Red in tooth and claw: A review of animal antagonistic roles in movies

1. Although cinema narrative represents a fundamental communication tool in framing public opinion, whether or not a negative representation of certain species in the context of animal-horror movies might increase the attitudinal hostilities toward them, remains an aspect of wildlife perception that is poorly studied.

2. Here, we reviewed online sources from the last 70 years to describe the negative representation of animals roles in horror and disaster movies. Specifically, we described species diversity, how the animal was depicted, the cause for its aggressive behavior, and how it came in contact with the human characters. By means of Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA), we also highlighted three main typologies of animal-horror movies.

3. The dataset consisted of 263 titles produced worldwide from 1950 to 2019. The results showed that animal representation is transversal yet uneven, with five species groups out of 18 appearing in more than half of the movies. There were sign...