The trailer for HUNGRY dropped this morning, and before we get into it, I want to address something. You are going to look at the words “hippo horror movie” and your brain is going to do a thing. It is going to go to Hungry Hungry Hippos. It is going to think this is a joke. You are going to be wrong, and the hippo is going to eat you for it.
Hippos kill an estimated 500 people per year in Africa. They are the third largest land animal on earth. They weigh up to 4,000 pounds, can run up to 19 miles per hour, and are aggressively territorial in both water and on land. The animals are also largely nocturnal, which means most of what they do to people happens in the dark. Jaws made us afraid of open water for forty years and sharks kill roughly five people globally per year. Five. Do the math.
The hippo has been waiting for its movie. HUNGRY might actually be it.
What Is Happening in This Movie
HUNGRY follows a group of tourists on a riverboat tour through the Louisiana swamplands who get lured off the main route with the promise of an exclusive experience. What they find instead is a ravenous hippopotamus lurking beneath the bayou’s murky water that has very different ideas about how this excursion is going to go.
That is the whole premise. Tourists. Swamp. Hippo. No one gets out easily.
The Louisiana bayou setting is doing a lot of work here. It is a landscape that already feels like it is hiding something. The water is opaque. The trees close in. Sound travels differently. If you are going to put an apex predator somewhere and make it feel genuinely threatening, a Louisiana swamp is about as correct a choice as you can make. The film is leaning into that and the trailer makes it clear this is not a sunlit adventure film. This is a survival movie.
Distributed by AURA Entertainment and classified as a survival thriller and creature horror, the film opens June 23.
