the High Seas, God Rest Her One-Eyed Soul" is pretty Self-Explanatory.
• They Might Be Giants:
  • The cover for their album Apollo 18 features a giant squid locked in battle with a sperm whale.
  • The music video for “With The Dark” features a similar squid that attacks the Johns.

Myth

• The Lusca is believed to be a giant octopus somewhere in the Bahamas.

Pinballs

• In Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey, the player must fight off a Giant Octopus as part of the Submarine Adventure.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Perfectly mundane giant squid and giant octopus have been statted in multiple editions, where they're treated as just regular animals. In Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, this qualifies them for a number of creature templates, which can make them far closer to the spirit of this trope. In particular, fiendish giant cephalopods (and the more powerful half-fiend versions) are true monsters, having at least human-level intellects and the personality of nihilistic sadists; they tend to be common threats in the aquatic regions of the Abyss.
  • Dagon, Demon Prince of Water, is generally described as an Animalistic Abomination resembling a Kaiju-sized amalgam of squid, shark and eel. He is usually characterized as one of the most ancient, intelligent and patient of the Demon Lords.
  • One of the more consistent examples in the D&D setting are the krakens, which resemble enormous squids, but have genius-level intellects, potent sorcerous abilities, and a raging god complex, which leads to them spinning elaborate plans of conquest and destruction. They are sometimes hinted to have originated on other planes, and often worship evil gods or Demon Lords And Arch Devils with a tie to water, such as Dagon. Weirdly, their depiction in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition looks more like Del Lago with tentacles.
  • The spin-off game Pathfinder has the Devilfish; 10-12ft long cephalopods that resemble seven-armed vampire squids, said to have been created when the blood of Dagon mingled with the blood of a powerful kraken queen during a titanic fight to the death. They are ruthless, sadistic, and highly intelligent predators with a poisonous bite that use clouds of toxic blood in the same way lesser cephalopods use ink.
  • Pathfinder is also home to the Lusca; three-headed hybrids of shark and octopus bigger than battleships covered in toxic slime and able to hurl lightning bolts.
• Dystopian Wars: The Empire of the Blazing Sun have the Ika class Mechanical Squid — a gigantic robotic squid large enough to grab and drag down the largest warships into the briny depths.
• Hollow Earth Expedition. Kraken are 100 foot long 40 ton squids powerful enough to capsize ships and eat their crews. They can also drag a ship deep underwater and let the pressure and lack of air do their dirty work for them.
• It Came from the Late, Late Show. A Giant Octopus Monster is 60 feet long. Its rampages include eating sunbathers and surfers and destroying coastal towns and bridges.
• Munchkin has Squidzilla as one of its monsters. As the name implies, it is huge.
• The New World of Darkness has the Leviathan, the Kerberos of the Sea of Fragments. It's actually only a guess that it's a cephalopod based on the fact that it has tentacles — it's too huge for anyone to ever see what it really looks like.
• Rifts: One of the largest squid-like entities in the game is the Lord of the Deep. Nobody knows if it really is squidlike, as only its tentacles are ever seen — its body is deep within the Mariana Trench. Said tentacles are several MILES long, and thick enough to pose a threat even to the ultratech battleships of rifts Earth.
• Warhammer 40,000 sees your giant squid and raises you the Void Krakens, a species of space dwelling asteroid eaters that are in the same weight class as small warship. Keep in mind, 40k warships start at 1km and only go up from there.

Theme Parks

• In Popeye & Bluto's Bilge-Rat Barges at Universal's Islands of Adventure, the guests have a run-in with giant octopus when their raft enters a dark cave.
• The now-closed Submarine Voyage rides at the Disney parks included an appearance by a giant squid. In the Disneyland version, the squid was fighting a sperm whale, and in the Disney World version it was attacking another submarine while another tried to attack yours as well.
• Lost Island Theme Park's take on the classic Dumbo style spinner, Eeki Eeki Escape, has guests riding fish in the clutches of a giant eeki eeki squid's tentacles.

Toys

• BIONICLE: Kalmah commanded an army of giant squids while he lived in the Pit. Ever since he got turned back into an air-breather, they probably don't follow him anymore.

Video Games

• ARK: Survival Evolved has the Tusoteuthis, a 30 foot long squid loosely based on the real prehistoric creature ^note  The real animal was an octopus, not a squid. It can grab prey (including players and various other giant sea predators) and crush them to death, inflincting torpor which can cause the creature to lose consciousness, while regaining health by drinking their blood. If you manage to start doing serious damage to one, it will spray a blinding ink cloud and flee. There's also an Alpha version which is even bigger, being the largest alpha creature on the island. Pretty impressive given it has serious competition. Fortunately, both the common and Alpha varieties are only found deep in the ocean and will not come to the surface unless tamed, so one can avoid them easily enough.
• The Assassin's Creed series:
  • Assassin's Creed II: Ezio goes searching for the Assassin Seals that unlock the Armor of Altair, he can come across what appears to be a giant squid twice in the same area. Once he pulls on a lever and watches the water, he can see the dark figure swim past menacingly. If he pulls the lever again and waits, the squid will use a tentacle to attack Ezio and fail. If Ezio falls into the water at any moment, however, the squid will not come to attack him at all.
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: If Edward looks out a certain window at the Antocha wreck for a short while, a cinematic depicting a battle between a Giant Squid and a white whale would occur.
• Even though it looks more like an octopus, Lusca from City of Heroes probably counts. There's no way to gauge how big it is, since you can't see the whole thing, but the amount of tentacle that you can see looks to be around 30 feet or more.
• In BioShock and BioShock 2, a Giant Squid can be seen swimming through Rapture.
• Big Karnak have a giant octopus as the boss of the second Slave Galley stage. It's tethered to the back of the ship and attacks using C Ombat Tentacles; and when you sever it's tentacles it then throws them at you as a projectile attack.
• Club Penguin has the Giant Squid make minor shadowed appearances in the minigames Aqua Grabber and Puffle Rescue. The Web Animation short "Captain Rockhopper vs. Mighty Squid" has Rockhopper fight off the Giant Squid.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 the Wacky Soviets have giant squid that can drag enemy ships down to the briny depths. Too bad they traded those in for war bears in the third game.
• Conan has a boss battle against one of these.
• Cookie Run Squid Ink Cookie, a gold-eating cookie resembling a squid monster who grows to kaiju sizes and attacks ships.
• In Crypt Of The Necrodancer, the boss Coral Riff is a giant squid with a guitar's body for a head.
• Tentacular, an indie VR game, have you playing as an island-sized giant octopus exploring the seas. You're a Gentle Giant and not some rampaging tentacled monstrosity (the norm for this trope) though.
• Dr Peculiar defends himself with a giant mutant octopus in The Deadly Tower of Monsters.
• The second Death in the Water sees you fighting giant octopuses regularly (compared to the first where your enemies are all sharks). The title refers to Death, an ancient, submarine-sized gigantic octopus who's analogous to the kraken, and the difficult Final Boss.
• Dragon Quest:
  • The King Squids, Squidzillas, and Tentactulars, first seen in Dragon Quest III, are powerful monsters while out at sea with loads of HP, devastating tentacles, breaths, and rocking the boat.
• One of Ecco the Dolphin's more random enemies are giant octopodes Eight-Arms. There's plenty of pointy ammonites in Prehistoria, too. Defender of the Future features a few giant cephalopods that require puzzle solving to get past, as well, perhaps in homage to the original series that it otherwise doesn't have that much to do with.
• The Endless Ocean games both feature giant squid in their respective abyssal zones, the second of whom will periodically tangle with a sperm whale, including during the storyline. The second game also has the giant squid's baby, Kraken Jr., who's only a couple of feet long and amazingly adorable for a squid.
• Eternity: The Last Unicorn has a swamp Krakken as a boss, who resembles a monstrous humboldt squid with spiked tentacles and a gigantic mouth with More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: The boss of the Milles City industrial area stage is a giant squid that attacks from the water and attacks with whatever arms are holding aloft The Men in Black enemies that were attacking throughout the past two stages. Rather than being a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, it serves as a Call-Back to the unearthed bracelet having a rampage effect on animals within its range. A clue that the players are getting closer to their objective.
• Frenzy! have an underwater stage that concludes with your submarine battling a giant octopus mecha. Who lose tentacles as it takes damage until it's a single head, but it can continue attacking by lumbering towards you.
• Story mission nine in Jaws Unleashed opens with a fight against one.
• In Kid Pix Studio, there was a "Moopie" stamp of a blue squid. Although quite small normally, as with all stamps, it could be enlarged by pressing the control key, and further enlarged by pressing the shift key as well.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Big Octo miniboss from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and wThe Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is a land-based variant.
  • The Big Octo from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. It's a giant squid that is always preceded by a large flock of seagulls, and will try to suck in your boat if you go near said seagulls, at which point you must attack several places on its body with your boomerang.
  • The Big Octorok from The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is technically the same size as the small Octoroks you fight in the overworld, but it becomes this from Link's perspective after he is shrunk to Minish size.
  • While the incident happened in the past and isn't portrayed onscreen, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a stone tablet that describes how Prince Sidon killed a giant Octorok that was terrorizing Hylian fishers.
• The Legendary Starfy series:
  • Densetsu no Stafy 3 features Muga, a huge, eerie, one-eyed squidlike creature who is the boss of the Sea of Sky. It follows Starfy with its eye and can fire beams from it directionally to attack, but swimming in circles around it will make it dizzy, leaving the eye open for a Star Spin attack.
  • Early in the fifth game, a big squid named Big Squiddy captures Bunston. You're chased after Big Squiddy in certain levels, and he's the game's first boss; you attack his tentacles when he's not about to grab you.
• Naval Ops: The final Optional Boss of Warship Gunner 2 is a giant squid that can sink ships with a blast of high-pressure ink or lasers. But it's a giant, flattened and dried squid.
• In Pokémon Sword and Shield, using the Dynamax feature on a cephalopod-like Pokémon will, obviously, produce this result.
• Phix: the Adventure have a giant squid boss who can somehow move on land, and have crab pincers on the tips of tentacles.
• Resistance 2: One of the bosses is a huge, many-tentacled Kraken.
• Shadow Master have a robotic giant octopus as the boss of Planet Ocella, a water-themed world. Said boss have tentacles ending in circular buzzsaws which it uses to slice you apart.
• Shantae: Squid Baron, Reoccurring Rascal/Concerned Parent. Despite his name, he looks more like a giant octopus than a giant squid. He may not be large enough to drag down a ship, but he's still roughly twice the size of an average human.
• Skies of Arcadia: One of the optional ship battles is against a giant flying squid.
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves: The giant pink squid thingy Krusher starts off as a boss fight before the Guru manages to talk it into temporarily joining you. You later control Crusher to defend Bentley by smashing pirates in a fashion in a scene that is best described as "Giant Squid Bongo with a Body Count".
• SOMA: The Final Boss is this, even named as such by the research base's scientists. Being heavily mutated by Structure Gel, this creature patrols the Abyss for prey, and after eating Johann Ross alive, it constantly stalks you along the way to station Phi, with only cramped rock tunnels for cover. If you're caught, the squid grabs you in its jaw and hauls you off in a random direction, often undoing your progress.
• In the original Splatoon, there's the Kraken special. Inklings are already humanoid creatures who can morph into roughly human-sized squids, but the "Kraken" special ability allows an Inkling to temporarily become a massive and virtually indestructible squid capable of destroying all it touches.
• Subnautica: The Crabsquid isn't that big in comparison to some of the other creatures but is still a few times larger than the average human. It's also highly aggressive and has both razor-sharp, crab-like talons that it uses to attack as well as a short range EMP that can disable any electronics in the area, including your vehicles.
• Super Mario Bros.: Bosses of this sort are fairly common in the series and tend to be supersized version of Bloopers, a type of common squid enemies.
  • Super Mario Sunshine: One of the recurring enemies is the Gooper Blooper, a giant land squid that sprays toxic ink around itself. It later makes an appearance as a boss in Paper Mario: Sticker Star, where it seems to have gotten into music, and Paper Mario: The Origami King, where it attacked a cruise ship you need to rescue from its clutches.
  • Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars: King Calamari is a giant squid that sank the pirate Jonathan Jones' ship and was locked in its treasure room. It's large enough for its body and tentacles to resolve as separate foes during its battle.
  • Paper Mario 64: The Mega Blooper is a supersized variant of the standard Blooper. The sequel has a similarly sized Blooper as the first real boss in the game, but lacks any manner of adjective on its name.
  • Mario Party 9: A giant Blooper appears in the boss minigame Blooper Barrage. It attacks from the ocean, and the players fight it by firing cannons at it from a pirate ship.
  • Super Mario Party: A Mega Blooper appears as a board hazard on Megafruit Paradise and Watermelon Walkabout, where it stalks players crossing the bridge between Present Island and Watermelon Island. In Mario Party mode, there are certain Event spaces on the bridge that trigger the Blooper's attack, while in Partner Party, every space on the bridge has a roughly 1/3 chance of activating it. Regardless, any players that get attacked by the Blooper will be sent flying back to start.
• The World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm has Ozumat, a creature working for the Old Gods and able to take on a Physical God.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Squoods are massive squid-like enemies that can be encountered while salvaging (Just about everywhere) or during fog. (In Tantal)
• One level of Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure revolves around taking one down.

Web Comics

• Cucumber Quest has the first of the evil Disaster Masters, Squidmaster, who, rarely for this trope, is actually intelligent. Well, sorta intelligent.
• Girl Genius:
  • There's that one time in Paris when someone had a scheme to raise giant squid in the sewers.
  • And the mechanical squid in the cisterns, because after all where else would you keep your mechanical squid?
  • And the giant winged squid attacking Castle Wulfenbach.
• Homestuck: During [S] Jack: Ascend, Bro Strider is seen battling a giant octopus-like monster that lives in the lava seas of the Land of Heat and Clockwork.
• The Order of the Stick: To destroy Lord Hinjo's private ship, Redcloak summons a fiendish giant octopus. It is eventually defeated by a shark-mounted paladin.
• Rusty and Co.: There's a kraken in the moat of the two vampire hipsters. And it wears puppets on his tentacles.
• Schlock Mercenary includes a giant squid in the "Touch and Go" arc that turned out to not actually be a squid.

Web Originals

• Played with in the SCP Foundation article SCP-252. A normal-sized squid species that appears to have the ability to transform into a 50 to 75 meters long monstrosity, but in truth is just a Master of Illusion that makes targets perceive it as more dangerous than it really is by hypnotizing them with its bio-luminescent organs.

Western Animation

• Captain Planet and the Planeteers: In "A Creep from the Deep", one of the ocean animals affected by Sly Sludge's waste dumping is a giant squid, which attacks a nearby town. The team has to summon Captain Planet to get rid of it. The same episode also involves a Shout-Out to the more famous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
• In the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode "Last of the Starmakers", the eponymous Starmakers are giant space squids that produce stars instead of ink.
• In one episode of The Deep (2015), Fontaine and Antaeus end up being attacked by one. Soon, a whole bunch of them show up to attack the Nektons.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, an episode had Timmy, Cosmo and Wanda visiting Atlantis, where their immediately arrested because Cosmo was responsible for sinking the continent. Timmy, having Wet Willie powers, attempts to summon a giant squid to help them, to which everyone laughs, thinking it doesn't exist. At the end of the episode, the squid finally shows up and destroys Atlantis.
• Family Guy. The Griffins' defense against it is ignoring it.
• The Garfield Show had a giant squid terrorizing the city's sewers. And it likes donuts.
• In one episode of Phineas and Ferb, Buford must conquer his fear of giant squid in order to save his friends and pet goldfish from one.
  • A later episode briefly shows him fighting the same squid for some seaweed.
• Rocko's Modern Life has a giant squid who is attracted to cheese.
• Hedwig, the Big Bad of Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid, has an orange giant octopus as one of her minions.
• SilverHawks Big Bad Mon*Star's mount is an armored giant space squid named Sky-Runner.
• Skull Island (2023): Subverted. The Kraken seems like it's going to be a classical version of its namesake when we see it solely by its octopoid Combat Tentacles dragging ships, helicopters and people into the ocean, but its full appearance is actually more of a fish/lobster/octopus chimera.
• In TaleSpin episode "It Came From Beneath the Sea Duck", a giant squid enters Cape Suzette's harbor when Mad Dog and Dumptruck cut a hole in the underwater safety net in order to sneak in. After tasting frosty pep ice cream, the squid develops a craving for it, causing mayhem in its search.
• In Wakfu, a giant black kralamoure is protecting Oma Island by destroying in its tentacles any ship coming too close. It is in fact the form chosen by an ancient shapeshifting dragon.

Real Life

• The giant squid and colossal squid do exist; the giant squid is longer and the colossal squid is bulkier. While a few stories circulate of boats being attacked by large squid, these creatures are mainly deep-water dwelling creatures, that mostly eat smaller prey. There have been reports of Giant Squid toothmarks on Sperm Whale skins which indicate that the two species regularly fight each other, but since Sperm Whales actively hunt them, these wounds may have been inflicted in self defense, and it is overall fairly likely that sperm whales and Pacific sleeper sharks (the main predators of mature individuals) are able to overpower them fairly easily under most circumstances.
  • There is only one verifiable story of a giant squid attacking a small boat (in this case a rowboat, not a ship), and even then the only reason it was verifiable was because the people attacked brought back proof—a tentacle that a young boy traveling with them chopped off of the animal, and the squid did not seek them out and only reacted aggressively to begin with because they rowed right up to it while it was surfaced and struck it with an oar, causing the (likely dying) squid to violently retaliate. In the rare instance a human interacts with a living giant squid these days, the massive cephalopods come off as Gentle Giants. The few reliable accounts of aggressive behavior can likely be chalked up to startled (and possibly sick or starving) animals in an unfamiliar habitat (surfacing is not believed to be a regular occurrence) defending themselves against a perceived threat. While little behavioral data exists for colossal squid, they are believed to be slow-moving ambush and opportunistic cold-water predators with extremely sluggish metabolisms that primarily feed on Antarctic toothfish, making aggressive and/or predatory behavior towards humans or other large underwater creatures similarly unlikely under most circumstances.
    • In 2015, a juvenile giant squid showed up in the harbour at Toyama, Japan. Though it was in an unfamiliar situation surrounded by people, the creature stayed remarkably calm, even allowing a diver to get up close with a camera to film it, before being carefully guided by the diver out of the harbour to just off the Sea of Japan beyond.
• Meanwhile, the largest octopus in the ocean is the Giant North Pacific octopus, with an arm-span of seventeen feet. There is not, as far as most scientists are concerned, any octopus of giant squid-sized proportions or whale-sized proportions, as urban legend seems to state.
  • The largest octopus that ever lived was Enchoteuthis, which could weigh up to 500 lbs and was a fairly common denizen of the Cretaceous-era Kansas seas. Of course, given the nature of those seas, they were actually pretty low on the food chain. Fossil evidence shows that they were preyed upon by massive predatory fish, and it also stands to reason that they were regular prey items of mosasaurs. It says something about how nasty those seas were when a giant octopus of all things was one of the less-threatening of the many predators roaming them.
• Another species on the list of largest squids, the Humboldt squid, while not considered giant, (With a 5-foot long mantle, it’s actually third place on the list of largest squids, which goes to show just how vast the difference in size is between them and their even-larger kin is) best fits this trope in its behaviour; whereas Giant and Colossal squid are thought to be mostly docile around humans, the Humboldt does not share this trait. In California and Baja, where the squid are fished for, it's gained a nickname amongst the fishermen. Diablo rojo, which means "red devil". This is a squid with a Hair-Trigger Temper that quite literally Turns Red when it goes on the offensive, flashing between its neutral white colour and a vivid blood red. Humboldts do not sink boats, but when feeding or being fished up, they are extremely aggressive. Their beaks are too weak to break bones, but their strong arms have sharp teeth which can rip through skin and most wetsuits, inflicting serious bleeding that has the potential to be fatal if it rips its way into a major artery. They have also been known to attack underwater cameras and will eat other wounded Humboldts. However, outside of feeding and being fished, they have also been observed to be calm and curious, so their behavior is a subject of debate. Regardless, underwater cameraman Scott Cassell—who made a career filming them—won't go in the water with them without wearing a chainmail wetsuit.

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