Man-Eating Plant: Difference between revisions

{{trope|wppage=Carnivorous_plant#Cultural_depictions}}

[[File:audrey2B 2514.jpg|link=Little Shop of Horrors|frame|Feed me, Seymour!]]

 

 

Of course, there are differences. For one, Man Eating Plants [[Noisy Nature|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 [[WKRP in Cincinnati|this]] Venus Flytrap or, err, '''[[Vagina Dentata|THAT]]''' [[Squick|Venus Flytrap]]. ([[Too Much Information|Though the latter is the reason for the Venus in Venus flytrap.]]) Also not to be confused with [[A Worldwide Punomenon|man eating]] [[Veganopia|a plant]].

 

* 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.

 

* 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 1978 ''[[Captain Harlock]]'' series, Miime's homeworld was overrun with carnivorous plants and now she's the [[Last of Her Kind]].

 

* 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 [[Dream Land|Outback]], where every native species, including the predatory ones, are plants.

* [[Red Sonja]] fights one of these in ''Savage Tales'' #5.

* [[DC Comics]]' [[Batman|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 [[I'm a Humanitarian|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.

 

* ''[[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 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 {{spoiler|Peter Fleming [[Heroic Sacrifice|sacrifices himself to rescue her.]]}}

 

* Like [[Everything Trying to Kill You|everything else]] in [[Lone Wolf|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, ''[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Castle Death]]''. ''Before'' you even get to the freakin' castle, Lone Wolf might encounter '''''seaweed''''' that tries to kill and eat him!

 

* 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.

* 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).

** 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.

* In the beginning of [[Jasper Fforde]]'s ''[[Shades of Grey]]'', the reader finds the protagonist "wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a [[When Trees Attack|yateveo tree]]." Of course, this can only be described as a "[[Understatement|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.

* [[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."

* 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]]''.

* ''[[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.

 

* ''[[The Avengers (TV series)|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 [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever|vary greatly in size...]]

* 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).

* Stanley Badgeworth in the ''[[Pixelface]]'' episode "The Problems of Dr Nigari".

 

* [[Genesis (band)|Genesis]], in their good old whimsical days, made a delightfully [[Epic Rocking|epic]] song about a war between humans and murderous plants. The plants are winning. It bears the B-movie-esque title ''[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Return Of The Giant Hogweed]]''.

 

 

* Fairly common in ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'', especially on the various [[Death World]]s, and in particular on the [[Single Biome Planet|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.

* The Dreadstalk from ''[[GURPS]]: Creatures of the Night'' like to kill adventurers and bury their stuff.

 

 

* 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.

* ''[[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, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|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 [[Mook Promotion|boss version]] of these, Plantix, doesn't.

* [[Demonic Spiders|Malboros]] in the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series usually just hit you with their [[Standard Status Effects|Bad Breath]], but aren't above chewing on people once they're out of the player's control.

* Civilizations worshiping Gaia can summon these to fight for them in ''Age of Mythology''.

* There are two puzzles involving these in ''[[The Neverhood]]''. {{spoiler|In the second, you have to be eaten by it.}}

* 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.

 

 

* ''[[VG Cats]]'', in a "Fullmetal Botanist" spoof of ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist]]''.

* The killer plants in ''[[Gold Coin Comics]]'' also enjoy downing a [http://www.goldcoincomics.com/?id=51 cold one after battle].

* [[Work Sucks]] has a plant that menaces Gayle several times, even successfully eating him early on. It appears to have found a solution to its food troubles thanks to delivery boys.

 

* Hilarious subversion from ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|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.

** 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.

* The I-Am-A-Pod from ''[[Aqua Teen Hunger Force]]''. [[Kill and Replace|After eating its victim, it makes a replica of its meal]].

* The Meatius Chompitii from ''The [[Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light]]''.

** 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.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Plant Tropes]]

[[Category:Older Than Radio]]

[[Category:Index of Fictional Creatures]]

[[Category:Horror Tropes]]