Man-Eating Plant

In Skid Row, garden salad eats you!

"This was a man-eating plant. If it had germinated, it would have required us just as much as we require green vegetables."

— Dr. Sheldon, The Avengers (1960s), "Man-Eater of Surrey Green"

A Venus flytrap is one of the coolest plants out there: It's carnivorous! And it eats insects! Its leaves even resemble grotesque, tooth-lined mouths. 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 don't just wait motionlessly for someone to step into their leaf — they can move and actively chase their victims (thankfully, they usually can't uproot themselves from where they grow). They also tend to growl and roar. Somehow.

Their leaves' resemblance to animal mouths also tends to get highly exaggerated — they might be dripping with saliva, be lined with actual razor-sharp teeth, or sport a tongue. Often, the plant's "mouth" is depicted as an elaborate, colorful bulb without any real parallels in real-life plant anatomy. In fact, while the real plant eats insects by trapping them within its leaves and digesting them there, the Man-Eating Plant actually swallows its victims; its stalk works like an esophagus while the roots seem to house an animal-like digestive system.

Besides the main set of jaws, their attacks may include typical traits of fictional plants: entangling with rapidly-growing or mobile vines, spewing damaging or debilitating substances — Alluring Flowers are often depicting as feeding on creatures enthralled by their mind-numbing scents — or even spawning mini-copies of themselves that threaten to inflict a Death of a Thousand Cuts.

Unless they are sufficiently vulnerable to normal attacks (although they typically take LOTS of ammo to kill this way), expect them to be fought by means used against plants in Real Life (or just take much more damage from them): cutting tools, weedcutters, pesticides, fire (or even napalm) or acid (they might instead attack with acid themselves). While doing this, a hero may be cracking snarky gardening-themed remarks.

Other varieties of carnivorous plants don't show up anywhere nearly as often. This is partially because they're not as well-known and don't sport that awesome carnivore-like appearance;^note Ironically, Venus flytraps, the only plants with "jaw" traps, are incredibly rare — they're only found in a few swamps in the Carolinas — while pitchers are the most widespread type of carnivorous plant what's more, their trapping mechanisms tend to be more passive — making them little more than living flypaper or a Pit Trap, which doesn't make for an exciting monster. The most common alternative variants are based on pitcher plants, with big bell-like stomachs in which to trap and digest prey. Other carnivorous plants, such as the sticky, entangling sundews and the aquatic bladderworts, are almost unheard of. Occasionally, a writer may simply take a regular, inert plant, such as a tree or a flower, and give it mobility, acidic secretions, and a taste for meat. A few are also more like normal plants, but are impatient enough for fertilizer that they actively kill prey and entangle the corpses within their roots.

In Japanese Media, the giant flower Rafflesia sometimes gets depicted‎ as this, though in Real Life it's a non-insectivorous root parasite (which incidentally makes it more like a herbivorous plant than anything else). Although the smell it gives off could certainly bring to mind images of the remains of previous animal meals rotting inside, which may be how it got that reputation.

Regardless of type, these aren't typically plants found growing among daisies and oaks in the woods behind your home — as a rule, the natural range of the Man-Eating Plant involves rather more exotic locations. The trackless depths of the Hungry Jungle and of festering, tangled swamps make of the heart of these plant's traditional range, but various stands and offshoots have been recorded in locations as varied as the Garden of Evil, the corrupted wastelands of Mordor, and savage alien worlds. This lineage of carnivorous flora has quite ancient roots as well, and varieties have been encountered as far back as Hollywood Prehistory and still often linger in Lost Worlds.

See also: Artistic License – Botany, Plant Aliens, Plant Mooks, 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.) And also not to be confused with veganism, men eating plants. A type of Fantastic Flora. Often overlaps with Botanical Abomination.

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Example subpages:

• Video Games

Examples:

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.
• This commercial for Cadbury dark chocolate, a young woman is gushing over her new pet to an irritating degree and annoying her friends. She is then eaten by a Venus fly trap, which spits out one of her shoes. Her friends seem pretty happy with her demise.

Anime & Manga

• Captain Harlock: Miime's homeworld was overrun with carnivorous plants, and she's now the Last of Her Kind.
• Delicious in Dungeon: Team Touden encounter a patch of these in the second chapter while looking for some much-needed produce, though they aren't exactly man-eating so much as generically carnivorous — it's just that they get big enough to swallow a person whole. After Laios saves Marcille from one, he asks whether being wrapped up by a parasitic plant's vines felt good or not, much to her horror. They then cook the fruits of the plants they defeated into a tart, with a footnote mentioning that different kinds of plants produce different fruit (which they use to lure prey into capture): the digestive types' are juicy and sweet, while the fertilizer types' are dense and full-flavored.
• Digimon has the giant plant Blossomon, a giant flower with a giant mouth, 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.
• Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure in the South Seas has Nobita and his new friend, Jack, being stranded on a jungle island and attacked by a giant fanged plant. The plant managed to swallow Jack, but Nobita saves him by grabbing a rock and bashing the plant repeatedly until it spits out Jack and retreats. Cue Nobita being relieved Jack is alright... until he saw the Cranial Eruptions on Jack's head unintentionally caused by him.
• Futaba-kun Change!: The school's Gardening Club brings one out to fight in the Tournament Arc. For some reason, it seems allergic to Futaba's blood.
• Kaiba: The pseudo-titular leviathan 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.
• Kingdom Hearts: In the manga adaption of Chain Of Memories, Big Bad Marluxia, whose Elemental Powers are of the Green Thumb variety, has a couple of these hanging around.
• Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: Inside the dungeon of Zagan, there is a huge plant that eats the humans who are being brought into the dungeon. During her adventure, however, this plant is destroyed by Morgiana.
• Midnight Horror School: Juno always carries a man-eating plant on her head. When she gets angry or serious, the man-eating plant on her head gets violent.
• The Mystic Archives of Dantalian: In the second part of the third episode, Dalian is caring for a rare African cactus in the greenhouse she shares with Huey. The plant blooms every 13 years and wilts after one night. It is later revealed that the cactus is a giant carnivorous plant that uses its book-shaped petals to attract victims and devour them, which the two burglars in the episode found out the hard way.
• Naruto: Zetsu 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.
• Ninja Nonsense 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.)
• Now and Then, Here and There: The protagonists have a run-in with one in the eighth episode. It is, interestingly, not the standard "giant Venus flytrap" that one would expect from this trope, but a something bearing a distinct resemblance to the mythical Ya-Te-Veo, a tree-like plant topped with a mass of writhing tentacles instead of branches.
• One Piece:
  • From the sixth movie, we have (Warning: major spoilers ahead) Lily Carnation. She/it looks like a cute little flower at first, but her/its true form is much more terrifying. Then it absorbs Luffy's crew members and outright becomes a Neo Exdeath-like Eldritch Abomination.
  • During the Time Skip, Usopp ends up trapped on an archipelago that are actually immense carnivorous plants the size of islands that prey on Sea Monsters. They're so massive, they themselves host forests of smaller (but still huge) man-eating plants and Big Creepy-Crawlies on their surface. It's not so bad though, since lots of delicious foodstuffs also grow on them (as bait) and he quickly grows fat (before burning it off later).
• Pokémon: The Series: James has had the dubious honor of owning two Man-Eating Plants, 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. James never really got over losing his Victreebel. There are a few points where a Weepinbell is available during a heist and James wants to catch it.
• Princess Resurrection: Hime is attacked by one that Sherwood planted in the front yard of her mansion before leaving. Funny enough, Hime literally refers to it as a "Man-Eating Plant".
• Rosario + Vampire:
  • The Lady of the Knoll (manga)/Rubi Toujou (anime) summons an entire army of these. 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, which everyone except Tsukune thought looked delicious. It (predictably) ended up trying to eat them, but they had the last laugh.
• 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 that "there are many bad bugs in Tokyo!"
• Tamagotchi: The big flower the Tama-Friends plant and study for a school project in episode 41b slowly consumes them as they approach and stay near it. The gang walk their way around the innards of the plant and try to find a way to get out.
• To Love Ru: The Yuuki family 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.
• Transformers: Cybertron: The Jungle Planet is home to plants that eat Humongous Mecha.

• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Aki Izayoi builds her deck around these, with a plant-based dragon-type Synchro, Black Rose Dragon, as her trump card.

Arts

• The Future Forest: Some of the plants are based on the Venus Flytrap (seen here◊) with sharp, biting teeth and gigantic sizes.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: In Season 4 episode 30, a big plant tries to eat Happy S. but misses him, causing its teeth to crack.
• Motu Patlu: In "Time Machine", a big plant tries to eat Motu. Patlu manages to get the plant to spit him out.
• Kung Fu Wa: In the first episode, after Tee Yang meets Kung-Fu Sock Master, the first Kwei they find is possesing a big rose with Vine Tentacles that tries to eat Tee Yang, but is saved by Kung-Fu Sock Master and they deafeat it together.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Mighty Little Defenders: Wolky sets up several in episode 3 for some traps he expects the goats to fall into. Wolky himself ends up the victim of the plants' bites by accident — and twice, no less.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • One of the earliest examples is a card called Carnivorous Plant, whose art depicts the traditional fleshy pod with teeth and a tongue variant. It's a 4/5 creature. Given that the average human is 1/1, in game terms that one big freaking plant.^note squirrels are also 1/1, technically — the scaling system isn't all that linear. Still a pretty big plant. Hell, it could dine on a Giant Spider.
  • Grappling Sundew depicts a mass of sundew plants growing on the roofs of the City Planet of Ravnica, which are large and strong enough to snare a dragon from the sky.
  • Phytohydras are a kind of carnivorous plants native to the plane of Ravnica. As their name suggests, they are cross between his trope and Hydra Problem — they have multiple jawed "heads", and regrow two new one for every head destroyed. The first one to be printed starts out as a 1/1, but hurting it only increases its strength and toughness.
  • Bramblesnaps are a type of Green-aligned elementals resembling vaguely humanoid masses of thorny vines with Lamprey Mouths ringed by sharp fangs. According to the card's flavor text, they're created by grafting together thirteen different plants that already hunger for meat.
• 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. There's also Traptrix Nepenthes, whose pet or true form is based on the pitcher plant, Traptrix Sera is based on the sundew plant, and Traptrix Tio, whose pet or true form is based on the venus fly trap.

Comic Books

• 2000 AD:
  • The Godplant is one of several carnivorous plants which appeared in an episode of Judge Dredd. It ends up eating the lead hippie-like character which is trying to worship it.
  • Anderson: Psi-Division: A whole bunch of plants start eating people when an eco-terrorist dumps a bunch of Mutagenic Goo in a plant store.
  • Tales of Telguuth: A mage's apprentice is sent by his master to ask a neighboring mage for supplies, but on his way there comes across a field of human heads crying for help, which the other mage harvests for food. The apprentice refuses to believe his words that it is a sentient plant that takes on human appearance to lure in victims and tries to free one of the female heads before he gets eaten. His skin is then recycled by the plant to form a new head.
• 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 this has been alluded to on occasion), she's certainly a man-eater in every other sense of the word. Her sweat contains pheromones 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 Harvest, a Plant Person 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.
• Marvel Comics: A villain called Plant Man has been known to create these, although he tends to be a joke. (And at one point, he himself says that "the old man-eating plant schtick is corny even for a guy calling himself Plant Man!")
• The Maxx: Though black Izs3 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.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): "Pony-gobbling petunias", as Rarity puts it, are one of the dangers the Mane Six have to deal with while crossing the Forest of Leota in "The Return of Queen Chrysalis".

• Rulah, Jungle Goddess: In Issue #18, a villainess called Flower Lady attempts to feed Rulah to her man-eating tiger plant. At the end of the story, Flower Lady suffers a Karmic Death as she falls into the tiger plant herself.
• Sensation Comics: A bitter horticulturist grows "octopus plants" in his basement and green house which he feeds his rival and his rival's daughter to, and which Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor rescue the Holliday Girls from.
• The Smurfs: Papa Smurf accidentally creates a Smurf-eating plant in "The Smurfs and the Howlibird" (and its Animated Adaptation), which requires a Smurf to chop at its roots to stop.
• Star Trek: The first-ever comic book adaptation (by Gold Key Comics) features a planet where the plants eat animals, to the point of keeping them in enclosures similar to cattle pens. Janice Rand is placed in one of these, and is almost eaten before being rescued.
• Supergirl: Supergirl fights one of these in Supergirl Vol 1 #3: The Garden of Death!: a giant, mutant carnivorous plant tries to swallow Kara whole but it quickly spits Supergirl out because it can't bite through her indestructible skin.
• Treehouse of Horror: An issue of the comic book adaptation called "Little Shop of Homers" had Lisa's experiment with a carnivorous plant accidentally splice with Homer's DNA. At first it feeds on donuts but moves on to people after growing a giant green copy of Homer's head.

Comic Strips

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

• Dick Tracy: More than one villain has owned a carnivorous plant known as a Muerte Vine. While they can be kept alive with raw meat, they need a living human being every once in a while to really thrive, as Lt. Teevo found out when he was Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves at the end of the "Mr. Crime" storyline.

• The Far Side had a cartoon featuring a plant called the Venus Kidtrap, a huge tree-like flytrap with downwards-facing jaws and tentacles resembling tire swings hanging underneath. A few hats and baseball bats are also strewn around the base of the plant for a good measure.

Fan Works

• Antipodes: While exploring the forest of zap apple trees, Incendia is attacked by a carnivorous plant of the sort consisting of a fanged, mouth-like bulb on a snakelike, moving vine.
  "What in Celestia's name was that?" [Tiptoe] said.
  "I have no idea," Jigsaw said, "but I think we had better get out of here. Even the plants are trying to kill us."
• Anything for Family: Cure Marine nearly loses an arm to a giant, hungry Venus flytrap.
• The Flight of the Alicorn: A variant with the honeytrap tree, which grows in the swamps and jungles of the Impenetrable Lands. It doesn't eat things, per se. Rather, it serves as a home for a swarm of flesh-eating insects that rush out to devour whatever disturbs their home, with the tree then drawing nourishments from the decomposing remnants of its hosts' meals. Due to drawing all its energy from this source, it does not photosynthesize.
• Heart of the Forest: While exploring White Tail Woods, Applejack and Discord come across bushes that use prehensile vines to grab passing creatures, pull them into their branches, and eat them.
• The Legacy of the Cursed Mask Series: The Wolf-Demon Crisis has demonic grass, a type of plant that impales people and drains them of blood.
• The New Adventures of Invader Zim: Episode 11 is all about Zim unleashing genetically-engineered plant monsters to attack the city. Unsurprisingly, they eventually turn on him, and he's forced to team up with Dib and his friends to destroy them.
• The Palaververse: The post on Corva mentions the death of the Fifth Cormaer, mixed with When Trees Attack: "ambushed and devoured by a carnivorous tree".
• Pokémon: Clefairy Tales: Leaf and her Pokémon encounter a pack of Bellsprout — Pokémon resembling animated pitcher plants — on Route 5 which are more rabid than usual. Leaf suspects the environment being tampered with and a subsequent Gaia's Vengeance attitude, but Red suspects a misplaced defense mechanism against Team Rocket, which had just invaded Saffron City directly to the south.
• Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: The prologue has Maka, Kid, Black Star, and Crona rounding up man-eating plants in Madagascar. They're called Madagascar Trees. It is a case of Shown Their Work because the term exists.
• Stallions Of Harmony Verse: After the characters are blown off a cliff by Nightmare Moon, they encounter a "carnivorous cabbage" that traps and tries to eat them. Shining Armor defeats it by letting himself get eaten and then activating his shield inside of the cabbage, causing it to explode.
• Something Wicked This Way Comes: Sulu's section of the Botany lab apparently contains more than one specimen of this variety. Scotty mentions one of the plants ("a wee beastie")that "nearly had the Captain for breakfast last week and McCoy, when suggesting another character take a stroll in the Botany gardens to relax, adds a warning to stay away from section twelve, where "our helmsman keeps his pets."

Films — Animation

• Cat City features a gigantic, mouse-eating plant in The Amazon Rainforest.
• G.I. Joe: The Movie: One of Cobra-La's many bioweapons is an entire field of trees, referred to as "Carno-Trees", which grab enemy soldiers and wrap them up.
• Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs features one big enough to eat both a mammoth and a Smilodon. Buck manages to make it release them after defusing it like a bomb.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony: The Movie (1986): The Phlume plant is only seen eating a passing insect, but is otherwise mobile, aggressive, capable of roaring, and quite dangerous in a fight.
  • My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games: When Twilight drops her device during the second event of the Games, it opens several portals to Equestria (most likely in the Everfree Forest), from which giant carnivorous plants emerge to attack the competitors. One even gobbles down Sugarcoat's bike.
• Pooh's Grand Adventure: While fleeing the Skullasaurus, the party gets lost in a maze of thorny vines bearing large, toothy maws. After finding Christopher Robin, it's shown that this was merely a large cluster of brambles, which the gang had mistaken for monstrous plants in their fear and confusion.
• Quest for Camelot: Kayley nearly gets eaten by a couple of patches of grass that she walks over, though Garrett intervenes before she even notices. Those are the only plants that try to eat anyone. Everything else in the Forbidden Forest either menaces the characters in other ways or isn't a plant.
• Tarzan (2013): Tarzan and Jane are nearly eaten by a mutated plant when entering the meteorite chasm.

Films — Live-Action

• Adele Hasn't Had Her Dinner Yet: Adele. The Gardener who created her treats her as his pet and affectionately calls her "Adelka" ("Little Adele"). She's seen being fed by lab mice and she has eaten a really big dog. She was created for one purpose only: revenge. She does eat one person near the climax of the movie, though it's nobody of the intended victims, and it's not her creator either.
• At the Earth's Core: A man-eating plant makes a brief appearance, interrupting a fight scene between the hero and an adversary. 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.
• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom: Both Aquaman and Orm are in the middle of a forest filled with hostile vegetation, including trees that attempts swallowing them on the spot.

• Creepshow 2: The animated linking story 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.
• Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. This early anthology from Amicus Productions 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.
• The Freakmaker: Professor Nolter admires carnivorous plants for possessing attributes of both plants and animals. He has mutated several to giant size and feeds them cats and rabbits. He uses the DNA from a giant Venus flytrap to mutate Tony into a human/Plant hybrid, and later gets eaten by the mutant, whose chest opens up like a flytrap to swallow him.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla vs. Biollante: Biollante is a Kaiju-eating plant. 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 (which she does indeed try to devour at one point). That said, Biollante is actually a peaceful monster and only killed to protect her scientist "father" and to try and stop Godzilla's rampages.
  • Mothra: The Vampire Plant uses its vines to constrict prey and presumably drinks their blood, and the rather self-explanatory Maneater from All Monsters Attack, a vaguely humanoid leafy monster that attacks the main character (it only appears in his Dream Sequences however).
• Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) at one point has Trevor and Hannah fight off giant Venus fly traps, which actually look very close to the real thing, but for one difference: they seize their prey using prehensile vines rather than simply waiting for it to come within reach. Trevor actually gives one an Offhand Backhand as they make a hasty getaway.
• Jumanji: One of the jungle perils in The Film of the Book 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...
• Konga 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. Made even more horrible in the Novelization where Professor Decker first rapes the poor girl, and then Konga knocks her into the plants. Decker tries to save her, but all he pulls out is her skeleton.
• The Little Shop of Horrors: By experimentally cross-breeding plants, a bumbling florist's assistant named Seymour Krelborn accidentally creates a talking plant with hypnotic powers that feeds on human blood. In a neat twist, the movie also features a man EATING a plant—one of Mushnik's regulars eats flowers straight from the bouquets.
• Little Shop of Horrors is a Recursive Adaptation, a film version of the musical based on the original film. Here, Seymour Krelborn is an assistant florist in a struggling flower shop who finds a strange plant (implied to be of alien origin) which he dubs Audrey II, and which has a mysterious ability to attract customers, but unfortunately demands human blood for food. Compared to the plant in the original movie, Audrey II's personality is greatly expanded, making it a cunning, charismatic manipulator with a great singing voice (supplied by Motown legend Levi Stubbs, of the Four Tops).
• The Lost Skeleton Returns Again: One attacks Lattice, but Peter Fleming sacrifices himself to rescue her.

• Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi: The sarlacc is a massive plant-like creature that unnaturally prolongs the life of anything it eats while slowly digesting them for a thousand years. It's said to reproduce through spores, and because of their Bizarre Alien Biology xenobiologists are unsure whether to classify them as plant or animal but most lean towards the former.
• The Ruins: The plot heroes become trapped in the titular ruins, which are infested with a man-eating plant that grows into your arteries when it smells blood. Cue plenty of messy, improvised amateur surgery.
• 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.
• Tales of Halloween: The monster in "Bad Seed" is a self-mobile, man-eating pumpkin.
• Tarzans Desert Mystery: Tarzan is caught by a bizarre man-eating plant with long vines entwining him, but he summons some elephants to free him by pulling the vines off long enough for him to escape.
• In the B-Movie Venus Flytrap, (a.k.a Revenge of Dr. X) a Mad Scientist unintentionally creates one of these out of a Venus flytrap plant (well duh) who then goes on a rampage.
• 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 wrapped up by the tendrils of a prehistoric man-eating plant.
• In When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Sanna becomes trapped by a carnivorous plant, and cuts off a portion of her hair in order to escape. As Tara goes looking for Sanna, he finds her hair trapped beneath the plant and assumes she is dead.

Gamebooks

• Lone Wolf: 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!
• Secret Agent Grandma involves a secret invasion of alien roses, which can grow fangs and devour humans. The titular "grandma" is an alien imposter tasked with planting them.
• You're Plant Food!, true to it's title, have giant, man-eating plants as recurring enemies in the main route. There's also giant dandelions (which you can grab and float away on), killer roses, paralyzing pollen, acid-spewing vines, and various plant-based hazards.

Literature

• 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 Belgariad: While traveling through Nyissa, Garion and company come across a beautiful tree with extremely good-looking and good-smelling fruit. Polgara recognizes it instantly and warns them away from it: it's a carnivorous tree that lures animals (and people) to it with its sweet smell, kills them with its poisonous fruit, then extends tendrils to infiltrate and digest their bodies. The half-Dryad Ce'Nedra says it's even empathic to some degree, and feeds on the fear and pain of its victims as much as on their bodies.
• Beware of Chicken: The Misty Lake is really more of a swamp, home to spirit plants like the Carnivine, which can grow large enough to eat entire villages if not culled.
• The Cat Trap: The mouse hero simply eats his way out of a carnivorous flower.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Quite a bit of the vegetation in the Dungeon is just as vicious as the animal life, although it tends to use less direct methods, such as lying in ambush or using mental attacks, instead of a frontal assault with brute force.
  Vines string across the tunnel, dangling moss in our faces and the rock walls are barely visible beneath layers of leaves and shrubs. Here and there are truly massive flowers and ferns that sway with the breeze.
  
  Hang on... we're underground. There is no breeze!
  
  The lightbulb goes on in my head just as the many plants and vines start shifting and moving, almost unfolding as they reveal hideous plant mouths laced with razor sharp teeth.
• Coldfire Trilogy: A less animalistic version is present in the form of trees that drug and paralyze nearby animals, and then grow tendrils into them and slowly devour them from the inside out.
• Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Vargo Statten Novelization contains a scene apparently invented wholesale for the book, in which David Reed and Mark Williams are attacked by a man-eating underwater tree in the titular lagoon.
• Gregor The Overlander: Curse of the Warmbloods features the underground jungle of Tantalus, where almost every plant is deadly in some way.
• 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."
• The Day of the Triffids: The eponymous menaces are a kind of exotic plant, resembling three-meter-tall pitcher plants capable of moving by means of three stubby, foot-like roots at the base of their bulbous stems. Their flower-like "heads" conceal long, venomous stingers. They feed by trapping insects in their sticky pitchers and by killing larger animals with their stings, after which they remain rooted near their decomposing carcasses, periodically tearing off pieces of meat with their stingers and dropping them into their bells. They're originally cultivated for industrial purposes due to the oil they produce, but escape into the wild after an abnormal meteor shower blinds most of humanity and become dangerous predators. They're mostly assumed to act on instinct, but display worrying sings of intelligence, such as by herding blind humans into areas where they can be killed more easily.
• Deltora Quest: There's a very nasty one that preys on farmers. 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.
• The Demon Breed has the (fortunately rare) Harpooneer plant. Don't stand too close to it, or you're Impaled with Extreme Prejudice and then lunch.
• Parodied in the Dr. Seuss book Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are, were the Narrator mentions a forest in France that has Pants-Eating Plants.
• Downward to the Earth: A lot of the flora of Belzagor is mobile and carnivorous in some way, including such species as carpets of toothy moss or mobile, noose-like vines.
• Edgar & Ellen: Subverted. 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 Edge Chronicles: In Beyond the Deepwoods, the first book, the protagonist Twig encounters a man-eating tree called a Bloodoak, which is described as essentially a giant digestive sac surrounded by a woody trunk. A mutualistic symbiotic plant known as the tarryvine snares victims and then drags them to the Bloodoak where they are devoured, complete with rather graphic descriptions.
• Fragment: Subverted. The apparent man-eating plants are actually weird animals, they just bear a cursory resemblance to plants.
• John Collier's short story "Green Thoughts", thought to have inspired the original film version of The Little Shop of Horrors.
• Violet the psycho plant in the first H.I.V.E. Series book. 'Her' creator, Nigel Darkdoom, had it put on growth retardants after it tried to eat his finger. Then the power is cut to the Herbology lab, and she quickly spreads through the school resulting in a Mass Oh, Crap! for all of the characters. 'She' is is only stopped after Otto triggers a cave-in.
• Hothouse: In the distant future of the Earth, there are very few animal species left, and plants have become mobile and intelligent to varying degrees. As many plants have long since evolved equivalents to nervous and muscular systems of animals, these are more often than not entirely capable of ensnaring and devouring humans, the other surviving animals, and each other. In many cases, they're entirely mobile beings that can actively stalk and subdue their prey. In the ocean, the algae are no less mobile or hungry. Many do not feed on flesh or other plants directly, instead using their prey's rotting tissues fertilize their roots, but others are carnivorous in the more direct sense. The future humans — themselves tiny and green-skinned — are on the constant lookout for predatory plants that want to devour them.
• InCryptid: Swamp bromeliads are giant flowers that can eat mammals as large as a deer, and sometimes prey on humans. Verity and Dominic rescue a boy who's trapped in one when they stop in Buckley. Their pollen also has a narcotic effect, which Dominic finds out to his chagrin.
• Spellsinger: 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.
• Joseph Payne Brennan's short story "The House on Stillcroft Street." A carnivorous ivy takes over plant collector Millward Frander's house, turning poor Millward into a kind of plant zombie (think Stephen King's "Weeds"/The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill from Creepshow).
• 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 horrifying.
• Known Space:
  • The "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.
  • Slaver sunflowers are a variation on the theme — when something flies over them, they use their reflective petals to scorch it with concentrated sunlight.
• 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.
• 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.
• Lord of the Rings implies that the Huorns (trees that 'wake up' and become more Entish, being capable of movement and malice) might do this, considering how the Uruk army that entered them didn't come out again, with no traces left — certainly, Old Man Willow, indicated to be something very much like a Huorn, has a similar method, luring travellers close to and almost absorbing Merry and Pippin.
• The German SF series Maddrax has as a scene a post-apocalyptic world in which almost all animals and plants have mutated into monstrous, giant creatures. And at the beginning of the series also plants are shown, which eat humans.
• Men in Black: The Green Saliva Blues: The antagonists of the book are the Zahurians, a race of mobile Plant Aliens, which resemble flowering plum trees and will slice, dice and suck up (through their roots) the remains of any fleshy beast or being they can reach. Naturally, this trait (combined with their refusal to communicate, and thus negotiate, with their would-be prey) makes them one of the most hated races in the galaxy.
• In The Nekropolis Archives, leech vines are thorny vines which wrap around victims and drain their blood. They particularly love to drain the blood of vampires, who are generally not amused by the irony.
• 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.
• 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).
• A common environmental hazard showing up in a fair variety of forms in Perry Rhodan's various alien natural and artificial jungle settings. How much of an actual threat they present varies, but they're inevitably at least a nuisance.
• The Planeteers: In "The Brain Stealers of Mars", a man-eating Venusian plant is mentioned as having almost killed one of the heroes.
• R.G. Macready's short story "The Plant-Thing" involves Intrepid Reporter Dick (no last name) being sent to investigate why reclusive scientist Professor Carter is buying up tons of livestock. Turns out he's feeding them all to a giant flesh-eating plant he's been growing. The plant goes rogue and tries to eat Carter, forcing his Malay servant Tala to shoot and kill it to save him while Dick elopes with the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter Isobel.
• In "The Sagebrush Kid", a short story in Annie Proulx's 2008 Fine Just the Way It Is, a childless Wyoming couple transfer their affections first to a piglet, then a chicken, and finally to a sagebrush they fancy to have the appearance of a child. It is tended and protected, and even fed bones and stray scraps of meat from their dinner-table. Even after the couples' passing, the shrub—now grown to the height of a fair-sized tree—is used to human attention, and meat. It consumes livestock, then soldiers, then a local medico, railroad men, surveyors, and most lately a botanist come to investigate its unusual height and luxuriance.
• "The Scarlet Citadel": Conan the Barbarian happens on a man-eating vine in his prison and goes to rescue the man.
• Septimus Heap: The carnivorous trees. Unlike most man-eating trees, they hunt by grabbing their victims and draining them of their blood.
• In the Seven Kennings series, it's taken up to eleven in level of danger. The nation of Forn have a plant named the bantil plant. It's a flower with a maw instead. It grows incredibly fast, it's higly aggressive. Worst parts? The seeds have hooks, grows incredibly fast and can grow by feeding on an host blood. If it wasn't enough, their vines are lined with them, a simple brush spells danger. They are even a danger to those blessed with powers of plants. Even with their immunity, they'll take a bite before they release they "are off-limits".
• 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.
• One of the Solar Pons stories involved a vine that drained blood.
• In Starlight and Shadows, Kelpies are a type of seaweed which uses Charm spells to lure in prey and then drowns and consumes them. The Kraken Society has been weaponizing them by planting large numbers of them in the waters surrounding Ruathym.
• According to the Star Trek: Vulcan's Soul novels, planet Vulcan has a few of these. Most notable is the S'gagerat, which hide beneath the sand to ensnare prey in their tendrils.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • The Syren Plant of Kashyyyk can take at least two humans (or a human and a wookie) at a time.
  • Galaxy of Fear:
    • An alleth sproutling in flicks to sting any hands that touch it, and a computer says that fully grown alleths can eat small rodents. These things are a lot more like Earth's carnivorous plants than is common for this trope. A little later in the same book a much larger plant called the vesuvague is found to be willing and able to strangle people with its vines, but whether that's to eat or otherwise is unknown — one character says he'd have been plant food if someone hadn't saved him, but no "mouth" is evidenced.
    • Later in the series, on Dagobah there is something called a meat flower, flowers with toothy petals that bite at people. If they've been fed they don't bother unless poked at or disturbed much. The juice from their leaves can soothe the injuries they leave. It's said that there are rare ones out in the swamp, much larger, which can eat people whole rather than just nipping.
• Tales from the White Hart: In "The Reluctant Orchid", Hercules Keating is nearly killed by a carnivorous orchid. He then attempts to use the orchid to murder his overbearing aunt, but this does not go according to plan.
• 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.
• The Underland Chronicles: In Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, Gregor, Lapblood, and Mange nearly get eaten by plants described as looking like "giant yellow smiles" as they're traveling through the jungle. By the time Ripred rescues them, Mange is already dead.
• The harpoon tree in The Venom of Argus by Richard Avery (pen name of Edmund Cooper).
• The War Against the Chtorr: A Season for Slaughter goes into horrific 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.
• In Manly Wade Wellman's stories there is the bizarre Gardinel. It looks like a rundown house, but if you go inside you discover it's actually like a Pitcher Plant, capable of devouring anyone so foolish. In some stories it's implied that the Shonokin, a malevolent part-human race in his stories, can live in them.
• Xandri Corelel: Diver almost gets snatched by a vine with teeth in Testing Pandora.
• The tangle tree in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels. In the earliest books carnivorous grass and kelp (or algae) show up as well, and are suggested to be common.
• Kameron Hurley's Worldbreaker Saga features a wide range of these, particularly in the Dhai forests. Examples include the blinding tree and the bone tree. Some of them are mobile. Other plants can be effectively domesticated and persuaded to not attack the humans who tend them while attacking intruders - so long as they are regularly fed with blood.

Live-Action TV

• In The Addams Family, Morticia owns an "African strangler" named Cleopatra which appears to be a baby man-eating plant. (In one episode, she says it is only three years old, but in another, she claims to have had it before she married Gomez.) In the cartoon version of the series, she owns full-grown versions of these monsters.
• In The Avengers (1960s) episode "Man-Eater of Surrey Green", a man-eating plant from outer space lands in Middle England and takes several top horticulturists as its prisoners in an effort to germinate the Earth. Fortunately for the Earth, Steed just happens to be a herbicidal maniac.
• Doctor Who. The killer Martian fungus in Season 6 Episode 5 "Seeds of Death", and Krynoid in Season 13 Episode 5, "Seeds of Doom". The latter can turn even nice houseplants into vicious killers.
• One of the endlings featured in Endlings being studied by Hewes turns out to be one. This carnivorous plant is capable of subduing potential victims by inducing a somnambulant state, so prey is easier to capture and digest. This plant finds humans easiest to entrance, due to their memories being easier to source as illusions for the pacification process
• In Farscape, Zhaan's species turn into this when they're starving. In "Home on the Remains" she starts sprouting buds that release pollen which irritates respiratory systems to the point of incapacitation, acting more and more aggressive and less rational, and requires animal protein to reverse that state, even attacking the others at one point. In the end the crew barbecue the other Monster of the Week for her.
• 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).
• The Death Bottle in The Future is Wild approaches this. It's a carnivorous plant that grows in the desert, and conceals a pit over a meter deep and filled with numerous sharp spikes. Animals wander in and impale themselves. It's not quite big enough to swallow an adult human, though. (There aren't any humans in the modern sense of the word left to eat anyway, this being 200 million years in the future.)
• In one episode of Get Smart, an undercover Control agent that infiltrated a greenhouse front for a KAOS operation ends up getting devoured by a rare tree that ensnares anyone that touches it. At the end of the episode, after the episode's villain ends up becoming a victim of it as well, the Chief tells his assistant Laraby to take the plant into custody. When Laraby asks where he should store it, the Chief replies "by your desk".
• In the It's About Time episode "Androcles and Clon", the astronauts are attacked by a man-eating plant in the jungle. The plant attacks them with its vines and tries to pull them into a thicket. Mac and Hector are able to free themselves with a little difficulty.
• One has been featured occasionally as a Zonk on the current version of Let's Make a Deal.
• 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...
• The Invenusable Flytrap monster from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, which manages to eat four of the Rangers. They get better.
• Monster Warriors: In "Capital City vs. the Plant Thing", Capital City is attacked by a killer vine.
• Odd Squad:
  • There's one in "A Case of the Sillies" that Oona and Ocean encounter. Oona was lucky that it just got her arm and it succumbed to Music Soothes the Savage Beast. It was large enough to eat her whole.
  • There is a giant Venus flytrap in the Creature Room at Odd Squad headquarters. Oscar nearly gets eaten by it in "First Day".
• Stephen Badgeworth in the Pixelface episode "The Problems of Dr Nigari".
• Max from The Thundermans gives his sister's Venus Fly Trap growth serum that makes it grow huge, super strong and very hungry.
• The X-Files: In the episode "Field Trip", Mulder and Scully unwittingly fall into a gigantic underground fungus which acts as a Lotus-Eater Machine while it digests them.

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.
• Leaf's もぺもぺ (Mope Mope). Don't watch further than 0:46. The plants never actually eat anyone, but they sure look like they could.

Myths & Religion

• The Bantu (a language family/tribe of sub-Saharan Africa) traditionally believed that gourds and pumpkins could become man-eating monsters the size of houses.
• 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.
• Carnivorous trees were also supposed to exist in the Nubian rainforest. They reportedly attracted their prey by various means, such as by killing off all plants surrounding them to gain a "monopoly" on shade and perches, as well as by growing luscious, enticing and irresistible fruit and flowers as extra bait.
• The jungles of Central America were in some accounts home of the man-eating yateveo tree (from the Spanish "ya te veo", "I see you"), consisting of a short trunk topped with a tangle of writhing, snakelike tendrils in constant motion, which would dart out to ensnare and devour passing humans.
• Among the Romani people of the Balkan peninsula, there exist legends of gourds and melons that drain human blood.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu: The Death-Vines of Xiclotl are gigantic carnivorous flowers with Vine Tentacles and hypnotic pollen that compels those who inhale it to hurl themselves into the pits where they live. If you get caught, you may as well write off the PC, since the chance of them surviving getting ensnared or eaten by one of those things is virtually nil.
• Deadlands: The Blood Oak. Originally created for the comic running in The Epitaph magazine, it was later given stats and introduced as an abomination in the game. Unusually for this trope, it doesn't have the iconic mouth-parts; it resembles a particularly massive oak tree covered in long, wickedly sharp spines; it eats by clubbing victims with its barbed branches, ripping them to pieces so it can drink the blood after it seeps into the ground.
• Dungeons & Dragons: There are a number of plantlike monsters 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.
  • Yellow musk creepers are aggressively carnivorous plants whose diet consists exclusively of the brains of others — they don't even photosynthesize, and in fact avoid bright light. They don't limit themselves to human prey specifically, however, and will happily go after anything with a developed central nervous system.
  • The Mystara setting of the 80s and 90s (including the AD&D 2e and D&D 3e rules) has the dangerous "vampire rose" plant, flowers with a hypnotic scent that feed by draining blood through their hollow-thorned stalks, a full exsanguination coloring their white blossoms red. A big shock factor, though, is how if these stalks are cut when in use, they spray blood, and the plant releases an ear-piercing scream that can inflict fear on first-time viewers under level 5.
  • One of the nastiest carnivorous plants in the game is 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 literally made of snakes, found in the Lower Planes. Graz'zt's home realm of Azzagrat has a whole forest of them.
  • 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 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.
• Exalted:
  • Fang blossoms are flowering vines whose blooms hide fang-lined mouths. Smaller, younger specimens limit their predations to small animals; ones left to grow unchecked eventually become large enough to swallow humans whole.
  • Greenmaws are serpentine wood elementals with a body like a flexible green vine, a tail branching into a tangle of roots and a head like a Venus flytrap with a sticky tongue like a sundew, and are typically born from shoots or root fragments in the jungles of the East and Southwest. Newborn ones have an overwhelming hunger for meat and will devour any that they find, regardless of whether its owner is living or dead — they can even heal themselves by gorging on flesh. They eventually grow out of this, though; their tree-sized elders are content to mind their own business in the deep jungle and to let their neighbors mind their own.
• GURPS:
  • The Dreadstalk from GURPS: Creatures of the Night likes to kill adventurers and bury their stuff.
  • GURPS Fantasy Bestiary describes several types of carnivorous plants in its Fantastic Plants section.
    • Bloodvines don't eat people as such, but they attempt to grapple any passing person or animal and drain their blood through their hollow thorns.
    • Devilbushes uses tempting berries to lure prey towards them, at which point their victims fall into a disguised pit around the bush and are seized by its mobile roots. Once its prey is secured, the devilbush afflicts it with debilitating sickness and feeds on its pain.
    • Herecine bushes likewise lure victims towards themselves with plump berries and succulent twigs, ensnaring creatures that come to graze on them or harvest their berries and dragging them towards woody jaws in the center of their trunk.
  • GURPS Space poses this as one idea for a combination autotroph/consumer in their section on creating various alien species.
• Ironclaw: The Deadly Snaptrap is like a venus flytrap big enough to catch people, and has a "lure organ" in the middle of the trap that often looks like a chunk of gold.
• Myriad Song: You can play as one. Morphir start out as ordinary carnivorous plants, but if a female plant is fed the brains of sentient animals they produce buds containing the memories of their victim, often smoked as a hallucinogen. And if they eat a sapient brain they become sapient and gain the ability to shapeshift, often using the absorbed memories to impersonate someone they ate.
• Pathfinder: Pathfinder has a huge number of carnivorous plant creatures, some of which were imported from Dungeons & Dragons alongside a number of originals.
  • Alraunes, assassin vines, basidronds, bodythieves, corpse lotuses, crypt flowers, giant flytraps, giant sundews, hangman trees, jack-o-lanterns, jinmenjus, kawa akagos, leaf rays, mire nettles, moonflowers, quickwoods, sargassum fiends, shambling mounds, stranglereeds, tarantula trees, tendriculoses, viper vines, and xtabays are all plants which hunger for flesh, preferably from the player characters. Fungus-like monsters such as cerebric fungus, myceloids, phantom fungus, phycomids, tsaalgrends, vegepygmies and violet fungus also exist, and are no less hungry. There are even more Plant-type monsters than are mentioned here; these are just the ones that are definitely carnivorous.
  • Countefloras, aggressive semi-mobile flowers that resemble giant black dandelions, are a notable example in that they do not actually eat other creatures — they're purely photosynthetic — but will nonetheless attempt to kill any living thing that comes close to them by beating them to death with their closed flowerheads and by releasing clouds of toxic seeds. This is done in order to fertilize the ground with the rotting bodies of the plants' victims, in order to make it more fertile and ease the sprouting and growth of counteflora seeds.
  • It's possible for players to obtain their own friendly man-eating plants by a couple of means:
    • One option is to create a flytrap leshy, a leshy being a small Plant Person grown from one of a variety of base plants and animated through a magic ritual. Flytrap leshys are grown in swamplands from venus flytraps, whose distinctive traps make up their heads and hands, are much more aggressive than other leshys and greatly enjoy eating meat. Downplayed in that, although they have no problems whatsoever with eating vertebrate meat (including that of fallen foes), they much prefer eating insects when they can. They and other members of the Leshy family were promoted to playable creatures in Pathfinder 2nd edition.
    • Some ambulatory carnivorous plants are also an available choice as "animal" companions for rangers, druids and hunters. Options include two-mouthed snapping flytraps, pitcher-like gulper plants and slithering sundews with two large, sticky traps.
• Rocket Age loves this trope. Even putting aside the plant-like animals (or animal-like plants) of Ganymede the solar system has a lot of man eating plants. Venus has carnivorous bromeliads, Mars has an aggressive desert tree and Ganymede has a true plant that can turn an entire valley into a giant trap.
• Shadowrun: Awakened plants don't turn carnivorous very often, but some such variants do occur and can be very dangerous.
  • The Sangre del Diablo, a mutated variant of a naturally-occurring South American rainforest tree, is a dangerous carnivore that uses magical compulsion to lure its prey to it, at which point it engulfs it with corrosive sap, digests it and absorbs its liquefied remains. They're invasive in the Amazon basin, and when groves form they become entirely barren of animal life.
  • Yeteyeos are Central American trees that strangle victims with their snakelike branches are use their corpses as fertilizer.
  • South Africa's Dog Eaters use a combination of an enticing, fruity smell and thick, glue-like sap to lure and trap animals.
  • Malagasy elephant fruits are trees with very broad, hollow trunks tipped with a cluster of leaves that secrete a honey-like substance. Animals and metahumans trying to get at this bait climb into the tree's trunk, which is very slippery and leads to a pitcher plant-like digestive cavity.
  • Violet sleepers are Awakened Venus flytraps native to the Amazon rainforest, and resemble their regular kin in most respects except for being large enough to eat humans.
  • Gomorrah apple trees are an unusual variant — their fruit petrifies any creature that eats it, after which the tree's roots grown into the resulting statue and absorb its lingering life force.
  • The umdhlebi is an African tree with a slender trunk and branches and a wide, umbrella-like canopy. Creatures coming too close to it, typically in search of shade, quickly suffocate due to the large amounts of carbon dioxide released by the plant; once they pass out, the tree's roots lash out of the earth and drag the victim underground to digest it.
• Smash Up: One of the expansion factions is Carnivorous Plants. Their defining game mechanic is that they become more powerful on the turn after they're played, because they need time to grow.
• The Stars Are Fire: Sentinel trees resemble thorny masses of knotted vines and are mobile, aggressive, and feed on almost any sort of organic matter.
• The Strange:
  • Thick, hallucination-inducing vegetation seeded by an alien seed overgrows a good part of the planned parklike environment of the World Below of Starship Heinlein, called the Forest of Perfidy. Portions of the vegetation, called sinroots, sometimes animate and hunt heretics and demons living there, or the visiting angels and recursors.
  • Prances are insidious mutant flowers in Cataclyst that attract prey with alluring blooms, calming perfume, and a magic aura that promotes well-being. Once prey has been put to sleep, prances emerge for a bloody feeding frenzy.
• Talislanta has the False Shelter Trees, Mandragores, Mantraps, Scarlet Sporozoids, Serpentvines, and Stranglevines.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Venus mantraps are giant relatives of the common Venus flytrap found in the jungles of the Death World of Catachan. They have traps large enough to engulf a grown man, and can physically grab onto creatures several feet away from them with their vines and leaves in order to drag them into their maws.
  • Dark Heresy: Kenov III is a Death World dominated by extremely aggressive hybrids of flora and fauna, locked in endless competition and predation. Native lifeforms include pit-blooms, flower-like plants that life flat on the ground to scoop up passers-by and drop them in their underground digestive sacs, and ripper-whips, tree-like organisms topped with clusters of thorned tentacle-vines that tear apart passing creatures to shove into toothy maws near the tops of their trunks.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Bloodsedges are a type of tree that feeds on living animals by grabbing them with its branches and holding them against its trunk, where powerful acids quickly turn it into fertilizer. A copse of these things can devour an entire war party passing through them.
• The Witcher: Game of Imagination: Kelpies are supernatural predators composed of tangled seaweed, and kill prey by entailing prey and drowning or suffocating it.

Theater

• Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad averts this, though the Venus flytraps are large, growling, omnivorous and aggressive, and are said to have been fed a steady diet of cats.
• Little Shop of Horrors: Seymour Krelborn, assistant florist in a struggling flower shop, finds a strange plant which he dubs Audrey II, and which has a mysterious ability to attract customers, but unfortunately demands human blood for food. Compared to the plant in the 1960 movie from which this musical was adapted, Audrey II's personality is greatly expanded, making it a cunning, charismatic manipulator. This musical also establishes that Audrey II is of alien origin, or, in its own words, "a mean green mother from outer space".

Webcomics

• The Beast Legion: The Mongrel plant that attacks Xeus is a large, ambulatory plant with muscular limbs and two fanged mouths.
• ''Captain Ufo': The planet Nesea is full of man-eating plants.
• The Dementia of Magic: Alex accidentally creates a plant which tries to eat her.
• Girl Genius has a particularly nasty one found in Castle Heterodyne, a supercharged Hetrodyne cultivar of Nepenthes dulcis. At least you'll die happy.

• League of Super Redundant Heroes: Thistle, a plant-based supervillain, had "man-eating plant research".
• Schlock Mercenary: In the third book, Tagon's Toughs run into a stand of "carniflowers" that use tongue-like projections to paralyze prey passing below them and then pull their victims into their mouths for digestion. Later on, it turns out that Nick believes bug spray will work against carnivorous plants.

• 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.
• Chopping Block: Butch tried to grow one. All he got from it is confirmation that he's terrible at raising plants.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-307 is a species of English Ivy that ensnares warm-blooded animals, liquefies their tissues and quickly drains them dry, leaving only their skin and bones — and sometimes a tangle of roots spreading from a seed planted in their skull.
  • SCP-867 is a parasitic species of spruce tree that injects seeds into any living thing that comes into contact with its needles, which then devour the host from inside-out and grow a new tree out of their remains.
• Serina: Centipedeweeds and wireweeds are razorgrass descendants from the Hothouse Age adapted for growing on exposed boulders and the stony trunks of cementrees; to make up for the lack of nutrients in these areas, they have adapted to supplement their diet with animal matter. Most get this by snaring small animals with tangles of sharp thorns evolved from their ancestors' sharp silicate-rich leaves, digesting them externally once they die; one particularly large variety, the vampire centipedeweed, has adapted to snag at large herbivores as they move in the cramp confines of cementree forests. Adults can tear themselves free, albeit while leaving blood and skin behind to feed the plant, but calves are likelier to become entangled, die of blood loss and exposure, and be entirely digested.
• Wolf 359: One of the plotlines for the third episode revolves around Commander Minkowski trying to get someone to pay attention to a weird plant sample that's exhibiting unusually rapid growth in the station's greenhouse. By the time that anyone bothers to actually pay attention to her and see what she's talking about, the plant has not only gotten much larger than a human, it's also grown an eye, teeth, and enough sentience to attack Eiffel on sight. The characters manage to escape from it, but the Space Mutant Plant Monster remains at large and unaccounted for at the end of the episode, becoming a recurring villain for the rest of season 1.

Western Animation

• Action Man (2000): Action Man and Dr. X encounter a huge Venus Flytrap on a deserted island after they crash land there.
• The Adventures of Figaro Pho: In one episode, Figaro raises one. It's a Shout-Out to Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, but unlike Audrey, this plant resembles a pitcher plant rather than a Venus flytrap.
• Aladdin: The Series: In one episode episode, Genie encounters a huge carnivorous plant in Mozenrath's lair.
• In Amphibia tomatoes are rare food for the frogs as they grow into large carnivorous plants. When Anne and the Planters look for one they get eaten whole by it, but they were able to make out of by eating it from the inside.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The I-Am-a-Pod. After eating its victim, it makes a replica of its meal.
• On Archer, Cheryl's family mansion has one of these in its conservatory. Ray kills it in a battle that costs him his right hand.
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: The second season has the titular villainous veggies and the tomato centurions now being capable of chowing down on humans.
• Batman:
  • Batman: The Animated Series: Poison Ivy's greenhouse in her introductory episode has a giant Venus flytrap, complete with tentacles which could grab any passing Batmen and pull them in.
  • Batman: The Brave and the Bold:
    • Man-eating plants form part of Ra's al Ghul's plan for world domination in "Sidekicks Assemble!".
    • And Poison Ivy tries to feed Batman to one in the teaser to "The Mask of Matches Malone!".
• The Big Knights: The aunties of the princesses cultivate man-eating plants.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation: A.F.L.O.A.T.", the team gets lost in a sea of asparagus while escaping from Stickybeard the candy pirate's ship. Things only get worse when their craft is attacked by a "great white asparagus" that starts hunting them down, and they're saved only when Stickybeard shows up and guns it down.
• Darkwing Duck: Bushroot 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.
• Disenchantment: In the season 2 episode Our Bodies, Our Elves, Elfo, Bean and Wade are attacked by one of these while on their way to the Ogre homeland. Elfo, of all people, is able to fight the plant off and get himself and Bean to safety.
• In one episode of Dragons: The Nine Realms, the Riders have to deal with carnivorous plants have evolved to prey on dragons.
• DuckTales (1987): Brigadier Broccoli's guest chair in "Duckworth's Revolt."
• DuckTales (2017): Turns out there's one that lures prey in with a fake village and festival in "The Town Where Everyone Was Nice!"
• Flash Gordon (1979): These show up a couple of times, most notably when one tries to eat Thun in the opening credits.
• The Flintstones: Weirdly and Creepella Gruesome have one of these, along with other monsterous pets. It tries to eat Fred more than once, but fortunately its masters are quick to tell it to heel.
• Garfield and Friends: In one episode, 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.
• George of the Jungle gets caught in one of these during the end credits.
• In The Godzilla Power Hour, Pete is caught by a man-eating plant with long whiplike vines, but Godzooky and Brock manage to trick it into letting their friend go by "feeding" it a large rock.
• Harley Quinn (2019) gives Poison Ivy a talking Audrey II-esque potted plant sidekick named Frank, who is introduced semi-apologetically spitting out the neighbors' remains.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002) had a villain named Evilseed, a sentient plant being who despised humanity for "gorging [them]selves on plant life" 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.
• Inspector Gadget: In one episode, Doctor Claw's 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.
• Kim Possible has Professor Dementor make an army of carnivorous plants.
• Little Shop, the animated adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors.

• Mighty Magiswords has the Carnivorous Plant Magisword, grown by Prohyas from a Magiseed. Its prehensile vines, strength and charming smile (all based on Audrey II) keep Prohyas from noticing his Leafy Baby's preferred diet of living creatures until it tries to eat Dolphin Magisword.
• Venus Mc Flytrap of Monster High is a carnivorous plant and the school’s ecologist.
• The Mr. Men Show: The chef in Mr. Scatterbrain's restaurant was a man-eating plant. It tried to eat Mr. Grumpy.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" has a carnivorous plant with prehensile vines, a head-like bulb, teeth, and a leaf for a tongue try to chow down on Neon Lights during the nightmare sequence near the end.
• The New Adventures of Batman: In the two-part episode "Have an Evil Day", Batman and Robin are transported to Bat-Mite's home planet, and as soon as they arrive Robin is caught by a giant Venus fly-trap like plant, and once again Batman comes to his rescue, though he narrowly avoids becoming plant food himself.
• Oscar And Friends: In one episode, Oscar, Doris, and Bugsy are in a greenhouse fulled with giant plants who want to eat them.
• The Owl House: Hexside School houses one of these in its plant magic homeroom/greenhouse, one that's apparently ticklish as shown when Willow quickly rescues a fellow student it tried to snatch up. Willow later learns to create or summon these plants for combat purposes.
• Pearlie: Pearlie gets swallowed by a self-mobile carnivorous plant in "Prickly Friends".
• Plastic Man: The Weed is a walking, sapient evil plant that can create plant monsters.
• The Real Ghostbusters episode "A Ghost Grows in Brooklyn": some ghost evades capture by hiding in Janine’s geranium, latter turning it into a treat for the entire New York city.
• In Rocket Robin Hood, Rocket Robin Hood is attacked by several species of man-eating plants, including giant Venus flytraps, when he lands on "The Living Planet", but manages to elude them all only to find himself caught in a deadlier trap (from which he is rescued in the nick of time).
• Rocky and Bullwinkle story arc "Pottsylvania Creeper" centers around this.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf: One of Dracula's attempts to slow down Scooby and Shaggy involves a man-eating plant. It tries to eat him instead.
• The Simpsons:
  • Parodied in one episode: 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's 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.
• Sky Commanders: The first episode has Cutter fall victim to one of these briefly. Fortunately, the others are able to rescue him before he can be digested. After Cutter's rescued, Stryker jokes "If he had eaten his vegetables when he was a kid, they wouldn't be eating him now."
• In Spider-Man (1967), the web-slinging hero is caught by a bizarre man-eating plant in the episode "Neptune's Nosecone", but manages to kill it with a branch off a thorn bush. He does the same in the remake episode "Down to Earth".
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "Mystery of a Thousand Moons": The plants in the valley where Anakin and Obi-Wan go to get the riksa root. In Jaybo Hood's words:
  "Don't touch the vines. [...] Because the plants don't like it, and they have big, sharp teeth."
• Super Friends: In one episode, 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.
• Teen Titans (2003): In one episode, Starfire, who is depressed because she is undergoing transformation (which is sort of like puberty to her species) is attacked by a carnivorous plant on an alien planet; but it spits her out. This makes her even more depressed, as she thinks the plant finds her revolting. Later, after a far-more wicked monster threatens to devour her, the other Titans come to her rescue, and the plant appears again, this time preying on the monster.
• Total Drama: Chris has a giant mutant Venus flytrap he named Larry, introduced in the fourth season Revenge of the Island, which gained its immense size, prehensile branches, and mobile roots as a result of the toxic waste that Chris allowed to be dumped around the island. He uses it as an obstacle in a couple of challenges, but also treats it like it was his loyal pet or own child.
• Touché Turtle and Dum Dum: Touché and his pal are summoned to vanquish a giant carnivorous plant that escapes from a science laboratory in "Dilly of a Lilly."
• Ugly Americans: Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors makes a cameo in one episode.

• Wander over Yonder:
  • In "The Bounty," one of several Bounty Hunters that Lord Hater employs to capture Wander and Sylvia is "The Potted Plant," who resembles nothing so much as a large daisy in a pot, but turns out to be one of these.
  • "The Lonely Planet" has the Genius Loci Janet the Planet, who speaks to Wander and Sylvia through the "mouth" of a rose-like flower growing on her surface. She quickly becomes this when revealing her Yandere nature.

Real Life

• While there's no documented cases of a human falling victim to it, there is a plant that, rumor has it, "feeds" on things as large as sheep, after a fashion. Though it's a far cry from the typical "Venus Flytrap on steroids" image associated with this trope, the giant bromeliad Puya chilensis is thought to trap animals that blunder into patches of it with its thick, barbed leaves where they die and decompose, granting extra nutrients to its soil. However, despite what many sensationalist news sites say, Puya is not a true carnivorous plant because it cannot digest animal tissue, and must wait for it to decompose; it is more accurately called a "proto-carnivorous plant" for this reason.
• As far as true carnivorous plants ^note Yes, there is a difference; a "true" carnivorous plant is capable of both trapping and digesting animals, while a proto-carnivorous plant can only trap them go, the ones that can kill the largest prey are pitcher plants, which are capable of catching small mammals, birds, and lizards. One widely-circulated story from 2011 tells of a man who found a garden songbird trapped inside one of his monkey cup pitcher plants. The same article notes that rodents are often victims to these flora.

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