Cocaine Bear, killer koalas and other screen beasts from folklore

In 1985, a United States narcotics agent turned drug smuggler was flying across Knoxville when he dropped millions of dollars worth of cocaine out of his Cessna aeroplane and ejected.

The smuggler died as a result of a botched parachute. His plane crashed. The cocaine landed in woodland close to the state line, where it was eaten by a black bear – all 34 kilograms’ worth.

The animal was already in beast mode, but the powder sent the bear into overdrive, causing it to dismember hikers, snort lines off severed limbs, outrun ambulances and terrorise the lead actors from FX’s The Americans (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys).

That’s the plot of Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear (2023), a movie “inspired by true events”. Certainly everything up to the bear’s first fix of white rock appears to be true: Andrew C. Thornton really was a former DEA agent who’d gone rogue; he did discard a huge amount of cocaine from his aircraft; it was eaten by a bear.

But the hungry mammal didn’t take off on a rampage to rival the closing scene of Scarface (1983). In reality, it died quietly in the Chattahoochee National Forest, and was then stuffed and later displayed in a mall in Kentucky (where it has earned the nickname ‘Pablo Eskobear’).

Banks’ film isn’t the craziest example of animal folklore being brought to the screen, and it’s certainly not the craziest bear movie overall.

Filmed in 1983 and unreleased for 37 years, André Szöts’ Grizzly II: Revenge (1983) stars Louise Fletcher of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and features George Clooney, Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen as teens hiding from a bereaved brown bear. It successfully toured the horror festival circuit almost four decades after its intended release date (which only goes to show the power of hibernation).

Likewise, Iain Gardner’s A Bear Named Wojtek (2022) will this year share the extraordinary story of the Syrian brown bear adopted by Polish soldiers. The plucky animal learned to march, salute, carry weapons crates and was eventually enlisted with the rank of private into the Polish 22nd Artillery Supply Company.

Other animals with a fearsome reputation aren’t lucky enough to receive top billing. The opening scene of Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) features a frenzied attack by a Gordy, an ape trained to act in a sitcom, and seems to mirror the real-life incident where chimpanzee Travis (famed for his cola commercials and 90s TV appearances) brutally attacked his owner Sandra Herold’s friend, leaving her blind and in need of facial reconstruction. Travis, like his screen counterpart, was shot dead by police.

Being based on a true story isn’t a key ingredient when concocting an animal folklore film, though it certainly helped in the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Two well-shared tales helped steer the narrative: author Daphne du Maurier watching a farmer attacked by swarming gulls while ploughing his field, and a Californian mass-attack that took place in 1961 where seabirds, disorientated after eating toxic algae, began flying into cars and vomiting on lawns.

Sometimes, a little poetic licence (and a misinterpreted encyclopaedia entry) is all you need to make a convincing screen beast. Anyone who’s read Monsters: 100 Weird Creatures from Around the World by Sarah Banville will know the story of the ‘drop bear’: a fanged koala that leaps from Australian tree-tops to eat unsuspecting gap-year students. The subject of a tongue-in-cheek but authentic looking warning by the Australian Museum, the legend been adapted into a film, Carnifex (2022) by Sean Lahiff, and makes for almost as unique an eco-horror as Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend (1978), where all of the bush’s flora and fauna unite against a pair of married litter-louts.

Ironically, it’s the creatures outside of folklore that have chalked up the biggest human kills and have yet to get a movie of their own. Mosquitos are responsible for a million annual deaths worldwide but can count only cult sci-fi Blood Fever (1994) as a starring vehicle. And even there they had to be mutated via alien plasma to appear more imposing on screen.

A more cinematic killer is the hippo, whose horror depictions peak with a single attack scene in Congo (1995). It’s engrossing, but not enough to convince you that these muddy creatures cause nearly 23 times as many yearly fatalities as lions. That’s enough to give Idris Elba a whole franchise, as opposed to a single adversary in Beast (2022).

Perhaps enough time has now passed for some of the more prominent ‘creature feature’ movies to enter into folklore themselves. Millennials will remember the groundswell of online support for David R. Ellis’s Snakes on Plane (2006), a script inspired by stories of brown catsnakes climbing on to cargo flights during the Second World War.

The idea went full circle when a garter snake was last year discovered aboard a United Airlines flight to Newark Liberty International Airport. Whether the event will inspire a horror-comedy of its own one day remains unknown, but one fact is undisputed: the snake species was non-venomous, which possibly negates the need for an action hero in the style of Samuel L. Jackson. 

Cocaine Bear is in cinemas from 24 February 2022.