Is This The Bad Bunny You’re Looking For? Our Favorite Horror Movie Hares

This feral fluffle falls in the grand tradition of “what if this animal/bug were HUMONGOUS?” Night of the Lepus takes place in a town under siege by gigantic rabbits. The town was initially under siege by regular-sized rabbits, but once scientists got involved, some things went awry, instructions were not followed, and BAM, we’ve got some giant bad bunnies on the loose.

Like most monster movies, Night of the Lepus is more about the crimes of man and the reality that humans are more often than not the true monsters. But it’s still fun to see these bad bunnies tearing through the town and inexplicably eating people.

The movie uses lots of miniatures and forced perspective shots of real bunnies, and perhaps the weirdest thing about the movie is that there are some real stars in the cast, we’re talking Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, and DeForest Kelly. The concept is campy as hell, but it’s played straight as can be, and the disjointed mashup of those elements makes it a bit of a trip.

Adapted from a novel of the same name,  this is a kid’s movie, with very adult themes depicting the harsh realities of the world, and war explained via bunnies. General Woundwort's hobbies include murder, manipulation, waging war, and being an all around tyrant.

He may be the baddest bunny on this list, traumatizing generations of children in what turned out to be accidental gateway horror. There's a 2018 remake with a rather star-studded cast, but something about the animation style in the original 1978 film really drives that kindertrauma home.

Ok, ok – Frank isn’t technically a real rabbit. He’s a young man wearing, in Donnie Darko star Jake Gyllenhaal’s words, “a stupid bunny suit”. But the image of his eerie chrome visage with those blank, lifeless eyes is seared into the psyche of many of us who came of age in the early 2000s when Donnie Darko came out, spawning a generation of horror lovers with a penchant for Tears for Fears and a phobia of animal masks.

Frank may not really be a bad guy in the grand scheme of things, but he’s still not someone we want to bump into in a lonely movie theater on a Friday night. Basket of eggs or otherwise. – Amber T

Only a director as adept at turning the normal into nightmares as the late, great David Lynch could turn an innocent family of bunnies into harbingers of deep, unsettling existential crisis. In Rabbits, a 2002 web series that would later go on to be part of Lynch’s Inland Empire, the titular buns might seem friendly and fuzzy, but something about their surreal, stilted way of talking has always put my teeth on edge.

Not to mention the utterly terrifying out-of-context laugh track that reminds us of the inherently horrifying nature of sitcoms. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of sitting through an episode of The Big Bang Theory, you’ll know what I mean. – Amber T

Bonnie the Rabbit isn’t really a bad bunny the way the others on this list are, rather more of a vigilante bunny seeking justice and revenge, for very good reason. Yes, Bonnie and the rest of the FNAF gang are actively hunting down the night guard, but I would not consider this a traditional villain, given that the Five Nights At Freddy’s backstory is actually incredibly grim.

For the unfamiliar, it involves murdered children, their souls trapped in the animatronics. So yeah, if you’re playing as the night guard being actively stalked by Bonnie, that lands Bonnie on the bad list. But once you know the why, it sure is hard to view the killer animatronics as horrifying entities.

In the new tradition of taking childhood tales and morphing them into hellacious versions of their once innocent former incarnations, Peter Cottontail did not escape the IP to horror pipeline. In this 2014 horror movie, Peter Cottonhell is a bloodthirsty Easter bunny battling an aspiring actress and a crazy dog catcher. Here comes… another bunny with a taste for human flesh!

Tina Romero's wildly hilarious and heartfelt zombie horror comedy Queens of the Dead is filled with flesh eating zombies, but this zombunny stole our hearts. Right before Riki Lindhome kicked its ass. Fun fact, the zombie bunny is actually a cameo from a Queens of the Dead producer doing double duty as a ravenous (and very very bad) bunny.

The Bad Bunny himself closes out the list. Benito must be a horror fan, because his 2023 music video for “Baticano” transforms the Puerto Rican rapper into Nosferatu’s Count Orlok. And he didn’t half-ass the look, we’re talking a full Max Schreck bald cap and a black-and-white music video paying homage to F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionist classic.

The song itself doesn’t have anything to do with vampires, so if you’re not fluent in Spanish, just vibe to the vampiric bass tones of the vocals and the dancey beat. If you are fluent in Spanish and you’ve never heard this one, let me apologize in advance before you hit that play button, I’ll send you off with a disclaimer… it’s kinda dirtaaay. Enjoy.