Man-Eating Plant

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Feed me, Seymour!

A Venus Flytrap is one of the coolest plants out there: It's carnivorous![1] And it eats insects! How cool is that? Now let's enlarge the plant about 100 times, and give it a taste for people!

Of course, there are differences. For one, Man Eating Plants tend to growl and roar. Somehow. Also, while the real plant eats insects by trapping them within its leaves and digesting them, the Man Eating Plant actually swallows its victims; its stalk seems to house an animal's full-scale digestive system.

See also: Plant Aliens, Plant Person and When Trees Attack. Not to be confused with this Venus Flytrap or, err, THAT Venus Flytrap. (Though the latter is the reason for the Venus in Venus flytrap.) Also not to be confused with man eating a plant.

Examples of Man-Eating Plant include:

Advertising

  • A commercial for the Toyota Echo that advertised its spacious interior had a grocery boy help a lady carry her bags to her vehicle. In the back was a massive Venus Flytrap-type plant that snatched up the boy while the woman looked around slyly to see if there were any witnesses. It can still be found on Youtube thanks to vore fans.
    • How can someone possibly decide that's an advertisement from a car (even if they're in marketing)?! It's like having a commercial where you invite someone to your place, and the minute they open the door Chuck Norris punches them in the face as an advertisement for real estate... actually, that would be a pretty cool commercial.
    • It was darkly humourous, and it really did showcase the spacious interior.
  • Two commercials for Flonase have Kaiju-sized plant monsters menacing a city, clearly meant to embody allergies at their worst.

Anime and Manga

  • The pseudo-titular leviathan of Kaiba is a giant planet-eating plant that behaves rather like a sea serpent. Also, it sucks out its victim's memories, leaving them an empty shell.
  • Ninin ga Shinobuden had the main character raising a Venus Flytrap to man-eating size, a fact which she was blissfully unaware of. (When she looked at it, birds alighted on it and sang. When she turned around, it ate the birds.)
  • In the manga Short Cuts, a girl from a distant land wears a flower on her head to eat bad bugs. A man comes up to her and suggests a paid date, and it eats him. By the next day the flower is gigantic, which she explains by saying "There are many bad bugs in Tokyo!"
  • The Lady of the Knoll(manga)/Rubi Toujou(anime) summons an entire army of these in Rosario + Vampire.
    • These are referred to by their Japanese trope name, hanabake (lit. "flower monster").
    • In the second chapter of Season II, Tsukune and pals are faced with a monster durian. They're actually the ones trying to catch and eat it, since monsters consider it delicious (though humans see it as disgusting).
  • Zetsu of Naruto is actually a cross between a two-toned human and a plant that eats people corpses, which he uses to cover the tracks of the Oddly Small Organization he is part of. However, it's worth noting that, while he's drained energy from the living, all the people he actually ate were dead, possibly a reference to plants getting nutrients from decomposing bodies.
  • In the manga adaption of Kingdom Hearts : Chain Of Memories, Big Bad Marluxia, whose Elemental Powers are pretty pink flowers plants, has a couple of these hanging around.
  • Scorponok sent a pair of these against the Autobots at one point in Transformers Headmasters.
  • The Yuuki family in To LOVE-Ru has an enormous one planted in the backyard named Celine. Instead of being carnivorous, it's more of a giant pet... that just happens to be a carnivorous plant. For some reason, nobody finds this unusual.
    • When Celine falls ill (or seems to, at least), the cast leave for space to search for the cure. Too bad the cure is on a planet entirely populated by Man Eating Plants... and except for the Luckberry Tree, none of them are friendly.
  • Digimon has the giant plant Blossomon, who is not only a giant flower with a giant mouth, but has vines that each have smaller biting flowers! And razor-sharp leaves that can slice through anything, allowing the flowers to be launched like shuriken. Possibly the most tricked-out Man-Eating Plant around.
  • Kurama from Yu Yu Hakusho loves these, and they get a Crowning Moment of Awesome in his fight with Karasu.
  • The school's Gardening Club brings one out to fight in the Tournament Arc of Futaba Kun Change. For some reason, it seems allergic to Futaba's blood.
  • James from Pokémon has had the dubious honor of owning two ManEatingPlants, Victreebel and Carnivine, who constantly gnaw on his head whenever he sends them into battle. Interestingly, this is implied to be how they show affection, and that they aren't trying to eat him (Carnivine even hugged James while gnawing on him).
  • In the 1978 Captain Harlock series, Miime's homeworld was overrun with carnivorous plants and now she's the Last of Her Kind.

Comic Books

  • Though black Izs in The Maxx are ambulatory basketball-sized black globs with arms and legs and lots of sharp teeth, they are in fact plants, as they come from Julie's Outback, where every native species, including the predatory ones, are plants.
  • Red Sonja fights one of these in Savage Tales #5.
  • DC Comics' Poison Ivy plays with this trope. She was once human but is now a mobile, autonomous, sentient and altogether villainous plant. While she may not literally eat human flesh (although this has been alluded to on occasion), she's certainly a man-eater in every other sense of the word. Her sweat contains pheremones which make her just about irresistible to members of both sexes and her lips secrete botanical toxins which she can and will use with relish to dispatch enemies with a kiss. (Enemies meaning anyone she sees hurting a plant, hears about hurting a plant or suspects may have hurt a plant at some point.) She also has the ability to control plants to a degree in which she can control their growth and cause mutations on the fly, most of which are of the literal Man-Eating variety. If she's not in the mood for a decent snogging, she can always feed her current play-toy to her "babies". Arkham Asylum: Living Hell has her admitting to using at least one victim as mulch.
    • Making it deliciously ironic and karmic when one of her "babies" became a Mind Hive of the people she fed to it that promptly decided to add her to the menu. Thanks to Batman and Robin she survived and the monster vanished, but Poison Ivy was left with a fear of plants for a while.
  • Averted and lampshaded by Plant-Man in Amazing Spider-Man #437; after Spidey destroys his mobile banyan trees, the villain needs to think up something else, and claims, "the old man-eating plant bit is too corny even for someone calling himself Plant-Man", so he decides on giant flowers that shoot poison thorns.

Film

  • Audrey II from The Little Shop of Horrors and its musical adaptation, Little Shop of Horrors. See also the stage version in Theatre below.
  • Scary Movie 2 featured a Man Smoking Plant: a plant of marijuana grown by Shorty that suddenly becomes a human-sized plant, and rolls Shorty in a joint and smokes him.
  • One of the jungle perils in The Film of the Book Jumanji is a large, rapidly-growing man-eating plant. How big, you ask? At one point it eats a CAR.
    • The car gets bent in half and pulled out of view; any actual devouring is left unseen. But then there's the scene where Peter is nearly dragged into a large carnivorous flower, and if you compare the size of those creepers based on the ones that later crush the car, then the flower at that point...
  • Adele from the Czech movie Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet (also known as Dinner for Adele).
  • The Godzilla foe Biollante probably qualifies. She's several hundred feet high and has a taste for general destruction as well as flesh, which of course irritates a certain radioactive dinosaur.
  • Attack of the Killer Tomatoes... Yep, ketchup is apparently really bad for you.
  • The animated linking story from Creepshow 2 ends with the main character leading a pack of bullies into an area where he had been secretly planting and growing these for just such a reason, much to the amusement of the creep.
  • The Ruins. The whole plot revolves in trapping our heroes on the titular ruins that are infested with a man-eating plant that grows into your arteries when it smells blood. Cue plenty of messy, improvised amateur surgery.
  • Voodoo Island. This low-budget opus offers up Boris Karloff as a scientist leading an expedition to the titular island. Somewhere during the expedition, anthropologist Claire Winters (Jean Engstrom) goes off on her own and decides it’s time for a swim. Never mind that for all she knows the jungle waters might be infested with poisonous snakes, crocodiles, or other predators. Well, she gets far worse than that when she finds herself enwrapped by the tendrils of a prehistoric man-eating plant.
  • Konga. This 1961 English rip-off of King Kong features a mad professor who invents some kind of serum that enlarges an ordinary chimp, first into a man-size gorilla and finally into a Kong-size monster. Working on the theory that that was not enough to keep an English audience properly horrified, the film also has the professor growing some sort of mutant Venus Flytrap in his hot house. While Konga runs amok at the climax, one of the professor’s female students has the misfortune of getting her arm trapped – a difficult thing to do, since the carnivorous cauliflower has no tendrils to draw her in. The film cuts away, leaving her fate uncertain but implying that she was devoured. Why she could not simply pull her arm free is unclear.
  • Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors. This early anthology from Amicus films contains five short stories that run the gamut of classic movie monster cliches: a werewolf, a vampire, voodoo, a crawling hand, and yes – a killer plant. There is little or no explanation for the vicious vine; it is simply noticed growing around an isolated house. Soon, it is snipping phone lines, strangling a hapless victim, and trapping the survivors in the house – until they learn that the wicked weed is afraid of fire, enabling them to escape. The final shot, of the vine batting out the flames left behind by the humans, leaves open the question of whether the plant is truly defeated.
  • At The Earth's Core. In this enjoyably unrealistic depiction of prehistoric life inside the Earth, a man-eating plant makes a brief appearance, interrupting a fight scene between the hero and an adversary. Needless to say, even though the two men had been trying to kill each other only minutes before, the hero saves his opponent from the clutches of the carnivorous creeping vine, and the two become fast friends, joining forces to defeat the evil Mahars that rule the underground world.
  • Similar shrubbery sprouts up in the 1960 version of The Lost World and in two Hammer Film productions, The Lost Continent and When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth.
  • 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth, had Brendan Frasier and two kids without any real personality fighting off actual snapping giant man-eating venus fly traps.
  • The Hungarian animated film Cat City features a gigantic, mouse-eating plant in The Amazon.
  • Intentionally done in The Lost Skeleton Returns Again. One attacks Lattice, but Peter Fleming sacrifices himself to rescue her.
  • Possibly the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi. In-universe, and according to Expanded Universe stories, there was a lot of debate among biologists as to whether it was more animal or plant; most decided that the beast was too dangerous to merit extended study.

Game Books

  • Like everything else in Magnamund, some of the plants Lone Wolf meets try to kill and eat him (not necessarily in that order). The most ridiculous example appears in Book 7, Castle Death. Before you even get to the freakin' castle, Lone Wolf might encounter seaweed that tries to kill and eat him!

Literature

  • An early example are the eponymous menaces in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids. (Although technically they eat rotted humans...)
  • The mouse hero in The Cat Trap simply eats his way out of a carnivorous flower.
  • Though most famous for his detective stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also had his fair share of strange monster stories. His "The American's Tale" (1879) (which has nothing to do with mice, by the way) features a Venus Flytrap big enough to hang a man from. Or otherwise cause bodily harm. Ironically, this is said to occur in Arizona, of all places.
  • The War Against The Chtorr: A Season for Slaughter goes into Nightmare Fuel detail on how such a plant (the shambler tree—actually a mutually-supporting ecology of plant-like creatures and their carnivorous tenants) could hunt and feed.
  • The children's book Pearl's Pirates features a carnivorous plant from which the heroes rescue a lost child. Subverted somewhat in that all the characters are mice, so it's not really a man-eating plant, and far more realistic (some carnivorous plants in the tropics have been known to get big enough to eat small birds and rodents).
  • Subverted in the Edgar and Ellen books, where aggressive, semi-sentient, meat-eating plants do exist, but most aren't big enough to eat anything larger than a pinky finger. Ellen keeps one as a pet of sorts, as does one of the performers in the Heimertz Circus.
    • Note that the one belonging to the circus performer is big enough to cram a small child inside, but is stated to be incapable of digesting humans.
  • The nightmarish bloodoak trees from The Edge Chronicles. Complete with rather graphic descriptions.
  • The tangle tree in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels.
  • The harpoon tree in The Venom of Argus by Richard Avery (pen name of Edmund Cooper).
  • Old Man Willow in JRR Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, who tries to eat the hobbits.
    • He tries to trap and/or kill them. He doesn't necessarily get nourishment from them.
      • He tries to get them die under his roots. Even if he was an ordinary tree, he would eventually get nourishment from them. Also, Tom Bombadil commands that he should eat earth and drink water, as opposed to what he's currently doing.
      • This was moved from Fellowship to Towers in the films, and Tom's lines given to Treebeard. Still involves Merry and Pippin.
  • The mostly realistic Life of Pi features a rather unrealistic giant flesh-eating plant that appears to be an island. By day it is dormant and the meerkat-like animals that inhabit it go to drink out of small ponds that form at the "center" of the island-plant. By night, the critters have to clamber up into trees, for the island-plant secretes digestive juices that it uses to eat things with. The main character, Pi, discovers the island is carnivorous when he tries to eat a fruit from a tree on the "island," only to find it had a human tooth inside.
  • Suzanne Collins's Curse of the Warmbloods features the underground jungle of Tantalus, where almost every plant is deadly in some way.
  • The Coldfire Trilogy has a less animalistic version: trees that drug and paralyze nearby animals, then grow tendrils into them and slowly devour them from the inside out.
  • The Syren Plant of Kashyyyk in the Star Wars universe can take at least two humans (or a human and a wookie) at a time.
  • A man-eating Venusian plant is mentioned as having almost killed one of the heroes in John W. Campbell's "The Brain-Stealers of Mars".
  • Violet the psycho plant in h.i.v.e.: higher institute of villainous education. "Her" creator, Nigel Darkdoom, had "her" put on growth-restricting hormones when "she" tried to eat his finger. Then, H.I.V.E.mind switches off all the power, and she becomes about 200ft tall resulting in a Mass "Oh Crap" for all of the characters, especially Ms. Gonzalez. "She" is eventually killed when Otto Rule of Cool blows "her" up with four modified laser pistols which DESTROY THE ROOF OF THE CAVE THEY'RE IN.
  • Larry Niven's "Orchid Thing" from Gummidgy - a planet where virtually all the native flora and fauna is as likely to try to attack and/or eat you. "Domesticated" ones can be used as decorative houseplants—as long as nobody sticks their fingers too close.
  • In the beginning of Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, the reader finds the protagonist "wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree." Of course, this can only be described as a "frightfully inconvenient" state of affairs.
  • The Iain M Banks short story Odd Attachment, while not necessarily about a man-eating plant, is written from the perspective of a lovesick intelligent alien vine who catches a human planetary explorer, that he thinks has fallen from a lucky star, and then plays "she loves me, she loves me not" - usually done by pulling petals from a daisy or other flower - by dreamily and thoughtlessly removing the (male) astronaut's various appendages. Including the "odd attachment". The vine does try to eat part of the astronaut's spacesuit, thinking it's peel, but doesn't like it.
  • Subverted in Fragment, where the apparent man-eating plants are actually weird animals, they just bear a cursory resemblance to plants.
  • David Drake often seems to be "phobic" about plants; they won't swallow you whole, but they'll sure suck the nutrients out of you. The vampire honeysuckle in The Jungle is Nightmare Fuel.
  • The Tunnels series has the Sweet Traps, plants which knock people out with powerful narcotics and then germinate their spores in their victims' still-living bodies.
  • In Robert E. Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel" Conan the Barbarian happens on a man-eating vine in his prison and goes to rescue the man.
  • The Darksword Trilogy has the blood-sucking Kij vines. The Fool Simkin initially tells his hungry companions that the vines are edible; only after the plant attacks does he correct himself "they consider us to be edible. I knew it was something to do with food."
  • According to Ponder Stibbons in The Last Continent, the Sledgehammer Plant of Bhangbhangduc has been know to take the occasional human victim who doesn't see the mallet in the long grass.
  • There's a very nasty one in Deltora Quest which preys on farmers; essentially it looks like a normal plant, until you get too close... and watch the ground open up to reveal jagged teeth and an open maw which essentially drags you in and lets you slide down inside to be eaten... getting torn at the whole time of course.
  • John Collier's short story "Green Thoughts", thought to have inspired the original film version of The Little Shop of Horrors.
  • The carnivorous trees in Septimus Heap, but unlike most man-eating trees, they hunt by grabbing their victims and draining them from their blood.
  • The Marching Proprut from The Hour Of The Gate is a mobile mass of plants that eats the ground barren as it ambles through the Swordsward grasslands.
  • One of the Solar Pons stories involved a vine that drained blood.
  • A Simple Survey has one of these brought to Earth by aliens. It's sentient and capable of understanding human language, as shown by it attempting to eat people who annoy it.

Live-Action TV

  • The Avengers episode "Man-Eater of Surrey Green".
  • Lyekka and her species from Lexx. Their "pods" contain ambulatory predators who occasionally wake up and emerge to feed, using telepathy and shape-shifting to assume a pleasing appearance and lure in their prey. Neither the pod nor the predator can survive long without the other. They can subsist on any animal life, but prefer "fat and greasy" humans by far. Oh, and they vary greatly in size...
  • On The X-Files, Mulder and Scully unwittingly fall into a gigantic underground fungus which acts as a Lotus Eater Machine while it digests them.
  • One has been featured occasionally as a Zonk on the current version of Let's Make a Deal.
  • One episode of Fringe involved a lonely child, and a sentient, telepathic, hive-minded fungus, which killed people by filling the air with fast-germinating spores (for which the ideal environment to grow was damp, dark and warm... like inside a human body).
  • Doctor Who. The killer Martian fungus in the Season 6 Episode5 "Seeds of Death", and Krynoid in Season 13 Episode 5, "Seeds of Doom". The latter can turn even nice houseplants into vicious killers.
  • Stanley Badgeworth in the Pixelface episode "The Problems of Dr Nigari".
  • Cleopatra, Morticia Addams' pet African Strangler from The Addams Family seems to be a baby Man-Eating Plant.

Music

  • Genesis, in their good old whimsical days, made a delightfully epic song about a war between humans and murderous plants. The plants are winning. It bears the B-movie-esque title Return Of The Giant Hogweed.

Newspaper Comics

  • Charles Addams drew a cartoon in which a group of jungle explorers come across a carnivorous plant that might be a new species. It has one of the explorers halfway eaten.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • One of the earliest man-eating plants is the “man-eating tree of Madagascar”, a fearsome entity that was described in 1881 in the South Australian Register, when the newspaper published an account of a "German explorer Carl Liche" who supposedly had eyewitnessed a Human Sacrifice ceremony of the “Mkodo” people in inner Madagascar:

"The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey."

While the “eyewitness account” was suspected to be a hoax early on, the man-eating tree still found its believers; in 1924 former Michigan Governor Chase Osborn repeated the legend in a book Madagascar, Land of the Man-eating Tree. However, it has since been confirmed that neither Carl Liche nor the Mkodo ever existed, and that the story was fabricated from scratch. The hoax seems to have been inspired by the first scientific description of carnivorous plants in Charles Darwin's book Insectivorous Plants in 1875.

Tabletop Games

  • Mortasheen has an entire class of plant mosters, but the closest to the classic archetype is the Devilweed. Widoweed is also a notable one, in that literally they only eat men.
  • Fairly common in Warhammer 40,000, especially on the various Death Worlds, and in particular on the jungle planet of Catachan.
  • There are a number of plantlike monsters in Dungeons & Dragons that are capable of feeding on humans. The most obvious of these is the Mantrap, which is—you guessed it—a flytrap, appropriately scaled up.
    • Dark Sun isn't rich on plants, but has some nasty sorts too, like spider cactus. Which looks just like a normal cactus, right until it shoots a bunch of harpoon-like needles, and then and drags the target onto sharp, poisoned feeding needles.
    • Likely the nastiest carnivorous plant in the game was the viper tree, introduced in the Planescape setting. Believed to be the bastard young of Nidhogg, the serpent at the root of Yggdrasil the World Tree, these strange hybrids of demons, reptiles, and plants are trees that are literally made of snakes, found in the Lower Planes. Graz'zt's home realm of Azzagrat has a whole forest of them. An amusing side note to their entry in the rulebook tells of how the Harmonium conducted a poll to find out their food preferences. Among the findings of this rather dangerous project: one in ten interviewed viper trees was able to overpower and devour the interviewer. Other than that, the poll actually seemed to yield some interesting results.
    • Zuggtmoy, the Demon Queen of Fungus, is a Demon Lord and is actually more fungus than plant, but according to her official stats in one source, if any mortal is foolish enough to fight her and gets close enough for her to manage a grapple, she can — and will — devour him. In game terms, as the entry describes it, she "engulfs" the victim, shoving him into her womb, where his Constitution is quickly drained by fungal enzymes until he dissolves completely. Clearly, it's a horrid way to die. More horrifically, those depraved enough to worship Zuggtmoy and who attain the greatest favor are astrally project to her in their sleep, in which they are erotically absorbed into her womb, consumed by her and then recreated in her womb; when they wake, their body has been transformed into a creature of animate fungi, rendering them Plant-type creatures. Keep in mind, such cultists want this to happen.
  • The Dreadstalk from GURPS: Creatures of the Night like to kill adventurers and bury their stuff.
  • Magic: The Gathering has a card called Carnivorous Plant. It's a 4/5 creature. Given that the average human is 1/1, in game terms that one big freaking plant. Hell, it could dine on a Giant Spider.
    • Also, the Phytohydra from Ravnica. It starts out as a 1/1, but hurting it only makes it bigger.
      • Same thing with the Fungosaur, which is just what it sounds like: A fungus-dinosaur.
    • On the other hand, squirrels are also usually 1/1 (and can die killing a pride of Savannah Lions), so creatures aren't really to scale. Still, 4/5 is reserved for pretty large creatures.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh has two of these by name and many others. However, most plants in the game are incredibly weak and focus on monster-swarming or swapping. Gigaplant is a straight and powerful example.

Theatre

  • THE Man-Eating Plant is and always will be Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, pictured above in his/her/its film incarnation.

Video Games

  • In the Crash Bandicoot series there are many man eating plants, many of them look very similar to Audrey 2 and often after eating Crash will them spit out his clothing.
  • The Piranha Plant and offshoots in the Super Mario Bros. games are basically a kid-friendly Ersatz of Audrey 2.
  • The Pokémon Masukippa/Carnivine is based on the Flytrap. The Oddish line, based on Raffelasia, and the Bellsprout line, based on the pitcher plant, are also based upon meat-eating (but non-mobile) plants. So guess who quickly found himself a Carnivine upon reaching Sinnoh?
    • For some reason, Pokémon's James never really got over losing his Victreebel (this was one of the two out of nowhere catches in the series, and it's barely even explained unlike Brock's Zubat). There was a few points where a Weepinbell was available during a steal and he wanted to catch it.
  • The Thorn of Bloodline Champions is implied to do this, as nothing is ever found of their presumed victims that go missing aside from an torn article of clothing.
  • In an interesting example, the old adventure-game Hugo 2: Whuddonit features a field of Venus Flytraps... of an entirely ordinary and realistic size. But you still die if you touch them.
  • In the Infocom Interactive Fiction game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, when the player visits Venus s/he has to deal with a giant mobile Flytrap.
  • Nancy Drew can get eaten by one if she gets too close in Curse of Blackmoor Manor.
  • The clinically termed "PLANT 42" of Resident Evil is the most "successful" experiment of the T-Virus in plant life.
  • Similarly, the Flaahgra boss from Metroid Prime is a giant Phazon-mutated plant.
    • There are also large carnivorous flowers in Super Metroid. If Samus falls into one's "mouth," they grab hold of her and deal some damage. Spore Spawn from the same games might also count. It's not known if it's carnivorous, but it does try to kill you.
  • The Legend of Zelda series features a few:
    • Pea Hats and Leevers are plants that have been trying to kill you since the very first game.
    • Manhandla in the titular game.
    • A Link to The Past features the Snapdragon, which is something like a daikon radish with legs and a big, toothy maw.
    • Deku Babas and a number of variations in Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask.
      • Also in Majora's Mask, there are several plants in the Woodfall Temple, which float on water like very flat lotus flowers with a tiny, thin row of teeth along the edge and an eye in the middle. Deku Link can use them as platforms to jump across, but if Link climbs on in his regular form, it will close on him, chew him up, and spit him back out. They turn into normal, non-carnivorous flowers when the water is purified.
    • The Wind Waker: The Boko Baba is the "small" version; Kalle Demos, though, is a really big Korok-eating plant.
    • Twilight Princess: More Deku Babas, the Baba Serpent, and the Twilit Parasite Diababa menace Link's path through the Forest Temple... not to mention those "vase-shaped" plants.
  • An expansion pack for The Sims 2 introduces the Cow Plant, which is exactly what it sounds like. However, instead of eating grass, it sometimes lures Sims close with the cake-shaped tip of its tongue and eats them. This causes its udder to fill with milk, which the plant's owner can drink, disturbingly enough. See it in action.
    • And the "milk" serves as extra potent version of "Elixir of Life" which makes the Sim that drinks it younger. So Sims can live indefinitely if you let the Cow Plant eat a steady stream of random passersby. Also the Sim gets a memory of "Drank (Victim)," some sims really want to drink their enemies' life essence.
    • 'Cake-shaped' is an understatement. Its tongue is shaped like a slice of birthday cake, complete with lit candle.
    • In The Urbz on GBA and DS there are also man-eating plants in the swamp area and drag you in and eat you (although you can escape via Button Mashing), although being eaten just sends you to the hospital.
  • Metal Slug also has its share of man eating plants. Apparently an experiment of the Rebellion Army Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • Plant Dominators in City of Villains get a large mobile Fly Trap as their pet at level 32. It follows the summoner and attacks his foes using some of the same powers as the summoner has.
  • King's Quest VII has plants which can eat you.
  • Wario Land 4 has Cractus, which is a standard Man-Eating Plant first boss (complete with punching spiked leaves and flying).
    • Wario Land Shake Dimension has a few called Venus Guytraps, which eat Wario as well as any enemy that happens to land on one (one mission is actually to feed five enemies to them). There's also Bloomsday/Scumflower, which while it doesn't actually eat Wario as an attack, is pretty much this by how it actually spits out various enemies as attacks.
  • Tales of Symphonia has a few enemy plants, but 2 are true examples of this trope: The extremely rare Insect Plant and its much more common Pallet Swap Upgrade, aptly named Carnivorous Plant, whose primary attack is to grab one of your characters and eat him/her. (Luckily, this only does a few hits before it spits out said character.) Conversely, the boss version of these, Plantix, doesn't.
  • Malboros in the Final Fantasy series usually just hit you with their Bad Breath, but aren't above chewing on people once they're out of the player's control.
  • World of Warcraft; the trailer for Un'Goro Crater shows one that's large enough to swallow a pterodactyl.
  • Civilizations worshiping Gaia can summon these to fight for them in Age of Mythology.
  • There are two puzzles involving these in The Neverhood. In the second, you have to be eaten by it.
  • In Fallout 2, there are spore plants, which both try to take a bite out of you and shoot you with seeds. More of an early level nuisance than an actual danger. One of these is also sentient, he's named Seymour.
    • Also in Fallout: New Vegas. The only thing to look out is that they are usually inactive and don't show up on your HUD radar until they wake up (though can still be detected by pressing the VATS button repeatedly while pointing at their direction). Still, they are a minimal threat since their acid spit does low damage, woefully innacurate, and can be easily dodged. They are found in Vault 22, Zion Canyon, and Big MT. There is a boss version called Dionaea Muscipula.
  • Wizardry has a set of dangerous plants who can move, attack in melee, and shoot thorns. Ah, and some of these attacks are poisonous, and on top of that they can release pollen which causes other Standard Status Ailments.
  • Spelunky has these. They're the only enemy in the game you can't jump on. Unless you're wearing spiked shoes.
  • One of the attacks of Moriomoto, the Arcana of Nature in Arcana Heart, has the Maiden using him throw seeds that will grow into these when her opponent goes near them.
  • In Secret of Evermore, there are several man eating plants. They drag you in, hit a few times, and spit you out. The first two varieties aren't that dangerous. The third delivers instant kills regardless of level if it's awake. Luckily you can just turn out the lights.
  • A bird-eating plant features prominently in the Edana segment of Myst III: Exile.
  • Bionic Commando has a nasty version in one zone, that manages to pop out of the ground, with only a slight rustling to notify you of when you're about to be eaten.
  • The Holy Sapling in Magical Starsign turns into a flower after your party whacks it; this flower is noteworthy because it can create one of the Millennium Gummies you need to pursue the Big Bad. It has to consume a person to do this, however; cue the Tear Jerker as Semolina offers herself up.
  • In Sim Earth, tweaking the mutation rate allows you to get "carniferns;" if they become sapient their appearance is a Shout-Out to the triffids mentioned earlier.
  • Poison Ivy commands one of these on steroids (or Titan, rather) to kill Batman in her boss battle in Batman: Arkham Asylum.
    • And if we turn back the clock to the 90's, the SNES game "Adventures of Batman & Robin" did the same.
  • Evil Genius has the Venus Man Trap, which you can research. While it doesn't outright kill agents, it does take a big bite out of their health. There's even a sign next to it saying "Do Not Feed." The agents are obviously illiterate.
  • Plants vs. Zombies has the Chomper, which will eat almost any zombie whole. Unfortunately, it's vulnerable to attack for around 30 seconds while it chews on the zombie.
  • In Kameo: Elements of Power One of the Elemental Warriors, Snare, is a giant, acid-spitting Venus Flytrap who can scoop up trolls, spit them out, and, predicatbly, devour them whole.
  • Castlevania has the Une and Maneater. While they attack you through Collision Damage and projectile-vomited skulls, respectively, the latter is the product of the former once it's consumed enough human blood.
  • Bug!! has Venus flytraps (in the ice world, for some reason) and they will eat the character. Subverted, because they're non-lethal and will spit him onto another platform, and also because your character's a bug. Played partially straight in the sequel- staying in a Venus flytrap for too long will get the character killed.
  • The first boss in Monster Party is a plant enemy that says, "Hello! Baby!" and looks sort of like Audrey II. In the Japanese beta version, it looked much more like Audrey II, and even had a microphone and speaker next to it (which actually remained in the game in a Dummied Out phantom form).
  • Battletoads has Saturn Toadtraps.
  • In Spellbound Dizzy there's a man-eating plant. Since Dizzy is an egg, it's harmless. ("Good job it wasn't an egg-eating plant.") Later, you can use some bones to entice the plant to swallow you, transporting you to a different part of the mines.
  • The "Attending to the needs of a singular plant" storyline in Echo Bazaar. It starts off as an ordinary plant; later, you can feed rats etc. to it; even later, you can start luring people to be eaten by it.
  • Bulletstorm features Venus Maneaters.
  • The plant boss from Jak and Daxter will eat the player character if it succeeds in biting him at one point of health.
  • Kingdom of Loathing has an Audrey II Expy in the Haunted Conservatory and a plant with a meat stack lure in the Spooky Forest. Both will try to eat you.
  • The Creeping Chrysanthemums from the Pikmin series. They hide underground and ambush your Pikmin when they get close, and they can take a chunk off of your army in one gulp! However, if you get away fast enough when they lunge, they will end up biting themselves, falling down and giving you a big window of opportunity to kill them.

Web Animation

  • In Helluva Boss, Stolas (the protagonist's benefactor and funder) collects these; unfortunately, they (and his servants) seem to take the brunt of his wife's abuse during her frequent tantrums.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Hilarious subversion from The Simpsons: while touring Africa, the family is caught in an enormous man-eating plant. Homer immediately tears his way through it, and when Bart asks him how he did it, he replies: "Psh, it was a flower!"
    • Another example from "Moe Baby Blues", where the Simpsons, while visitng a botanical garden, come across Venus Flytraps. One lures in Homer with a hot dog and manages to clamp onto his head.
  • Poison Ivy's greenhouse in her introductory episode of Batman: The Animated Series had a giant Venus Flytrap, complete with tentacles which could grab any passing Batmen and pull them in.
  • Bushroot from Darkwing Duck is a quasi-example, as he's a duck turned into a plant. However, his powers let him turn any plant into a deadly warrior, particularly his giant venus fly trap, named Spike.
  • In an Aladdin series episode, Genie encounters a huge carnivorous plant in Mozenrath's lair.
  • In an episode of the Superfriends, a meteor falls into a swamp, turning the naturally harmless water lilies into lumbering plant monsters that can turn people and animals into plant-covered zombies whenever they are touched or shoot their seeds at anyone.
  • Kim Possible has Professor Dementor make an army of carnivorous plants.
  • The 2002 remake of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had a villain named Evilseed, a sentient plant being who despised humanity for 'gorging [them]selves on plantlife' and sought to destroy them. The minions he could create were some kind of plant/dinosaur hybrid, and later a hydra-esque creature. Fortunately he gets a beatdown from his ancient foe, Moss Man; a more benevolent plant guy.
    • He also appeared in The Eighties TV series, but I seem to recall he just used vines back then.
  • George of the Jungle gets caught in one of these during the end credits.
  • Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs features one big enough to eat both a mammoth and a smilodon. It manages to release them after exploiting another trope.
  • The I-Am-A-Pod from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. After eating its victim, it makes a replica of its meal.
  • The Meatius Chompitii from The Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light.
  • The second season of the animated cartoon Attack of the Killer Tomatoes has the titular villainous veggies and the tomato centurions now being capable of chowing down on humans.
  • The animated version of Little Shop of Horrors.
  • The main defence of the Apocazons in the Loonatics Unleashed episode "Apocalypso".
  • They show up a couple of times in the Filmation Flash Gordon—Most notably when one tries to eat Thun in the opening credits.
  • The Jungle Planet in Transformers Cybertron is home to plants that eat Humongous Mecha.
  • On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Heloise has one in her living room. She assures Jimmy it's been fed already.
  • On an episode of Garfield and Friends Jon accidentally buys a "meat - eating fern" that tries to devour him, Garfield, and Odie. The man who accidentally sold it to him saves them, though.
  • Rocky and Bullwinkle story arc "Pottsylvania Creeper" centers around this.
  • Man-eating plants form part of Ra's al Ghul's plan for world domination in the Batman the Brave And The Bold episode "Sidekicks Assemble!".
    • And Poison Ivy tries to feed Batman to one in the teaser to "The Mask of Matches Malone!".
  • The aunties of the princesses in The Big Knights cultivate man-eating plants.
  • In an episode of Inspector Gadget, Doctor Claw's latest scheme involves using a growth serum on plants. His henchman uses it on a Venus flytrap to sic it on Gadget. As usual, Penny and Brain have to rescue him, subduing the creature with knockout gas.
  • Amphibia is a place where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, including the plant life. One ironic example occurs in "Hop Luck" where Anne, Sprig, Hop Pop and Polly are swallowed whole by a man-eating tomato plant, but discover that this man-eater is both edible and delicious, so they are able to eat their way out.
  • Frank from Harley Quinn, one of Poison Ivy's creations. A mutated plant-monster who can talk, this makes him a Servile Snarker with the attitude of a "gangsta rapper" and a foul mouth; he's hilarious.
  1. ↑ Truthfully, they and other carnivorous plants "eat" the same way most plants do, via photosynthesis, but growing in soil (mostly swampland) that lacks certain nutrients has caused them to evolve in a way that lets them augment their diet by preying on these insects.
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