Monster Monday: The Mahamba

The Congo’s fifty-foot crocodile

Sometime in early 1888, a small government steamer was making four miles an hour up the Congo River when she ran aground. There’s nothing remarkable in that — Africa’s second longest river and the world’s deepest is a maze of shifting sandbanks, and any pilot expects to feel his hull kiss the bottom now and again. What was remarkable was that this sandbank began to heave. The water around the bow churned in a way no sandbank has any business doing, and the steamer’s engineer, leaning over to find the cause, watched the bank itself detach from the riverbed and bolt. It was a crocodile. One longer, he was certain, than his forty-two-foot boat, and it crossed the bar and tumbled into deep water before he could reach for a rifle. They had run the steamer clean into a living animal at speed, jammed it into the sand, and it had shrugged them off and left without a mark on it.

The engineer was John Reinhardt Werner, and the animal, if the Congo’s rivermen were to be believed, was the Mahamba.

A witness in the wrong century

Werner is an unusually good witness for a monster, which is precisely what makes him a problem. He was not a folklorist collecting tales around a fire, nor a Victorian showman selling a story. He was a working engineer keeping the boilers running on a colonial waterway, and he wrote his account up plainly in A Visit to Stanley’s Rear-Guard (Blackwood, 1889) as one observation among many practical ones. His steamer, the A.I.A., took her name from the Association Internationale Africaine — the “philanthropic” society, dedicated on paper to lighting the darkness of Africa and ending the slave trade, that served as Leopold II’s cover story while he assembled the private empire that would become one of the most murderous colonial regimes in history. I wanted to make that clear, because the romance of the Victorian riverboat curdles the moment you remember what the riverboat was for. Werner was part of the apparatus. His crocodile sightings come to us stamped with the flag of a project built on forced labour and mass death.

That grim provenance aside, Werner’s testimony is specific. He described these giant crocodiles as almost common on the river, and he did not hedge on size. On a low sand-spit beyond the grasses, he wrote, one might see a monster of perhaps fifty feet; he claimed to have seen several considerably longer than the A.I.A. On one occasion, stalking ducks across a sandbank with only a shotgun, he found the largest crocodile he had ever seen lying between him and his supper. Measuring it by eye against the steamer moored three hundred yards off, he reckoned it a full fifty feet long, with the ridged crest of its back standing four feet clear of the sand. He sent a boy for his rifle, thought better of the whole enterprise, and in retreating spooked the ducks — whereupon he took a shot at them, missed, and startled the crocodile into the water. It is a very funny, very human anecdote, and it has the ring of a man reporting exactly what he saw rather than embroidering a legend.

The scale problem

The Nile crocodile, the largest predator these waters officially hold, is a genuinely formidable animal that tops out at roughly twenty feet. A big saltwater crocodile — the largest living reptile on Earth — reaches perhaps twenty-one. Werner was describing something more than twice that length: a creature outside the entire range of any crocodile known to science, living or dead.

And that last phrase is where the Mahamba does something most cryptids cannot. It out-measures the fossil record.

The usual yardstick reached for here is Sarcosuchus imperator, the Cretaceous giant nicknamed the “SuperCroc.” When Paul Sereno’s team described it for a rapt public in 2001, the headline figure was around forty feet — a crocodile-shaped monster that shared the rivers of what is now Niger with dinosaurs and, on the strength of a five-and-a-half-foot skull, may occasionally have eaten them. Forty feet. Even by that generous early estimate, Werner’s fifty-foot animal is the larger beast.

But the comparison has sharpened since. A 2019 reassessment pulled Sarcosuchus back to a more conservative maximum of about thirty-one feet — and the other contenders for largest-ever crocodilian, Deinosuchus and the giant caiman Purussaurus, cluster in the same thirty-three-to-forty-foot bracket, all of them reconstructed from fragmentary bone. In other words, the best-supported estimate for the largest crocodyliforms that ever lived now sits comfortably below what Werner claimed to have watched sunbathing on a sandbar. The Mahamba is not merely bigger than any living crocodile. It is bigger than the biggest crocodile the earth has ever produced a fossil of.

That should give even a sympathetic and optimistic reader pause.

The second stream

The easy move would be to file Werner under Victorian exaggeration and close the book. What complicates that is a second, entirely independent line of testimony arriving nearly a century later.

In the 1980s the biologist Roy Mackal travelled the Congo basin chasing Mokele-mbembe, the region’s more famous “living dinosaur.” Along the way he collected the vocabulary the Bobangi people used for the animals of their river, and it was more precise than an outsider might expect. There was the ordinary crocodile. There was the Nguma-monene, a long, ridge-backed thing that was something else again. And then there was the Mahamba: not a separate kind of animal but a crocodile in every way that matters — same shape, same habits — only monstrously, impossibly large, forty to fifty feet and more, said to lie up in long tunnels dug into the riverbanks. The people describing it were not confusing it with anything. They were insisting, from direct familiarity with the real crocodiles all around them, that this was one of those and simply far too big.

So we have two witnesses who never met, separated by a hundred years and by every difference of language, purpose and worldview, describing the same specific impossibility in the same specific water. That is a genuinely uncomfortable coincidence, and it is the strongest thing the Mahamba has going for it.

What could it be?

The serious hypothesis is a relic: a surviving or simply undescribed giant crocodilian, a lineage that kept the old Cretaceous dimensions going in the vastness of the Congo swamps where no one has ever managed a proper survey. It is not absurd on its face — the region is enormous, poorly mapped, and has surrendered new large vertebrates within living memory.

The less serious end of the shelf holds the idea, which surfaces now and then in the cryptid literature, that the Mahamba is no crocodile at all but some freshwater relative of the mosasaurs. A 1954 sighting in the Maika marshes is sometimes pressed into service here — a large reptile that reportedly lifted an abnormally long neck from the water before diving. But that long neck pulls in the opposite direction from everything else on record; it describes a different animal from Werner’s flat-backed, short-legged, unmistakably crocodilian giant, and folding the two together muddies rather than strengthens the case.

Then there is the explanation that requires nothing new at all. A single, genuinely enormous Nile crocodile — an old, exceptional individual pushing the upper limit of its kind — glimpsed across open water, with no fixed reference for scale and a rifle conspicuously absent, is exactly the raw material from which fifty-foot estimates are honestly made. Water flatters length. Distance deceives. Fear does the rest. Werner measured his monster against a steamer three hundred yards away, and even a careful man measuring by eye across that gap can be handsomely wrong.

I remember being on the banks of the Chobe River in Botswana, and just happening to look up. At some distance – my estimation was not dissimilar to Werner’s three hundred yard steamer – I saw what I thought was a large tree floating in the centre of the river. It took me a few moments to realised it was of course, a huge crocodile. The size really threw me off and at that distance, I almost certainly over estimated it. But I did think it was every inch of twenty feet, if not more. And I made the comparison to what was in front of me – a tour boat.

So, I have some sympathy for anyone matching boat sizes to unusually large crocodilians. But I think we can accept it’s not an exact science.

Where are the bones?

Sarcosuchus skull at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. No children were harmed in the taking of this photo 🙂

Which brings us to the question that closes the file on the Mahamba, as it closes the file on most of its kind.

We know Sarcosuchus was real because it left us a skull the length of a man and enough skeleton to argue over. We know the outer limits of crocodilian size because the fossil record, patchy as it is, has physically produced the animals. The Mahamba has produced witnesses — good ones, independent ones, a century apart — and not one confirmed bone. No skull, no skeleton, no shed tooth the size of a hand, nothing hauled from a bank or found bleaching on a sandbar. For an animal supposedly common enough that a working engineer saw several in the course of doing his job, that absence is very loud.

Sarcosuchus outgrew the living world and left us its remains. The Mahamba outgrew even Sarcosuchus, and left us only the water it disappeared into.

Man-eater Monday: Avni the Tigress

Every man-eater this blog has covered so far has arrived with an explanation. The Champawat tigress had her canines shattered and could no longer take her natural prey. The lions of Njombe, the Leopard of Panar, Gustave brooding in his stretch of river — each was a creature bent by circumstance into something that fed on us, and the horror always came braided with a thread of pity. You could follow the line from cause to consequence and, if not forgive the animal, at least understand it.

Avni breaks the pattern. Not because she was more monstrous than the rest — if anything the reverse — but because by the time her story ends, the tiger is only part of the story.

She was officially labelled T-1, a six-year-old tigress in the Pandharkawada forests of Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district, and she was given the name Avni, meaning “Earth”, by the conservationists who would later fight to keep her breathing. She had two cubs, roughly ten months old, still dependent on her. From 2016 and across two years, she was linked to thirteen human deaths, a figure that hardened into received fact and was repeated in every headline. It should be stated that the forensic case was thinner than the number suggests: thermal-camera evidence and tests on the recovered bodies put the toll closer to six. Either way, the fear was real and the cost was real. Some twenty villages lived under advisories to come in early and never walk alone as fields went untended, and daily life buckled. People had died horribly. None of what follows is meant to pretend otherwise.

What happened was a mangled and corrupted series of events. And it is these, not the predator, that should keep you up at night.

The legal machinery did its work first. In September 2018 the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court sanctioned an order to tranquillise or, failing that, shoot her; days later the Supreme Court declined to interfere. But the permission came fenced with conditions. Killing was to be a last resort, attempted only if capture failed. The cubs were to be darted and moved to a rescue centre. On paper, this was a state behaving responsibly toward a protected national animal it had decided, reluctantly, it might have to destroy.

But there’s significant detail the official narrative preferred to walk past. Avni was young, and she was healthy. The textbook man-eating tiger is usually a broken animal — old, injured, or starved of its proper prey, like the Champawat tigress and her ruined teeth. Avni had no such alibi, and that is precisely the point. A fit young tigress turning to human prey is not a freak of nature; she is a symptom of something we built. Shrinking forest, advancing settlement, prey squeezed out, predator and people pressed into the same narrowing ground. She was not the disease. She was the fever telling you the disease was beginning to show physical symtoms.

Enter the hunter. The forest department engaged Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, a Hyderabad-based marksman with a long and contested record — a man the Union minister Maneka Gandhi would publicly brand a criminal. The gun, when it finally went off, was not even fired by him. It was fired by his son, Asghar Ali Khan, who had no authorisation to kill anything.

Before that, though, came the circus, and I use the word advisedly. To draw Avni in, the team deployed a live goat, the urine of another tigress, and — this is not a joke — bottles of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, on the strength of a Bronx Zoo experiment suggesting its civetone pheromone attracted big cats. There were Italian Cane Corso sniffer dogs sourced from a champion golfer. There were drones, too noisy to be useful, and paragliders, defeated by the terrain. And there was the elephant, brought in from Tadoba to track her, which one night tore free of its chains and trampled two villagers to death. In tragic irony, a hunt mounted to stop a killer had begun manufacturing its own corpses.

Then, on the night of 2 November 2018, they found her. The department’s account was clean and self-justifying: a dart was fired, the tigress charged the open vehicle, and Asghar shot her in self-defence from eight to ten metres. It is a tidy story. The postmortem tore it apart, line by line.

Avni was facing away from the shooter. A charging animal does not present its back. The fatal round was a textbook lung-and-shoulder shot, the kind a trained hunter delivers with intent, and there were no signs of a struggle on the body — no thrashing, no scramble, nothing to suggest a frightened animal fighting for its life. As for the tranquilliser dart that was supposed to have come first: it appeared to have been pushed into her flank after she was already dead, with no haematoma around the wound, no bruising, none of the bleeding a living body produces when struck. It had been staged. Someone knelt beside a dead tigress and inserted a dart into cold muscle to make a killing look like a mercy that failed.

The rest only deepens it. The rifle was widely alleged to be a .458 Winchester Magnum, heavier than the calibre floor the National Tiger Conservation Authority required, and it was never surrendered for verification. No veterinarian was present, in breach of protocol. The shooting happened at night, also in breach. The team took over an hour to reach the body, from a base camp fifteen kilometres away. A later authority inquiry noted the dart had been prepared days earlier and would have been all but useless — the kind of detail that again suggests the darting was theatre from the start.

So, the question that organises this whole squalid affair is not whether Avni was a man-eater. It is whether anyone holding authority over her ever intended to find out. A Supreme Court ruling, a national protocol, a last-resort clause, an order signed and countersigned — the entire apparatus of a modern conservation state appears to have arranged itself neatly around a foregone bullet, and then dressed the result to pass inspection. We also can’t rule out that some very frightened villagers urged or possibly paid Khan to kill Avni regardless. Or, that he perhaps acted in what he thought was their best interests, regardless of the authorities.

Maneka Gandhi called it a ghastly murder, a straight case of crime. The forest minister called it self-defence and a last resort. Out in the villages, where the dead had been real, some people set off firecrackers. All of that is true at once, and a story this graceless does not resolve into a side. But again, corruption, conflict, and conservation often go hand in hand in the field, and especially across modern India and Africa.

And then there are the cubs. The press release announcing Avni’s death did not mention them. In the hours afterward they were simply gone — orphaned, somewhere out in the forest she had hunted, the same forest the order had promised would deliver them safely to a rescue centre. Whether that promise was honoured any more faithfully than the one about taking their mother alive is a question the dart in her flank had probably already answered.

Movie Monday: When Nature Sent the Bill: The Drive-In Decade of Animal Revenge

There is a tidy version of this story that gets told every summer, usually around the time someone re-airs Jaws on a bank holiday. It goes: Spielberg made a film about a shark, the film made an obscene amount of money, and every producer with a chequebook and a rubber animal spent the next decade trying to do it again. Tidy, and not exactly wrong. But it skips the most interesting part, which is that Jaws lit the fuse on a genre it didn’t actually belong to.

Look closely at the 1975 original and you’ll notice something the imitators all felt obliged to fix: the shark has no reason. It isn’t avenging anything (we’re ignoring the fourth instalment at this moment in time). It hasn’t been mutated, provoked, or wronged. It is simply a large apex predator doing what large apex predators occasionally do, and the film is far more interested in the three men in the boat than in any quarrel between humanity and the sea. There’s a lovely irony buried in this. Even the picture’s own origins are slippery — the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks are widely cited as the seed of Peter Benchley’s novel, and Benchley went to the trouble of issuing a correction to The New York Times in 2001 to deny it. The film references 1916 in its own dialogue. Make of that what you will. The point is that Jaws arrived without a thesis about nature, and the films that chased it spent a decade supplying one.

The bloodline before the shark

The idea of nature turning on us was hardly new. Hitchcock had done it in 1963 with The Birds, in which gulls and crows lay siege to a California town for no stated reason at all — arguably the purest expression of the whole notion. The early 1970s kept the thread going: Willard (1971) and its army of rats, Night of the Lepus (1972) and its giant rabbits filmed in slow motion across miniature sets (a sentence that explains the film’s reputation rather efficiently), and Frogs (1972), in which an assortment of swamp life conspires to remove a polluting Florida patriarch from the gene pool. The amphibians mostly sit and watch, which is somehow more unnerving than if they did the work themselves.

So the appetite was there. What Jaws added wasn’t the concept but the commercial proof — that an animal-attack picture could be the biggest thing in the country. The rest was arithmetic.

Silent Spring with teeth

Here’s the engine that the tidy version leaves out. The decade that produced these films was also the decade that produced modern environmentalism. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had landed in 1962, the first Earth Day was held in April 1970, and the air was thick with genuine anxiety about pesticides, pollution, the ozone layer and what exactly we were doing to the world. The drive-in took that anxiety and gave it fangs. Where Jaws offered a predator without motive, its descendants offered defendants. The animals weren’t just hungry — they were owed.

You can read the era’s whole guilty conscience in the premises. Day of the Animals (1977) blames a damaged ozone layer for sending wildlife collectively berserk. Prophecy (1979) hands us a bear mutated by mercury from a paper mill, lurching through the Maine woods as a sort of furry environmental impact statement. Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) sics pesticide-starved tarantulas on William Shatner. The monster, increasingly, was us — and the films knew it.

The American core

The film that turned the key was Grizzly (1976), directed by the prolific William Girdler and marketed, with admirable honesty, as the most dangerous jaws on land and at least one tagline cited “Jaws with claws“. And it is Jaws transposed to a national park almost beat for beat: the denied threat, the obstructive official, the climactic showdown (here the bear is dispatched with a bazooka, because of course it is). Critics were unkind. Audiences were not — it became the highest-grossing independent film of 1976, earning somewhere near $38 million against a budget under a million, a record it held until Halloween two years later. There is a grim coda to that success: distributor Edward L. Montoro allegedly kept the profits, leaving Girdler and his writers to sue, was later pursued by Universal over a different rip-off entirely, and in 1984 simply vanished with the company’s money, never to be seen again. A man-eating producer to bracket the man-eating bear.

The cycle that followed had range. Piranha (1978), directed by Joe Dante from a John Sayles script, was the clever one — a film that grasped the joke and told it on purpose, which is precisely why it endures. Alligator (1980), Sayles again, took the old urban legend of the flushed pet reptile and fed it discarded growth hormone until it burst out of the sewers; it remains, for my money, one of the era’s genuine guilty pleasures, smarter and funnier than it needed to be. And then Prophecy, which is a real curio — a John Frankenheimer film, properly mounted and beautifully shot, that lapses into pure camp the moment the mutant bear appears. The gap between its ambitions and its monster is where a lot of its charm lives.

The prestige peak: Orca

If Grizzly was the cycle’s reliable workhorse, Orca (1977) was its swing for the fences. Dino De Laurentiis commissioned it to outdo Spielberg outright. The legend has him phoning his writer in the night demanding a “fish” tougher and more terrible than the great white, and threw real money at it: Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and a Morricone score. What makes Orca fascinating isn’t its budget but its morality. It flips the polarity completely. The whale isn’t a monster; it’s bereaved, hunting the captain who killed its mate and calf. It’s less Jaws than Moby-Dick reversed, or Death Wish with a dorsal fin — the animal as wronged party, the human as the one with the reckoning coming. That inversion, the audience quietly rooting for the creature, became the cycle’s true signature.

The cash-ins and the artful outliers

Inevitably, the imitation curdled into outright theft. The Italian industry, never shy, produced Cruel Jaws and Enzo Castellari’s The Last Shark (released abroad as Great White) — films so close to the source that Universal had their American releases halted in court. The genre had begun eating itself.

Australia, meanwhile, did something more interesting with the same materials. Long Weekend (1978) is the era’s most artful entry, a slow, dread-soaked story of a bickering couple whose casual cruelties to the bush — litter, a rifle, a smashed egg — are answered by a landscape that turns sentient and patient. And then there’s Razorback (1984), Russell Mulcahy’s giant-feral-boar picture, which has no business looking as good as it does. Mulcahy came from music videos, and it shows in the best way: the outback set-pieces, especially the desert sequences, are extraordinary — bleached, surreal, lit like a nightmare. It’s a B-movie with the visual imagination of something far grander. I also especially liked the tagline: it has two states of being – dangerous or dead. The film also featured a young Arkie Whiteley, the London-born, Sydney-raised daughter of the painter Brett Whiteley, in one of her early roles. She died in 2001 at just 37, of adrenal cancer — a genuine loss, and worth a moment’s pause amid the killer pigs.

The bill comes due again

By the early 1980s the cycle had run its course. Cultural dread migrated to the nuclear and the dystopian — the wasteland replaced the wilderness — and the notion of a vengeful animal started to feel quaint. But it never quite died, and lately it’s been stirring, fed by the same anxieties that powered the original wave, now updated. Shark cinema, frankly, never stopped at all (that will get its own blog). The bear got its absurdist revival in Cocaine Bear (2023). And the moral inversion Orca pioneered has come fully back into fashion: Killer Whale (2026) builds its whole story on an orca driven to kill by twenty years of captivity, with the humans cast firmly as the villains — an animal-welfare parable in a creature-feature costume.

What’s telling is that even a film made to condemn captivity caught flak for doing the one thing the genre always does: turning the species into a monster to sell tickets. Which brings us neatly back to the patriarch. Both Benchley and Spielberg lived to regret what Jaws did to the great white’s reputation — Spielberg has said as much, plainly. Half a century on, the nature-strikes-back film has become self-conscious about the very fear it trades in. The animals are still sending us the bill. We’ve just started to suspect we had it coming.

Monster Monday:The Devil of Lake Labynkyr

I’ve just come back from the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival, where I attended a talk by palaeozoologist Darren Naish on sea monsters past and present. Standing in the Etches Collection a few hours beforehand, staring up at the fossilised remains of a pliosaur — one of the genuine, historically verified sea monsters that once ruled the world’s oceans — I found myself doing what I suspect most visitors do: imagining it alive. Imagining the water disturbed.

The sea rex skull at the Etches Collection.

The rational case against lake monsters is well-rehearsed, and Naish is one of its most eloquent advocates. The breeding population problem alone is formidable — a single animal isn’t a species, it’s an anecdote. And Naish has also noted, in published research with Charles Paxton, something fascinating: the rise of fossil plesiosaur discoveries in the 19th century demonstrably changed the shape of sea monster reports. Before plesiosaurs became culturally embedded, people reported sea serpents. Afterwards, they increasingly reported things with long necks, paddles, and large rounded bodies. The monster template updated itself. We see what we’ve been taught to imagine. And that’s before we get to misidentification and everyday animals and objects reported as monsters.

I’m not saying there’s nothing in any lake. I would love there to be. But it’s worth keeping that thought in mind as we travel several thousand miles east to one of the coldest places on earth. And as Naish said in his talk, no argument against potential existence is the same as saying people aren’t having experiences. Furthermore, we should be open to the possibility that science can make the logical argument why something can’t exist, but can’t account for the supernatural or other explanations. And ultimately, absence of evidence is never evidence of absence.

The Pole of Cold

Lake Labynkyr sits in the Oymyakon region of Yakutia, deep in Russia’s Far East — the same district that lays claim to being the coldest permanently inhabited place on the planet. Temperatures here have been recorded as low as -67°C. The lake itself is roughly 9 miles long, 2.5 miles wide, and plunges to around 260 feet at its deepest point. It sits at over 1,000 metres above sea level, and is ordinarily frozen from October to June. Wikipedia

Ordinarily, that is, because here Labynkyr starts to get interesting. Unlike other lakes in the region, which freeze solid during the long Siberian winter, Labynkyr doesn’t — it maintains a near-constant surface temperature of 2°C. One theory is that Labynkyr, where much of the underlying rock is volcanic, is warmed slightly from below by a fissure in the Earth’s crust. Whatever the cause, the result is a body of water sitting open and dark in the middle of one of the most hostile landscapes on the planet, surrounded by ice — and on its surface, according to those who have ventured close enough to look, large holes that locals call “devil windows” appear on the ice, with traces of large animals beside them. Fandom + 2

The nearest settlement is about 150 kilometres away. Local people, the Yakuts and Evenks, have kept their distance from the lake for generations.

What They Say Is in the Water

The creature is described as a huge, aggressive monster with a big mouth full of sharp teeth. Witnesses across different generations and different communities have given strikingly consistent accounts: a large animal with a flattened dark-grey body and a big head with a mouth like a bird’s beak with enormous teeth. Estimates put it at around 30 feet in length. The distance between its eyes, according to some accounts, is no less than the span of a traditional local raft made from ten logs. Russia Beyond + 2

The stories that have accumulated around the creature are the kind that travel. On one occasion, an unknown creature is said to have come ashore and chased a local fisherman until he died of fright. On another, the devil surfaced in front of villagers and swallowed a floating dog in a single movement. Other accounts describe hunters’ dogs leaping into the lake to retrieve shot ducks and simply disappearing. MYSTICAL RUSSIA goodreads

The accounts predate the Loch Ness Monster — to whom Labynkyr’s creature is inevitably compared — by decades, with the earliest written records reaching back to the late 19th century. Scotland’s monster only became a media sensation in the 1930s. Labynkyr’s devil had been quietly eating dogs for at least fifty years before that. Blogger

A 1964 edition of the Italian magazine Domenica del Corriere depicts the monster.

The Geologist’s Diary

The creature might have remained a piece of remote folklore, absorbed and forgotten, were it not for Viktor Tverdokhlebov. In July 1953, just a few months after Stalin’s death, Tverdokhlebov — a geologist with the East Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, not a man professionally inclined to whimsy — was on expedition with a colleague named Boris Bashkatov near the shore of Lake Vorota, roughly 20 kilometres from Labynkyr. What he recorded in his diary is among the more compelling pieces of eyewitness testimony in the annals of cryptozoology, precisely because of how clearly it resists embellishment.

In his own words: “It moved in an arc: first along the lake, then straight toward us. As it approached, I was seized by a strange numbness that chilled my bones. The dark grey creature rose slightly above the water, with animal eyes and something like a stick protruding from the body.” Russia Beyond

The two scientists noted it was visible by the way it moved — rising slightly above the water and throwing its torso forward. Above the surface they could make out a large dark-grey mass, and two bright symmetrical spots that resembled eyes. From the back of the creature, something protruded like a stick or a bony growth. Garynevillegasm

The diaries were published in 1961 and triggered the first formal scientific expedition to the area. It found nothing. In the following decades, several divers made attempts, during which some reported seeing something in the murky water — but nothing that could be identified or verified. Delachieve

The Remoteness Problem

There’s a pattern worth pausing on here. The Loch Ness Monster is probably the most famous cryptid in the world, and part of what made it famous is the road. The A82 runs the entire length of Loch Ness’s western shore, and has since 1833 — which means that from the moment Nessie became a media story in the 1930s, there were hundreds of daily witnesses in position to see something, and hundreds more who could arrive quickly to look. The sightings multiplied. So did the hoaxes, the misidentifications, and the tourism industry.

Loch Morar, about 70 miles to the southwest of Loch Ness, tells a different story. Its southern shore and much of its northern shore are accessible only by foot, boat, or bicycle. It is deeper than Loch Ness — the deepest inland loch in the UK at 310 metres — and it has its own monster, known as Morag, with its own sighting history stretching back to 1887. There are over thirty known recorded sightings — and given the loch’s remoteness and complete absence of tourist infrastructure, that number is arguably more striking than Nessie’s catalogue, not less. The witnesses tend to be ordinary Highland residents — fishermen, stalkers, community members — with no record of sensationalism or publicity-seeking. Morag simply isn’t famous, because almost nobody goes there. Scottish-at-Heart + 3

Labynkyr operates at a similar remove, multiplied by several orders of magnitude. It is not 70 miles from a famous loch with a visitor centre. It is 150 kilometres from the nearest settlement, in a region where the annual temperature swing can exceed 100 degrees Celsius. The handful of serious researchers who have made the journey have done so at genuine physical risk. There is no incentive to perform a sighting at Labynkyr. There is barely any incentive to go at all.

This doesn’t prove there is something in the water. But it does change the texture of the testimony — the same way Morag’s witnesses carry a different quality of credibility than a tourist snapping a photo from a car park at Drumnadrochit.

The Sonar and the Skeleton

The thread didn’t die. In 2012, Moscow State University associate professor of biogeography Ludmila Emeliyanova used sonar readings to record several large, underwater objects in Lake Labynkyr. She was careful with her language — she didn’t claim to have found a monster — but the readings were of objects larger than any fish or shoal of fish the equipment would normally register. Live Science

The following year, a team from the Russian Geographical Society dove to the lake bottom during winter conditions, in temperatures that were hitting -45°C outside. They recovered what appeared to be the remains of jaws and skeleton of an animal. The expedition’s geologist gave a quote that has the quality of the best kind of open verdict: “There have been all sorts of hypotheses about what kind of creature it could be: a giant pike, a relic reptile or an amphibian. We didn’t manage to prove or to disprove these versions… we managed to find remains of jaws and skeleton of some animal.” Live Science

Some animal. After sixty years of searching, that’s the most the evidence has yielded.

What It Probably Is (and Why That’s Still Interesting)

Sceptics at the Russian Academy of Sciences have done the maths on the creature’s supposed dimensions. If the distance between its eyes is really 1.5 metres, as some accounts suggest, then the body must be somewhere between 7 and 8 metres long. That’s not impossible for a large aquatic animal — but it rules out most of what actually lives in the lake. Pike don’t grow that large or live long enough to reach such a size, though they remain the most popular rational candidate. Cryptozoologist Karl Shuker has proposed the burbot — an unusual, deep-water fish with a loose body and a large, rather unlovely head — as an alternative candidate, arguing that in the cold of Labynkyr, undisturbed by predators or human interference, a burbot could theoretically attain a genuinely extraordinary size. Live Science + 2

There is also the mirage factor to consider. One diver who made multiple descents into the lake saw nothing but large dogfish, and noted that the area produced visual mirages — something like moving islands — that are common throughout northern regions with significant ice and snow cover. A mirage of an ice feature, glimpsed briefly across 200 metres of open lake in conditions of extreme cold, could very reasonably become a dark-grey rising hump in the telling. Wikipedia

And yet. The consistency of the descriptions across cultures and centuries is hard to entirely dismiss. The lake’s anomalous thermal properties remain partially unexplained. The underwater trench — deeper than most of the lake and, as of the last serious attempt, still not fully explored — is a blank space on the map. There are also theories that Labynkyr is connected by underwater channels to Lake Vorota, 20 kilometres away, where Tverdokhlebov made his original sighting — which would at least account for why the creature seems to appear at both locations. The Watchers

The Cover That Started in Italy

The Domenica del Corriere illustration that opens this article — that hulking, grey, thick-bodied mass rising from icy water, tiny human figures fleeing in the foreground — was published in June 1964, when the legend had been circulating in the Western press for a few years following Tverdokhlebov’s published diaries. It looks like a plesiosaur, roughly. It also looks like an enormous seal, or a boulder, or a trick of the light in one of the coldest places on Earth.

I stood in front of a genuine sea reptile fossil last week and felt the pull regardless. There’s something in us that wants the monsters to be real — and standing at the shores of a lake that refuses to freeze in -60°C weather, in a wilderness where no one lives for 150 kilometres in any direction, hearing stories that have been told in the same terms for over a century, it would be hard not to look out at the water and wonder.

The Labynkyr Devil may be a giant burbot. It may be a mirage. It may be a legend that filled a void left by a place too remote and too hostile to allow easy explanation. But until someone gets back down into that unexplored trench and comes up with something definitive, the lake keeps its secret — and in the meantime, the devil windows keep appearing in the winter ice, and no one seems particularly eager to find out who’s making them.

If you’re interested in Sea Monsters both past and present, real and imagined – you might find some in my upcoming book, Dark Tides. The Kindle version is available to pre-order now here.

Man-eater Monday: Gustave the Crocodile

Last week, I happened to be in Oxford on a rainy day, and so, found myself at the UK’s only crocodile zoo – Crocodiles of the World, near Brize Norton. And one of the showpiece spectacles is their feeding of the 26 Nile crocodiles they have in the collection.

It was quite something to behold. But despite the many snapping jaws, and many being over two metres or more in length, they were still diminutive compared to a certain legendary Nile.

One named Gustave.

The Animal

Gustave is — or was — a Nile crocodile of extraordinary size. Estimates put him at somewhere between five and a half and six metres in length, making him one of the largest crocodiles ever reliably documented. His weight has been guessed at over nine hundred kilograms. These figures carry the usual caveats: he was never captured and therefore never officially measured. But even accounting for a little over estimation, Gustave appears to have been a genuinely massive animal, an outlier among outliers, operating in the Ruzizi River delta and along the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika near Bujumbura.

Gustave next to some smaller, more typical-sized Nile crocodiles.

It wasn’t just Gustave’s size that made him easy to identify at a distance. He had a grouping of scars along his right rear flank put there by machine gun fire and another visible patch of pink scarring on his right shoulder from either a spear or homemade harpoon. These and other marks were accumulated through decades of encounters he walked, swam, or slithered away from.

He also had two large bony projections on top of his head that seemed to have fused at the rear, something noticed and commented on in the 2004 documentary Capturing the Killer Croc.

And he was old. Dr Alison Leslie, who observed Gustave in the early 2000s first thought he was maybe 100 years old due to his size. But his excellent and full set of dentition meant he was more likely around the age of 60, and still growing. Niles have a typical optimal lifespan of around 70 years in the wild.

Either way, his size and age, if reliably estimated, combined to produce an animal that operated by slightly different rules. For instance, in 2003, a park ranger observed Gustave stalk, kill, and devour an adult hippopotamus – something unheard of.

Another of those differences was something that researchers and locals often observed about his kills. Crocodiles, like all predators, typically don’t kill more than they can eat, or close to it. Yet Gustave appeared to kill well beyond that threshold with reports of multiple victims in a single event, before disappearing for periods. One theory holds that his sheer size made conventional feeding mechanics difficult: he was perhaps too large to roll prey underwater efficiently.

Another possibility, darker and less comfortable, is that the behaviour was simply something akin to personality – Gustave killed because he could. As the dominant animal in whatever patch of river he claimed, his age and size combined with highly territorial instincts would make his mere presence a threat. Whatever the mechanism, the pattern meant that the kill estimates grew, and kept growing, and eventually became uncountable.

The number of alleged human fatalities, between 60 and 300, tells you everything about the problem of documenting Gustave’s victims. Attacks along the Ruzizi and the Tanganyika shore were rarely reported to any central authority. Many victims were fishermen, or people collecting water, in communities with limited access to formal record-keeping. The lower figure probably reflects confirmed attributions; the upper figure is folk accounting and accumulation, the number that feels true even if it can’t be proven. The real figure is somewhere in there, which is its own kind of horror.

My own observation is that Gustave was clearly capable of taking large prey, having been documented attacking the hippopotamus mentioned earlier, other crocodiles, and a mature cow – which was caught on camera. Many of his human victims were found drowned and not devoured (but not all by any means). I think its likely that these kills were either territorial or perhaps those discovered before Gustave could return to them: although the idea of crocodiles storing meat underwater to tenderise the meat is something of a myth (they prefer fresh meat almost always), they have been observed caching larger prey and leftovers in places where the carcass won’t be swept away by strong currents. However, the kills may have also been instinctual: the riverbanks that Gustave called home were often popular with fishermen and their presence may have been too tempting. But perhaps afterwards, Gustave decided they didn’t meet his calorific requirements.

The Man

Patrice Faye arrived in Burundi as a French expatriate and became a long-term resident, which given his interest in herpetology, isn’t surprising. Burundi is an exceptional destination for herpetologists because it sits at a unique biogeographical crossroads. Bridging the Congo River Basin, the Great Rift Valley, and the East African savanna, its isolated, high-elevation montane forests, pristine rivers, and protected nature reserves are a goldmine for discovering endemic and rediscovered reptiles and amphibians. And due to decades of political turmoil, much of the country remains under-surveyed compared to neighbouring East African nations. This offers huge potential for modern field researchers and taxonomists to uncover rare or presumed-extinct taxa.

However, by the 1990s, Patrice had become the foremost chronicler of one reptile in particular – Gustave — not as a scientist exactly, but something between a naturalist, a documentarian, and an obsessive. He photographed the crocodile. He collected accounts of attacks. And eventually he decided to catch Gustave alive.

Faye constructed a large trap. It was a massive, 10-metre steel device designed to hold a crocodile of Gustave’s dimensions. Deployed in the animal’s territory, the plan was to lure him in, secure him, and then keep him in an especially built enclosure, some 60 by 90 feet for study and I’m sure as a potential attraction.

We’ll never know, as after the trap was deployed. Gustave ignored it. He showed some curiosity once live bait was introduced, but never ventured into it.

The 2004 National Geographic/PBS documentary Capturing the Killer Croc followed Faye’s expedition, and what it captured — unintentionally — was the peculiar comedy and pathos of human expertise confronting an animal that didn’t know it was supposed to be catchable. The crew waited. Gustave circled. On several occasions he came close enough to raise heart rates, then turned away. By the end of the documentary he had not been caught and ultimately. never has been.

There is something almost classical in the shape of this. The monster that keeps proving itself uncatchable is a very old story. What’s unusual here is that it’s a true one, documented on film, with a specific man standing at the centre of it — wading into a Burundian river, looking for something he couldn’t quite reach.

The Legend

Here is the moment Gustave crossed from animal into myth: sometime in the mid-2000s, while confirmed attacks were still being reported, communities around the lake began to speak about him less as a crocodile and more as a presence. A territorial entity. Something that had claimed the water and established terms. Fishermen avoided certain areas not merely out of caution but out of something closer to acknowledgement that they were operating in Gustave’s space, and that he might enforce that.

His own skin was a pockmarked testimony of his un-killable nature. And his intelligence was almost supernatural. Faye and other scientists often felt outwitted and out manoeuvred by Gustave – that he was always somehow one step ahead. Even the trap intended for his capture was somehow dislodged. Some say it was by heavy rains. But others say Gustave walked around the cage, took the goat, and dislodged it that way.

This is how living legends get made. Not through any single dramatic act, but through the accumulation of attacks that defy logic, combined with evasions and failed attempts at capture, until the animal stops being an animal and becomes an idea. Gustave’s unusual size also certainly added to his legendary status.

But here is something Burundi’s killer croc has probably never been told: he is very probably now dead.

The rumours have circulated since around 2019 — that Gustave, the most feared predator in Burundi, the Nile crocodile estimated to have killed somewhere between sixty and three hundred people, died quietly somewhere in the reed beds along Lake Tanganyika. No body. No confirmed sighting in years. Just the slow absence of a presence.

The probable death, if the 2019 rumours are true, is interesting precisely because of how little it has settled. There was no body. No confirmed final sighting. No Faye standing over something conclusive. The absence of evidence is indistinguishable, at this distance, from a six-metre crocodile lying low in deep water. And so Gustave continues to circulate — in articles, in forums, in conversations. Here, now, in this one.

It should be noted that Faye was arrested and imprisoned in Burundi in 2011, on five charges of rape, serving a 25-year sentence. Although the case must be taken seriously for obvious reasons, it is marred by possible corruption and questionable proceedings. However, the point is that since 2011, Gustave’s main documenter has been out of the game. So maybe, just maybe, Gustave still stalks the riverbanks of the Ruzizi River delta and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika

The Honest Admission

There is something worth acknowledging about the fact that the people most fascinated by Gustave — researchers, filmmakers, writers, readers of blogs like this one — are, on some level, rooting for him. Not for the attacks. Not for the deaths, which were real and brutal and happened mostly to people living modest lives beside a beautiful lake. But for the persistence of the animal itself.

It is difficult to explain this without sounding callous, so let’s try to be precise: what people are rooting for is the idea that something this large, this old, this impervious, is still out there. That the world is still a place where a creature can operate entirely on its own terms, evading every trap, outlasting every pursuit, accumulating a toll that becomes legend — and then disappearing, silently, on its own schedule.

We built our categories — man-eater, monster, legend — and Gustave filled them all without ever being asked.

And ultimately, we must consider the part humans played in creating the circumstances that enabled or even drove Gustave towards becoming a man-eater. In the 1950s, when Gustave was less than two metres long and barely ten years old, Burundi’s deltas were home to buffalo, elephant, warthog, and wild herds of numerous antelope. But each was made geographically extinct in a few short years. The only wild large mammal to survive was the hippo.

It’s not hard to imagine as livestock were introduced and brought to the water’s edge that Gustave became acclimated to the presence of humans. And then, one day, after growing used to taking the cows, he missed or opportunistically targeted their human companion. And a legend was born – perhaps one that will never truly die.

Movie Monday: Why Hollywood Has Never Made a Mountain Lion Movie

Sharks have Jaws. Bears got Backcountry, Grizzly, and The Edge. The wolf played the villain in The Grey. The killer whale has Orca. Crocodiles claimed Black Water, Lake Placid, and Crawl. There are snake movies. Scary spiders from the silver screen. There’s even a film where Bruce Dern is menaced by a sentient bee swarm. And of course, we can never forget Sharknado, despite some of us trying to (don’t fret, I have a soft spot for it really).

Yet the mountain lion has practically nothing.

This is strange enough on its own. The cougar — also called puma, panther, catamount, and mountain lion depending on which state you happen to be in — is the most widely distributed wild land mammal in the western hemisphere. It is the apex predator of three continents. It has killed people across at least eleven of the United States. The 1991 attack on Scott Lancaster, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, was only the most ‘photogenic’ in a long line. And yet Hollywood, which has built entire subgenres out of much less, has produced no Jaws for the mountains. The few films that feature a cougar at all keep it offscreen, reframe it as a misunderstood Disney protagonist, or bury it inside an ensemble cast. The absence is so total that it starts to look intentional.

And I think it is. Or rather, I think it’s the product of several things working at once, with none of them about cinema and all of them about us.

The exceptions that confirm the absence

The closest the studio era got to a mountain lion movie was William Wellman’s Track of the Cat (1954), starring Robert Mitchum as a rancher hunting a cougar that’s been killing his livestock. The cat is barely shown. It functions as a Moby-Dick stand-in and a symbol of the family’s rotting psyche rather than a creature with claws. The mountain lion exists offscreen as metaphor. It is the absence around which the film is built.

Twenty-three years later, Day of the Animals (1977) gave the cougar a screen credit in an ensemble of murderous wildlife. Hawks, dogs, snakes, bears, and a cougar all turn on a group of hikers above five thousand feet, driven mad by ozone-depletion-induced psychosis. The premise tells you everything. To make a mountain lion dangerous enough for a horror film in 1977, it required a sci-fi scenario for it to be dangerous at all.

Then there is Benji the Hunted (1987 – all together now, awwww), in which a cougar menaces a small dog and a litter of orphaned cubs. This is the most telling of the three, because it captures the prevailing pre-1991 view of cougars perfectly. The mountain lion was a threat to small mammals and unattended children. It was not, in the popular imagination, a serious threat to a grown adult. The hunting and ranching culture of the American West had been calling cougars “scaredy cats” for the better part of a century, and the films of the era took the description at its word. The Disney filmography, meanwhile, is full of cougar protagonists such as in Sequoia (1934), Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar (1967), and Run, Cougar, Run (1972). All are sympathetic, soft-focused, and almost domesticated. Not one is a killer mountain lion movie.

The statistics, and a death in 1991

The pre-Lancaster view that cougars were essentially harmless had statistical cover. In California, there were two fatal mountain lion attacks in 1890 and 1909, and then none for seventy-seven years. Hollywood was not declining to make a mountain lion movie. There just wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, a mountain lion to make a movie about.

Then January 1991 happened. Scott Lancaster, eighteen, was killed and partially consumed while jogging near Idaho Springs, Colorado. Barbara Schoener was killed jogging in Auburn, California, in 1994. Mark Reynolds was killed mountain biking near Mission Viejo in 2004. In March 2024, brothers Taylen and Wyatt Brooks were attacked while looking for shed deer antlers in El Dorado County; Taylen, twenty-one, was killed.

These are real deaths. They also remain extraordinarily rare. The Mountain Lion Foundation puts the lifetime tally at twenty-nine fatal attacks in North America since 1868, which is roughly 0.18 a year. Yale Environment 360, working with more recent figures, has it at thirty-two fatalities and more than 170 non-fatal attacks since 1890. Either way: vanishingly rare. Every year in the United States, around 777 people die from mosquito-borne illnesses, twenty-eight are struck by lightning, eighty-six die from animal venom, and somewhere between 35,000 and 45,000 die in motor vehicle accidents. In California alone, two mountain lions die from car strikes every week.

Even the lethality is overstated. When mountain lion attacks do happen, around 15% are fatal. The corresponding figure for African lions is 62%. For tigers, 78%. For leopards, 32%. The cougar is, by a generous margin, the least dangerous big cat to encounter, yet the one Americans are by far the most afraid of (and yes, I realise there is a distinct lack of the others to worry about in the US – but my argument is that the fear is out of proportion to the threat).

That gap is what this piece is interested in. The attacks since 1991 are real. But, the fear they generate is wildly disproportionate to them. And in all that fear, in all that disproportion, Hollywood still hasn’t made the movie.

The fear is older than the species

Some of the reason for that fear is in our bones. Literally.

In the 1970s, the South African palaeontologist C.K. “Bob” Brain examined an Australopithecus robustus skull from Swartkrans Cave and found two clean canine punctures on the parietal bone, spaced exactly to match a leopard’s lower jaw. The leopard had killed the hominin and dragged the corpse by the head (the same way modern leopards still carry kills into trees today). Brain’s wider analysis of the Swartkrans assemblages overturned the old “Killer Ape” hypothesis that early hominins were the dominant predators of their landscape. For most of our deep history, it was the other way around. We were the prey.

The big cats of that period included Dinofelis, a false sabre-toothed cat that Brain identified as something close to a specialist primate killer that selected hominins and baboons as prey, and dragging them to its lair. A predator whose ecological niche was eating things that looked like our ancestors. The pattern persisted for an extraordinarily long time. A study published in 2025 used AI bite-mark analysis on the OH 7 fossil – the juvenile Homo habilis specimen that defined the species in 1964 – and concluded with high confidence that a leopard had killed it, two million years ago. Even as our brains were enlarging, we were on the menu. In modern African rainforests, leopards still kill primates: in one study of the Tai Forest in Côte d’Ivoire, primate remains turned up in sixty-four separate scat samples.

The point is not that mountain lions are leopards. The point is that the primate fear of stealth cats is one of the oldest things about us. We’ve shared territory with bears for tens of thousands of years. Cats though, have hunted us for millions. The cougar arrives in the American imagination dragging a tail of evolutionary memory it had nothing to do with earning.

The political cougar

The other reason, and the more interesting one, I think, is that the mountain lion is too useful as a symbol to be retired into fiction.

In November 2024, Colorado voters defeated Proposition 127, which would have banned trophy hunting of mountain lions, bobcats, and lynx. The campaign against the proposition, bankrolled in part by hunting and ranching interests, ran television ads claiming that unchecked mountain lions would “continue to decimate Colorado’s deer population, killing more than 200,000 deer each year.” CBS Colorado, fact-checking the ad, generously called the claim speculation. Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s own 2020 management plan notes that the impact of lion predation on deer populations is, in its own words, “poorly understood.” The state has recorded twenty-five lion attacks on humans since 1990 and four fatalities ever. Meanwhile, hunters had been taking around 500 mountain lions and 880 bobcats a year. The animal is hunted more than it is the hunter by several orders of magnitude.

In California, Senate Bill 818 — “Taylen and Wyatt’s Law” — was introduced in 2025 after the El Dorado County attack. The bill originally sought to legalise the use of hounds to haze mountain lions away from populated areas. The Senate Natural Resources Committee gutted the hounding provision via amendments and rerouted the bill toward a broader “conflict reduction program.” One real tragedy, immediately translated into legislative pressure for predator-control infrastructure. Whatever your view on the policy, the cultural move is unmistakeable. One cougar is being used as the avatar of every cougar in the state.

The horror-film cougar, if you made one, would have to die at the end of the third act. The political cougar can’t. It needs to remain out there, prowling the wildland-urban interface, justifying hunting tags and ballot measures and house bills, year after year. The deep evolutionary fear keeps the audience primed. The rural-political machinery keeps the threat permanent. Hollywood didn’t decline to make the mountain lion movie. The mountain lion movie is being run, on a continuous loop, in the legislatures of the American West.

The image problem

Even if you tried to make the film, you’d run into something more practical. The mountain lion has an image problem.

The African lion arrives at any production with a cinematic toolkit that’s been millennia in the making. The mane is the most efficient piece of visual shorthand in the animal kingdom, that silhouette alone tells the audience everything. The roar is recognised on every continent and runs under the MGM logo. Prides give you ensemble drama, defended cubs, and the Ghost and the Darkness premise of the man-eaters working as a pair. The savanna gives you wide-open golden-hour cinematography. And underneath all of that, you have heraldic and scriptural weight in the form of Aslan, the Lion of Judah, Daniel in the den, and the lion on a hundred national flags. Beast, Prey and The Ghost and the Darkness just have to deliver on a promise the culture made centuries earlier.

The mountain lion has almost none of this. No mane, no silhouette, just a blank tawny body (its latin name translates as ‘cat of one colour’ – and yes, I know that’s not really accurate) with a long tail. And no roar. Cougars physically can’t; the larynx isn’t built for it. What they do instead is scream, and the scream sounds like a woman being murdered, which is genuinely terrifying but in a folkloric, uncanny register, not a majestic-predator one. You can’t score a film with that. You can score a horror film with that, which makes the absence even stranger.

No pride: the cougar is solitary, and two cougars on screen is already a stretch – although we now know related females often spend time together and the species is probably a little more sociable than we thought. No mythic name: the same animal is called mountain lion, cougar, puma, panther, and catamount depending on which county you’re in. Mountain lions have rich significance in Puebloan and Cherokee cosmology, but Hollywood has never learned to speak that language fluently, and the suburban-Western imagination they grew out of treated cougars as vermin to be bountied, not symbols to be revered. No exoticism, either: African lions allow the safari-horror frame, with out-of-their-element Westerners and dramatic geography. Mountain lions live in Cupertino. They eat the joggers of Mission Viejo and the children of Lakewood.

And the macho problem cuts both ways. The African lion gets respect even when it’s killing people. The Tsavo man-eaters are mythologised and taxidermied and on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, alongside the Lion of Mfuwe. Travis Kauffman, the Colorado runner who strangled a juvenile cougar to death with his bare hands when it attacked him, became a punchline meme. Guy strangles housecat. Same act of survival, totally different cultural register. The mountain lion isn’t macho enough to lose to.

The cat we can’t film

So the absence isn’t aesthetic, and it isn’t accidental. The mountain lion is feared too primally to ignore with the evolutionary memory of millions of years of leopard predation doing the priming work for free, yet pictured too plainly to film. The bear can be filmed. Even sharks can be filmed. The African lion arrives pre-styled. The cougar slips into the frame with no mane, no roar, no pride, no exotic geography, no flag, no constellation, and no Aslan, and Hollywood, for ninety years, has not known what to do with it.

What it does instead is something stranger. The mountain lion is being run, in real time, as the antagonist of a different kind of horror story — the one Colorado watched on television in October 2024, the one the California legislature is rehearsing right now. The American predator without a movie has a much bigger role than that. It is the predator we can’t stop thinking about and can’t figure out how to look at.

Monster Monday: Emela-Ntouka — Killer of Elephants

There are names that snag in the imagination and refuse to let go. “Killer of elephants” is one of them.

I can still remember the first time I encountered the Emela-Ntouka. I was deep in a rabbit hole of cryptozoology — the kind of reading that starts at one creature and spirals outward through footnotes and cross-references until it’s suddenly 2am and you’re not entirely sure the world is as well-mapped as you thought. The Emela-Ntouka arrived alongside its more famous neighbour in mystery, the Mokele-mbembe — another alleged giant of the Congo river basin, whose name is said to mean “one who stops the flow of rivers.” Both creatures seized something in me. But it was the Emela-Ntouka, the killer of elephants, that truly lodged itself in the back of my mind, as it would any young budding wannabe monster hunter. Even now, if that name doesn’t make you lean forward slightly in your chair, I’m not sure what will.

This is one of the ones that got me into cryptozoology in the first place. So let’s do it justice.

Into the Likouala

The Republic of Congo contains one of the most extraordinary and least-explored ecosystems on the planet: the Likouala swamp region. Covering an area roughly the size of England, this vast labyrinth of rivers, lakes, dense rainforest, and waterlogged terrain in the north of the country is among the most remote and inaccessible places on Earth. Roads are scarce. The terrain swallows expeditions whole. Entire communities live along its waterways having had minimal contact with the outside world for generations.

It is here, in this green, dripping cathedral of the unknown that the Emela-Ntouka is said to live.

The name itself comes from Lingala, one of the major languages of the Congo basin, and it translates with memorable bluntness: killer of elephants. It is also known by several other regional names — aseka-moke, gamba-namae, and emit-ntouka among them — and has been referred to in some accounts as the “water elephant,” though what it does to elephants is anything but gentle.

The First Written Account

Cryptozoology — the study of hidden, unverified, or folkloric animals — has its founding father in the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, whose 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals is the genre’s cornerstone text. The man who first gave Heuvelmans that title — who called him, in print, the “Father of Cryptozoology” — was a French colonial official named Lucien Blancou, who served as senior game inspector in the Likouala region of what was then French Equatorial Africa.

In December 1954, Blancou published an article in the scientific journal Mammalia that gave the Emela-Ntouka its first formal written description. He reported that local people knew the creature well. It was feared, respected, and given a wide berth, as it was known to disembowel elephants with a single horn on the front of its head. More strikingly still, Blancou noted that an Emela-Ntouka had reportedly been killed in the region around 1934, though no specimen was ever scientifically examined or preserved.

That last detail is both tantalising and frustrating in equal measure. A semi-credible story of a body, also known as a type specimen. But nothing more. If you’re even vaguely interested in cryptozoology, you’ll know this is practically a tradition, and certainly a trope.

What Does It Look Like?

The physical description of the Emela-Ntouka is remarkably consistent across accounts gathered from different sources and communities over the decades. And consistency is something that serious researchers always note as a point in favour of something real underlying the reports.

The creature is described as being the size of an elephant, or perhaps larger. Its skin is hairless, and coloured somewhere between brown and grey, not unlike a large pachyderm or a rhinoceros. The body is heavy and powerfully built, supported by thick legs that bear the weight from directly beneath the body, in the manner of an elephant or a large mammal rather than the sprawling posture of a crocodile or lizard.

The tail is one of the more distinctive elements of the description: it is heavy and muscular, compared by witnesses to the tail of a crocodile. This is not a small, unremarkable appendage, it is reportedly a significant structural feature of the animal.

But the most distinctive feature of all — the one that lodges in the imagination and sparks the most debate — is the single horn on the front of the head. Witnesses describe it as resembling the ivory tusk of an elephant in appearance: forward-pointing, prominent, and apparently devastating in use. It is with this horn that the Emela-Ntouka is said to gore and disembowel elephants, water buffaloes, and other animals unfortunate enough to provoke its legendarily short temper.

Its footprints are elephant-sized, and reportedly show three toes or claw marks. This detail has generated significant discussion, as we’ll see shortly. The sounds it produces have been described variously as a growl, a rumble, a howl, or a roar. Its diet, meanwhile, is described as entirely herbivorous: it feeds on malombo plants and other leafy vegetation, which makes its aggression towards other animals purely territorial rather than predatory. It doesn’t eat elephants. It simply kills them, when provoked. The name is apt.

The Dinosaur Hypothesis

Here is where things get genuinely exciting and genuinely controversial.

Several prominent cryptozoologists have proposed that the Emela-Ntouka may be, in essence, a living dinosaur: specifically, a surviving ceratopsian, the group of horned, frilled herbivorous dinosaurs that includes the famous Triceratops, and also the somewhat less famous Monoclonius and Centrosaurus, both of which bore a single horn above the nose rather than Triceratops‘s three.

The case for this identification, made by researchers including Roy Mackal, Karl Shuker, and Scott Norman, rests on a striking convergence of features. Ceratopsians were large, heavily built herbivores. They walked on legs positioned directly beneath the body; not sprawling, but upright and column-like. They possessed single or multiple prominent horns. They left three-toed footprints. And they were, by all palaeontological accounts, capable of formidable defence when threatened.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

The emotional pull of this hypothesis is undeniable. A living ceratopsian, hidden in the Congo basin swamps is undoubtedly one of the great romantic possibilities of natural history, the kind of discovery that would rewrite everything. I remember watching the 1985 film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, and being absolutely spellbound by the idea of a living dinosaur in our time. I think I was pretty spellbound by Sean Young at the time too (think I was 11 or 12 when I first saw it).

And it’s not as though the idea of large, prehistoric-seeming animals surviving in isolated ecosystems is entirely without precedent: the coelacanth, a fish believed extinct for 65 million years, was found alive in 1938, and its discovery remains one of science’s most astonishing moments.

But intellectual honesty demands that we also sit with the difficulties here.

No fossil evidence of ceratopsian dinosaurs has ever been found in Africa. Not one bone. The ceratopsians were a primarily North American and Asian group, and the continent of Africa shows no trace of them in the geological record. For a surviving ceratopsian to exist in the Congo, we would need to explain not just how it survived the mass extinction event 66 million years ago (when every other non-avian dinosaur perished) but also why it left absolutely no trace in tens of millions of years of African fossil deposits. The Likouala swamps are remote and underexplored, but remoteness does not erase deep time.

And then there is the crocodilian tail. Ceratopsians, as far as the fossil record shows us, did not have heavy, crocodile-like tails. Their tails were relatively unremarkable and not the muscular, laterally-flattened appendages described by witnesses. It is, unfortunately, an awkward fit.

Does this mean the ceratopsian hypothesis is wrong? Not definitively. But the bar for “living dinosaur” is extraordinarily high, and the current evidence does not clear it.

A possible depiction of Emela-Ntouka based on the Centrosaurus theory.

The Rhinoceros Hypothesis

The more scientifically conservative proposal, championed by Loren Coleman and others, is that the Emela-Ntouka may represent an unknown or relic species of semiaquatic rhinoceros.

This is, on balance, a more plausible candidate, and deserves to be taken seriously.

Africa has a rich prehistory of rhinoceros relatives. Extinct rhino-adjacent megafauna roamed the continent well into the Pleistocene epoch (which ended only around 11,700 years ago, a blink in geological time). The continent still supports two living rhinoceros species. And the known behaviour, biology, and physiology of rhinos maps onto the Emela-Ntouka description with remarkable tidiness.

Rhinos are large, hairless, and grey-to-brown in colouration. They are herbivores – grazers and browsers of vegetation. They are famously aggressive, extraordinarily territorial, and possessed of a well-documented tendency to charge and gore other animals, including elephants, with their horns. They walk on legs positioned directly beneath their bodies. Their horns (single in some species) are prominent, forward-projecting features used in combat.

A semiaquatic rhino species, adapted to the swamp environment of the Likouala, could plausibly account for much of what witnesses describe. The Congo basin’s waterways and wetlands could sustain a large, plant-eating megafaunal species if it had remained sufficiently hidden from the outside world.

The main sticking point, again, is the tail. Rhinoceroses have short, unremarkable tails, nothing like the heavy, crocodile-esque appendage described in Emela-Ntouka accounts. This either suggests the tail description is exaggerated or mistaken, or it points to an animal genuinely distinct from any known rhino and perhaps something more archaic.

There is also the three-toed footprint to consider. Modern rhinos are three-toed, which is a point in the rhino hypothesis’s favour, but it is also one of the details that keeps the ceratopsian camp interested.

Could Emela-Ntouka be an undiscovered semiaquatic species of rhino?

What Are We Actually Dealing With?

The honest answer is: we don’t know. And that is not a failure, it’s an invitation and an open door.

The Likouala swamp region remains one of the few places on Earth where a large, undescribed animal could conceivably remain unknown to western science. The region has never been comprehensively surveyed. Expeditions into its interior are logistically gruelling, and the terrain actively resists investigation. New, large animal species continue to be formally described by science with some regularity. The saola, a large bovine discovered in Vietnam in 1992, is perhaps the most famous recent example, and Africa’s rainforest and swamp systems have historically held surprises.

The indigenous testimony is persistent, consistent across communities, and spans generations. Lucien Blancou was not a fabulist, he was a trained, colonial official writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The description of a kill in 1934, frustrating as it is without physical evidence, suggests something more than pure folklore.

And yet: no photograph, no specimen, no bones, and no confirmed tracks. No expedition has returned with anything definitive. The Emela-Ntouka remains stubbornly, infuriatingly, magnificently uncaptured.

The Killer of Elephants

There are plenty of cryptids whose appeal is primarily aesthetic — strange shapes glimpsed in water or fog, shadows at the edge of headlights, shapes that resist definition. The Emela-Ntouka is something different. Its appeal is almost confrontational. Killer of elephants. The elephant is the largest land animal on Earth, the great grey unmovable titan of the African continent, an animal that carries its own mythology of power and memory and grief. To name a creature by its capacity to kill an elephant is to say something extraordinary about it.

Whatever the Emela-Ntouka is — unknown rhinoceros, surviving dinosaur, regional legend grown vivid through generations of retelling, or something else entirely that we haven’t yet thought to propose — it represents everything that draws us to cryptozoology in the first place. The world is not finished. The map is not complete. There are still edges.

We are drawn to the unknown because the unknown suggests that reality is larger than we’ve been told. The Likouala swamps are out there, right now, dark and vast and dripping, and somewhere in them – maybe – something that has no name in any scientific catalogue is moving through the water, eating leaves, and occasionally, with tremendous force and very little patience, reminding the local elephants who the real authority of the swamp is.

I find that extraordinarily hard to let go of. I suspect you might too.

Further Reading:

Lucien Blancou, Mammalia, December 1954
Roy Mackal, A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe (1987)
Karl Shuker, In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995)
Loren Coleman & Jerome Clark, Cryptozoology A to Z (1999)
Bernard Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955)

Man-eater Monday: The Beast at the School Gate

On January 14th, 1991, near a High School in Boulder, Colorado, Scott Lancaster went for a run and didn’t come back. He was 18. It was the first recorded fatal mountain lion attack on an adult in the United States in over a century, and the first ever recorded fatality in Colorado. Yet, everything that preceded it meant it should never have been a surprise.

A Town That Loved Its Lions

Boulder, Colorado, sits at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It has earned a reputation as a liberal, outdoorsy, environmentally conscious city that had, by the late 1980s, cultivated a particular relationship with the wilderness on its doorstep. Nature was not something to be feared or managed. It was something to be celebrated, protected, and welcomed. Its herd of deer were prolific and welcomed by many, even when they strayed into gardens.

When mountain lions began reappearing in the foothills and open spaces around the city, rebounding after decades of persecution and bounty hunting, many residents greeted the news with similar delight. These were apex predators, returned to their ancestral range. It was, surely, a conservation success story. Perhaps at the time, the link to the significant and incredibly tame deer on their doorstep, had not been made.

What it was, in reality, was a slow-motion disaster that David Baron would later document with forensic clarity in his book The Beast in the Garden — a narrative that traces the paved-with-good-intentions road from Boulder’s love affair with its lions to the death of a teenage boy behind his high school.

Less than Subtle Warning Signs

The escalation began quietly. On February 8th, 1989, a mountain lion snatched a cock-a-poo named Fifi from the porch of the McCain family home. Bernice McCain hit the lion with a broom, twice, but it didn’t flinch. It backed up, took the dog over the fence, and was gone.

Wildlife specialist Michael Sanders considered this among the first true escalations in lion behaviour in the area. The lion had not fled from a human. It had simply ignored her.

That same year, Rob Altschuler, a member of the Boulder Emergency Squad, was monitoring an area in the aftermath of a wildfire, when a mountain lion approached him with unsettling confidence. He retreated to his Chevy Blazer — a vehicle with orange flashing lights running, the kind of presence that should, in theory, have sent any wild animal in the opposite direction. The lion was unmoved.

The dogs kept dying. On November 30th, 1989, a Highland Terrier was attacked despite sharing a pen with a much larger Great Dane. The lion had already visited the pen earlier and left a small wound on the terrier, one the owners had assumed was caused by the other dog. It came back to finish the job. The Great Dane was not a deterrent. Nine days later, an 85-pound Doberman was mauled so severely that the veterinarian who treated it described the dog as a pin cushion, owing to the number of puncture wounds. A German Shepherd followed. A black lab. Then others.

By February 1990, there had been enough incidents that the Division of Wildlife sponsored a public meeting in Coal Creek Canyon. The intention was practical: advise residents on how to safeguard their pets and property. What happened instead was a glimpse into the fatal blind spot at the heart of Boulder’s relationship with its lions.

Those who had lost animals found themselves on the receiving end of hostility from their neighbours. The message from a vocal portion of the room was clear: people needed to adapt to the presence of mountain lions, not the other way around. There was a strong anti-kill sentiment, as one might expect. But beneath it lay something more troubling — a failure to reckon with what these animals actually were. Not symbols. Not neighbours. Apex predators that were running out of reasons to be afraid of people.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Lynda Walters expressed frustration and jealousy when her father, Bill, spotted a mountain lion, from his car. “I wish I could see one”, she had said,

She got her wish on June 2nd, 1990. Lynda was a medical student and studying hard. She gave herself one daily reward – a 5pm run. She was jogging through Dry Gulch, near Canyon Drive, when she encountered not one, but two mountain lions.

The first she spotted on a bank, just fifteen feet from her. She raised her arms and yelled, intending to drive the cat away. It didn’t budge. Then she noticed the movement in her peripheral vision. A second cat was moving in behind her.

She threw rocks. She stood her ground. Eventually, the only option left was a tree, and she climbed it.

One of the lions climbed after her and clawed her leg. She stomped on its head.

Lynda eventually broke a branch and fashioned a makeshift spear, using it to keep the cats at bay while, below her, they waited. She was in that tree long enough for the light to die. In the darkening canyon, above two mountain lions that showed no inclination to leave, she listened to the not-distant sounds of civilisation – of cars passing on the road, a dog barking and children playing in a nearby sub-division.

Lynda later said she imagined her own death many times over, expecting at any moment that the animals would come up and take her.

What saved her was a deer. It appeared across the creek, making its way through the brush. The cats caught its scent, abandoned their interest in Walters, and slipped away into the dark to stalk it. She climbed down and ran.

The lions that stalked Lynda Walters were not aberrations. They were the product of years of habituation: a generation of animals that had grown up in and around human settlement, learning that people did not pose a threat. Boulder’s open spaces had become, in effect, a nursery for large predators with no fear of the species they lived alongside.

Scott Lancaster’s Final Run

On January 14th, 1991, Scott Lancaster, 18 years old, went out for a training run around the trail circuit at Clear Creek High School. Scott was a keen athlete and cyclist, training hard. With a free period to burn late in the day, Scott took advantage.

He borrowed the gym kit of his locker share, James Valdez, and the running shoes of another friend, Eric Simonich. He headed out into a beautiful winters’ afternoon. As he began his run, he waved at a teacher before veering off onto the hillside, following a route carved out by him and his ski-team buddies.

His route took him past the windows of a fifth-period English class, and the students inside watched him go by. He put on a show for them, making like he was out of control with wobbly legs and arms. His friends cheered and laughed, anticipating his next run past. They knew he usually ran several laps of around fifteen minutes each.

Scott didn’t come round again.

At some point in the next few minutes, within a few hundred yards of his friends in the classroom, Scott was knocked to the ground and killed. It was a cold, calculated, brutal, and efficient attack. It is thought the loss of blood from the wounds made it relatively quick and painless.

When Scott failed to return, initial suspicion, albeit briefly, fell on the idea that he might have simply left. Absconded. But Scott’s family knew better. He would never leave his beloved custom bicycle behind. His friend James Valdez opened their shared locker and found his own gym clothes gone and Scott’s street clothes still inside. He had gone out, and he had not come back.

Sheriff’s deputies searched. Volunteers combed the area. Dogs scoured the hillside. For nearly two days, there was no trace of him. It was Steve Shelafo, a 28-year-old emergency medical technician, who found him.

The mountain lion was still there, guarding the body, when Shelafo arrived. It was shot dead at the scene after a short and hectic chase. The animal was a young, adult male, approximately 100 pounds. An autopsy revealed fragments of human heart in its stomach.

Scott Lancaster was the first adult killed by a mountain lion in the United States in over a century. He was not though, as Baron’s account makes searingly clear, an unforeseeable victim of a random wild encounter. He was the end point of a trajectory that had been visible for years, to anyone willing to see it.

The Myth of Wilderness

Baron closes his account with an argument that has only grown more relevant in the decades since: that what killed Scott Lancaster was not simply a lion, but a myth: the idea that wilderness is a pristine, self-regulating thing that humans can live alongside without active management, without accepting the responsibilities that come with sharing space with large predators.

Boulder had created something that looked like a wild landscape but functioned like nothing that had existed before: a place where apex predators learned that humans were harmless, where the social structures that once governed the boundary between human settlement and wild land had quietly dissolved, and where the consequences of that dissolution were still, somehow, a shock when they arrived.

The lion that killed Scott Lancaster had likely never learned to fear people. Why would it? Nobody had ever given it a reason to.

In the 35 years since, there have been eleven more recorded fatal attacks. The lesson Boulder failed to learn in 1991, that coexistence with apex predators requires honesty about what they are, has not notably improved with time. We are still, by and large, a culture more comfortable with the idea of wilderness than with its reality.

Movie Monday: The Monster We Made — How Cinema Invented the Werewolf

There are very few monsters as instantly recognisable as the werewolf. Full moon. Silver bullet. The agonised howl. A man. – well, usually it’s a man – twisting out of his own skin and into something older, more honest, and considerably hairier.

Ask most people where these ideas come from, and they’ll shrug and probably point to: folklore. Ancient superstition. Europe’s deep, forested past. Something old, pre-cinematic, probably involving peasants and torches.

Which is a perfectly reasonable assumption. And almost entirely wrong.

The werewolf we know — the full moon, the silver bullet, the transformation as curse, the beast as Freudian double — is not the product of ancient mythology. It is, overwhelmingly, the product of Hollywood. Specifically, of one film, one screenwriter, and a creative decision made in 1941 that went on to quietly rewrite centuries of folklore until the cinema’s version and the “original” version became indistinguishable.

Let’s unpack that. And along the way, ask why the werewolf has endured, mutated, and kept finding new meaning across nearly a century of cinema.

Before Hollywood Got Involved

It would be unfair to say werewolf mythology began with Universal Pictures. It didn’t. The idea of humans transforming into wolves is genuinely ancient. It appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, crops up in Norse saga, and lurks in the margins of medieval European law, which occasionally found it necessary to legally address the problem of people who claimed to have committed crimes while in wolf form. Courts had questions. Defendants had creative excuses.

But pre-cinematic werewolf folklore was, by modern standards, a mess. It was inconsistent, regional, and ungoverned by rules. In some traditions, the transformation was voluntary through a gift, or a curse willingly sought. In others, it was contagious, passed through bite or scratch. Sometimes silver worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes the moon had nothing to do with it. Sometimes the werewolf looked like an actual wolf, rather than a man with impressive sideburns.

The one consistent thread running through European werewolf legend is the idea of dual nature: the human who is also animal, the civilised person who is also wild. That tension, at least, is old. The specific mechanics, however, were up for grabs.

Which is where Curt Siodmak came in.

The Man Who Wrote the Rules

Siodmak was a German-Jewish screenwriter who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and found his way to Hollywood, where Universal Pictures handed him the keys to their werewolf franchise. He wrote The Wolf Man in 1941, and in doing so didn’t so much adapt werewolf folklore as invent it wholesale.

The famous verse “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright”, is not, as it is sometimes assumed, an ancient piece of verse. Siodmak made it up. He later admitted as much. The transformation triggered by the full moon? Siodmak’s idea. Or at least, his formalisation of a vague folkloric notion into hard dramatic rule. The bite as means of transmission? His. The silver as weakness? His, at least in terms of putting it on screen in a way that stuck.

The film itself is a strange and melancholy thing. Lon Chaney Jr. plays Larry Talbot, a man who seems genuinely surprised and devastated by the whole situation, which is fair enough. Claude Rains plays his father with the kind of gravitas that makes you wish he’d been in everything. The Wolf Man’s makeup (courtesy of the legendary Jack Pierce, who also built Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster), is a remarkable feat of thick-browed, yak-haired practical effects. It took hours to apply, which Lon Chaney Jr. apparently accepted with less grace than he later claimed.

The film was a hit. And its sequels Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, and the deeply unhinged Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, gradually hardened Siodmak’s rules into canon. By the time the full moon appeared in the sequels’ version of the poem (“And the moon is full and bright”), it was settled. The werewolf had its rulebook, and the rulebook had been written by a refugee screenwriter in a studio back-lot in California.

This is not, to be clear, a criticism. It’s a remarkable act of accidental mythology-making. The fact that most people assume these “rules” predate cinema by centuries is testament to how convincingly Siodmak built his world. We should all be so lucky.

The Silver Bullet Question

This is perhaps the detail most worth examining, because it has the most interesting history and the most useful counterexample.

People often cite the Beast of Gévaudan as evidence that the silver bullet is a pre-cinematic tradition. I’ve done this myself, recently even feeling smug as I pointed it out to a historian. But my research into this favourite subject has actually revealed something contrary.

The Beast, a wolf-like creature that killed somewhere between 80 and 113 people in rural southern France between 1764 and 1767, is one of history’s most extraordinary animal attack cases, and it did end with a man named Jean Chastel reportedly shooting it dead. The legend says he used silver bullets, made from a blessed medal of the Virgin Mary. His piety and his silver ammunition have become inseparable from the story.

But… the story about the large-caliber silver bullets, made from melted-down medals of the Virgin Mary, is a literary invention by French writer Henri Pourrat. And Henri Pourrat’s novel was published in 1946 – five years after The Wolf Man was released. Modern scholars argue it is only through much later translations of the story that a silver bullet is introduced as killing the beast.

In other words: Hollywood almost certainly gave the silver bullet to the Beast of Gévaudan, not the other way round. The story borrowed from the screen, laundered the detail through historical folklore, and then returned it to us in an ancient guise. This is one of those beautiful, slightly dizzying feedback loops where myth and cinema create each other in real time.

There is one genuinely pre-cinematic silver reference, which makes me sure there are others. There is a seventeenth-century story from the city of Greifswald that tells of a werewolf that was taken down by silver buttons melted down to make a bullet. So, the general association of silver with werewolves is not entirely invented. But the specific, non-negotiable rule of the silver bullet? That’s Siodmak’s gift to folklore, not folklore’s gift to Siodmak.

The 1980s: When Werewolves Got Complicated

For a few decades after The Wolf Man, the werewolf largely played by Siodmak’s rules. Hammer Films picked up the baton from Universal and gave us Oliver Reed in The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), which is a much better film than it has any right to be, featuring Reed doing what Oliver Reed does best: radiating dangerous energy in a period costume. The wolf bites, the moon rises, silver is deployed. The rules held.

Then came 1981, which arrived like a bus full of werewolves and completely rewrote the genre.

Two films in particular, both favourites — John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London and Joe Dante’s The Howling — appeared within months of each other and collectively did to werewolf cinema what punk had recently done to rock music. The old forms were torn down and reassembled into something stranger, funnier, and considerably more visceral.

An American Werewolf in London is most famous for Rick Baker’s transformation sequence, which remains one of the most impressive pieces of practical effects ever committed to film. David Naughton’s transformation in the London flat, shot in real time, with nowhere for the camera to hide, is genuinely uncomfortable to watch: All popping joints and elongating limbs, a body becoming something that the body was not designed to be. Baker won the first-ever Academy Award for Best Makeup for his work on this film, largely because the Academy had to create the category to accommodate what he’d achieved.

But the film’s more lasting contribution is its tone. Landis shot a horror film as a dark comedy, following his hero through the impossible indignity of being a werewolf with a kind of cheerful ghoulishness. His undead friend (Griffin Dunne, increasingly decomposed) keeps showing up to nag him about suicide. The film plays “Blue Moon” and “Bad Moon Rising” with a commitment to lunar puns that borders on the aggressive. It is funny. It is also genuinely frightening. The two things coexist without either one undermining the other, which is a trick most filmmakers spend entire careers trying to pull off.

The Howling is the darker counterpart. The film is about a news reporter who retreats to a rural therapy retreat that turns out to be populated by werewolves who have, in a very 1980s twist, embraced their nature as a form of liberation. Dante’s film is weirder and less immediately accessible than Landis’s, but its central idea, that the wolf inside might not be something to suppress but something to accept, quietly planted a seed that werewolf cinema would keep returning to.

On a side note, I’d still love to see the original book trilogy of The Howling made into more faithful films.

Both films feature transformation sequences that deliberately rip apart Lon Chaney’s relatively neat make-up. These werewolves don’t just get hairy. They become something, in horrible, exciting, unhideable detail. The wolf is no longer a metaphor with fur. It is a body horror experience. The beast is physical, immediate, and impossible to look away from.

Ginger Snaps: The Period Drama Nobody Expected

If the 1980s expanded what a werewolf could look like, Ginger Snaps (2000) rewrote what a werewolf could mean.

The Canadian horror film, directed by John Fawcett and written by Karen Walton, follows two death-obsessed teenage sisters in the grey suburban flatness of Bailey Downs, Ontario. When Ginger is bitten by a wolf on the same night she gets her first period, the film becomes something genuinely unusual: a feminist body horror comedy about adolescence, biology, and what it means to change in ways that other people find frightening.

The 2000 Canadian horror film explains the gruesome shift into the horrors of femininity, with possession of womanhood and the culture surrounding the transformative nature of puberty shown through violence and female rage. The film is not subtle about this. Ginger’s mother asks her if she’s been growing hair in funny places. Her transformation is tied to her menstrual cycle. The parallel is stated directly and the film has the confidence to just lean into it, because the metaphor is good enough that it doesn’t need to hide behind ambiguity.

But what Ginger Snaps does that the earlier werewolf films didn’t, is put a young woman at the centre of the transformation. The history of werewolf cinema had been almost entirely male: men losing control, men struggling with inner darkness, men as the dangerous beast to be feared or pitied. Siodmak’s Larry Talbot is fundamentally a film about male guilt, male desire, and male violence turned inward. The werewolf-as-curse is a very male reading of the monster.

Ginger Snaps takes all of these themes and spins them on their head. It is a horror movie so tied to the female experience that it’s impossible to separate the two, subverting the common traits of werewolf cinema while cementing itself as the figurehead of werewolf stories for the twenty-first century.

The film sat in development hell for years because studios weren’t comfortable with it. It was too dark, too female, and too difficult. It eventually got made with Canadian government funding, went largely unnoticed on limited release, and then, in the way that genuinely good films eventually find their audience, became a cult classic that is now routinely cited in academic discussions of feminist horror. It has a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the site’s consensus reading: “The strong female cast and biting satire of teenage life makes Ginger Snaps far more memorable than your average werewolf movie — or teen flick.”

It is, for many viewers, the best werewolf film ever made. And it arrived nearly sixty years after The Wolf Man by doing the one thing Universal never thought to do: asking what the transformation feels like from the inside, for someone who wasn’t expecting it, and for whom the world’s response is not terror but condescension.

Dog Soldiers: The Werewolf as Platoon

It would be a disservice to Dog Soldiers (2002) to describe it purely as a werewolf action film, though it is absolutely and gloriously that. Neil Marshall’s debut feature drops a squad of British soldiers on a Scottish military exercise, introduces a farmhouse, and then introduces the werewolves, and from that point it more or less refuses to let you breathe for ninety minutes. It also gave us a legendary tagline: Six men. Full moon. No chance. I love this film, and am still mourning that Neil Marshall could not secure the rights for a sequel.

The film works for several reasons. Sean Pertwee and Kevin McKidd are both excellent. The werewolves are enormous, loping, practical-effects creatures shot in ways that keep their scale ambiguous and their movement genuinely unsettling. They are among the best monster designs in British horror. And the film has a rugged, low-budget commitment to practical chaos that CGI never quite replicates.

But what’s interesting about Dog Soldiers in the context of werewolf mythology is what it doesn’t do. There is no sympathy for the werewolves. No transformation-as-self-discovery. No metaphor about repressed desire. They are, straightforwardly, monsters. The film uses the werewolf not as a Freudian mirror but as a threat, and finds that there’s still plenty of mileage in that approach when it’s done with real craft and a decent script.

It is, in some ways, the purest heir to the Universal tradition. The werewolf is a creature to be survived. And yet even here, there’s something interesting going on: the military unit under siege, the question of who can be trusted, the body horror of transformation on familiar faces. The wolf, even at its most straightforwardly monstrous, keeps finding ways to mean something.

The Sympathetic Wolf: Where We Are Now

The werewolf has never been more popular, or more complicated, than it is today.

Twilight gave us werewolves as swooning love interests, which polarised audiences but sold an enormous number of books to teenagers, so someone was getting something right. The Underworld franchise cast them as an underclass in a vampire aristocracy, which is a fairly pointed political metaphor dressed in a lot of leather. Teen Wolf — both the cheerful 1985 Michael J. Fox version and the much darker MTV series — used lycanthropy to explore adolescent identity, belonging, and the particular terror of a body that won’t behave the way you want it to.

Harry Potter gave us Remus Lupin, perhaps the most structurally interesting cinematic werewolf since Larry Talbot: a man who is brilliant, kind, generous, and who must take a potion once a month or become something terrible. The HIV metaphor has been written about extensively. What’s perhaps more interesting is that Lupin doesn’t fit neatly into either the “monster to be defeated” or “beast to be liberated” categories. He is simply a person, managing a condition, trying to live with some dignity.

That shift, from the werewolf as horror to the werewolf as character, is the defining movement of the genre over the past thirty years. The beast is no longer purely something to be feared or destroyed. It is something to be understood, accommodated, perhaps even embraced.

This makes a kind of cultural sense. We live in a moment that is deeply interested in interiority, in understanding why people behave as they do, in extending the frame of sympathy to figures who once existed purely as threats. The werewolf, more than any other monster, is built for this. It is, at its core, a story about what happens when the thing inside you refuses to stay inside. About the performance of being human, and what breaks it.

Why the Werewolf Endures

The vampire is elegant. The zombie is political. The ghost is nostalgic.

But the werewolf is physical. It is the monster of the body — of biology, of urge, of transformation that is experienced from the inside. It is change made literal and terrifying and sometimes liberating. It is the question of what we would be, if we stopped pretending.

That’s why the silver bullet trope has lasted. Not because of any genuine folkloric weight, but because it implies something important: that the wolf has a specific vulnerability. That there is one precise thing, one shining exception, that can reach through the monster and kill what was once human. The silver bullet doesn’t just kill the werewolf. It ends the suffering.

And that’s a very human idea. The hope that the thing that has overwhelmed you is not permanent. That there is a cure, a fix, a single gleaming object that can restore the boundary between man and beast.

The werewolf persists because we haven’t stopped needing that particular hope — or that particular fear.

The moon rises. The hair comes. The bullet waits.

Curt Siodmak made it all up. And it turns out, he was right about all of it.

If you’re drawn to stories where human nature and something darker run very close together, where the boundary between instinct and reason is the most interesting part of the story — my novels explore similar territory.

Monster Monday: The Dobhar-Chú — Ireland’s Water Hound

A Creature Between River and Legend

There are some creatures that feel rooted in place. Not just sightings, or rumours, but something older that often seems to belong to the landscape itself.

The Dobhar-Chú is one of those.

In the lakes and rivers of northwest Ireland, particularly around Leitrim and Donegal, stories persist of a creature that is, at first glance, familiar. An otter. A water-dog. Something known.

But then, not. Larger than an otter should be. More aggressive. Capable, in at least one telling, of killing a human being and summoning its mate in a kind of avenging response. And steeped in the supernatural and folklore, either virtually invulnerable or gifting that invulnerability to any who do kill it, or cursing them to a death within 24 hours.

The Water Hound

The name itself tells you a great deal.

Dobhar-chú — from the Irish dobhar (water) and cú (hound).

A water dog.

But like many old names, it carries layers. It has been used interchangeably for the common otter, for mythical beasts, and for something in between — a creature described in folklore as a “king otter,” ruler of its kind, rare, powerful, and dangerous.

Some accounts describe it as white, with black-tipped ears and a dark cross marking its back. Others describe something darker, slick-skinned, almost seal-like. Some say it bears a horn. What is consistent is its status, not just another animal, but something elevated.

A master. And, crucially, something that does not behave as expected.

The Glenade Killing

At the centre of the Dobhar-Chú legend is a story that shifts it from folklore into something far more grounded, or at least, more unsettling.

In 1722, a woman, often named as Grace or Grainne Connolly, was said to have been washing clothes at Glenade Lake when she was attacked and killed.

Her husband, Terence McLoughlin, later found her body.

The creature, a Dobhar-Chú, was reportedly lying across her chest. He killed it. But before it died, it let out a shrill cry.

And then came the second animal, its mate.

What follows feels less like folklore and more like something pulled from a man-eater account, with a pursuit, panic, and a desperate attempt to escape. McLoughlin and another man fled on horseback, chased by the creature’s mate. Only by turning and confronting it, using the horses themselves as a barrier, did they manage to kill the second animal.

This story repeats, with variations, across the region. The details shift including a horned beast, a cloak used as a decoy, a different victim, and even the creature ripping its way through the horses, but overall its the same story built around an attack, a killing, a second creature, and a fight that feels far too physical to dismiss entirely.

Folklore, or Misremembered Reality?

What makes the Dobhar-Chú particularly compelling is how little evidence there is yet how persistent the story remains.

Outside of the Glenade account and its variations, there are no consistent modern sightings. No clear physical evidence. No ongoing pattern.

Instead, what we find is a layering of belief:

The “king otter” that cannot be killed except by a precise shot (usually a small, white mark on the chest).
The magical skin that protects anyone who owns or procures it from harm
The idea that killing one brings death within 24 hours
The belief that it rules over other water creatures

These are clearly not zoological descriptions. They are mythic structures.

And yet, sitting alongside them, there are quieter, more grounded details. Ones that begin to pull the story back toward reality.

Because the European otter is not always the gentle, playful creature it is often portrayed as. It is powerful. Territorial. Capable of killing prey larger than expected. And when pushed, it can be aggressive.

Historical accounts describe unusually large individuals, some approaching six or even seven feet in length, and rare colour variations, including albino specimens.

Both giant otters of the Amazon and short-clawed otters of Asia are known for banding together in formidable groups to intimidate threats and protect other members of their clans.

Otters across England and Ireland were hunted to near extinction in previous centuries. Maybe, just maybe, their forebears showed similar behaviour and tenacity, as well as likely growing to larger sizes before hunting became popular.

Enough, perhaps, to start a story. But not enough, on their own, to sustain it for centuries.

The Bunyip Parallel

Thousands of miles away, another creature emerges from water and uncertainty, The Bunyip.

The Bunyip is famously inconsistent. Descriptions range wildly, from seal-like to bird-headed, from amphibian to mammalian. But among those variations is a recurring form:

A large, semi-aquatic animal.

Dark. Elusive. Dangerous.

Sometimes described in ways that echo the Dobhar-Chú as an oversized otter-like creature inhabiting rivers, billabongs, and lakes.

Like the Irish legend, many Bunyip stories centre on water’s edge encounters. Livestock taken. People warned away. Occasional attacks implied, if not directly stated.

And like the Dobhar-Chú, the Bunyip exists in that uncertain space between:

Indigenous knowledge and colonial interpretation
Real animals and exaggerated memory
Fear of water, and what might be beneath it

Where the Dobhar-Chú feels localised, almost anchored to Glenade, the Bunyip is broader, more diffuse. But the underlying pattern is familiar.

Water. Isolation. And an animal that is almost known, but not quite.

Illustration of a Bunyip by John Macfarlane, 1890.

Why an Otter?

There’s a reason both myths gravitate toward otter-like forms. Otters occupy a strange ecological and psychological space.

They are:

Seen rarely, despite being widespread
Silent in the water
Capable of sudden, explosive movement
Equally at home on land and in water

Most importantly, they break expectations.

We are conditioned to see them as playful, almost harmless.

So when behaviour contradicts that, when an otter becomes aggressive, territorial, or simply larger than expected, it creates a sharper rupture than if the animal were already feared.

A wolf behaving like a wolf is not surprising. An otter behaving like something else entirely is.

As we see in some man-eaters, that’s all it takes for a myth to find a footing.

The Shape of the Story

What both the Dobhar-Chú and the Bunyip reveal is less about undiscovered species, and more about how humans process the unfamiliar.

A rare sighting becomes a story. That story encourages others to see a pattern. Patterns form beliefs.

And over time, belief reshapes the original event into something more coherent but often less true.

In Ireland, that process created a water hound that could summon its mate and grant supernatural protection. In Australia, it created a creature that could take many forms, but always belonged to the water.

In both cases, the starting point may have been something far simpler:

An animal seen briefly, perhaps in the wrong light, doing something unexpected.

Between Beast and Memory

There is a temptation, with creatures like the Dobhar-Chú, to resolve them. To decide whether they are myth or animal, real or imagined.

But that misses the point. The Dobhar-Chú endures not because it was proven, but because it sits in that unresolved space.

A place where:

Real animals can behave unpredictably
Landscapes hold memory longer than evidence
Stories fill the gaps left by incomplete understanding

And perhaps that is why it remains tied so strongly to Glenade.

Not as a monster waiting beneath the surface. But as a story that refuses to settle.

If you enjoy this kind of exploration of beasts, both real and imagined, my novels tread similar ground, where wildlife, folklore, and human fear begin to overlap.