Since the dawn of time, mankind* has fought against beasts in the never-ending struggle for survival. Our ancestors likely battled direwolves, giant sloths, a variety of sabre-toothed things, and maybe even some dinosaurs (definitely did not) so that we might enjoy the comfort of beast-free living in the modern era. Yet some primal part of us still yearns to watch the epic struggle between man and beast, preferably from the safety of our own homes and couches, and through the heavily plotted-out and edited lens of Hollywood productions.

Unfortunately, the majority of "Man vs Beast" movies are low-hanging fruit. Animal effects are often part of very low-budget films; "classics" like The Killer Shrews and Night of the Lepus come to mind. Those examples are in keeping with the trope of "giant-sized version of a relatively harmless animal" attempting to eat our protagonists. That's all in good fun, but what we're after is more of a visceral, realistic, and harrowing tale of Man vs Beast, bringing everyman heroes up against real-world killers from all corners of the natural world.

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Image via Paramount Pictures.

With that in mind--and with director Alexandre Aja's Crawl making its way into theaters this weekend, already getting good buzz from early audience screenings--we compiled 10 of the best (and less-than-the-best but still super-fun, honestly) "Man vs Beast" movies for your enjoyment. We've got lions, we've got (Tasmanian) tigers, and we've got a bunch of bears, plus creatures the slither, swim, peck, bark and bite. With each "leader of the pack" movie listed below, we've also included some honorable mentions that feature the same beastie attempting to snack on some puny humans. Enjoy!

*Because it's 2019, I should probably point out that "man/kind" is just a stand-in for "human/kind" throughout this article, just in case anyone wants to get Mad Online about it.

Here are 10 great (and not-so-great) "man vs beast" movies, ranked with the best coming last:

Snakes on a Plane

Being perfectly honest, the viral marketing for Snakes on a Plane was far better than the movie itself. The premise, beyond the obvious, goes something like this: An extreme sports bro witnesses a murder, so the FBI flies him out to LA to testify against the culprit. Problem is, the bad guy has smuggled a bunch of venomous snakes aboard said plane in time-release cages in the hopes of either killing the witness through snakebite or bringing the whole plane down in a fiery crash. It's inane and insane, and most of the snakes prevail, but it's Samuel L. Jackson who makes this mess worth watching.

You've undoubtedly heard Jackson's infamous lines delivered a number of times by now, but they're still fun to hear in the context of this ridiculous flick. If you want to see some famous faces dispatched in absurd ways, or if you just want to see a snake bite both a boob and some guy's junk, then Snakes on a Plane is for you.

Honorable Mention: Anaconda, because who doesn't want to watch Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and Jon Voight take the world's worst riverboat cruise in search of a record-setting anaconda? Obviously lots of people did because somehow they made 5 of these movies overall.

Cujo

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I may be preferable to a heckin' good pupper over most humans, but it's tough to recommend Cujo to fellow dog-lovers. This 1983 adaptation comes courtesy of an award-winning Stephen King novel by the same name published in 1981. It follows the title pooch in Castle Rock, Maine, a good dog who's driven to violence by a rabies infection. That ends poorly for the pup, of course, but quite a few humans end up on the losing end of Cujo's savagery as well. The only character who's a match for the mad mutt is a mom who's protecting her son from what would otherwise be a fine canine companion.

While Cujo is a sad story either on the page or on the big screen, it does serve as a reminder that humans and animals have long been at odds; what may seem like a domesticated animal can still turn on its keepers if the conditions are right. Few movies drive this fact home like King's classic, Cujo.

Honorable Mention: If you prefer your bloodthirsty hound as a genetic mashup of all kinds of animals to give it heightened attributes, check out Man's BestFriend. And if it's that classic childhood tough lesson/tearjerker you prefer, there's always Old Yeller.

Piranha

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If Jaws had an ocean-sized budget, Piranha's was more of a great lake. And yet Joe Dante managed to deliver a solid "Man vs Beast" movie that moved the threat from saltwater to freshwater ... at least until the experimentally modified fish made their way to the ocean. The movie follows the disappearance of two skinny-dipping teenagers and the resulting search for them, which leads to the discovery of a secret base that developed "Razorteeth" piranha for military purposes. When those flesh-hungry fish escape, all hell breaks loose in the streams, rivers, and lakes that connect the small community, and pretty much everyone you seen on screen will pay the price.

Piranha may have more of a cult following but it's a genuinely fun and funny film to watch. That's thanks to Dante, executive producer Roger Corman, and the film's willingness to embrace its obvious parody of Jaws rather than pretend like it wasn't aware of it at all. Pound for pound, Jaws is far and away the better film, but Piranha still has plenty of bite.

Honorable Mention: Piranha II: The Spawning, because, obviously. Also because it was James Cameron's debut feature film as both writer and director. Even today's A-listers had to start somewhere.

Black Water

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While Crawl aims to win over fans of "Man vs Beast" movies, with Kaya Scodelario taking on the heroic role this time around, the 2007 Australian horror flick Black Water is worth revisiting. Andrew Traucki and David Nerlich wrote and directed this adaptation of a real-life crocodile attack in the Northern Territory of Australia back in 2003.

Everything up until this point has been kind of silly or pseudo-sciencey; it's Black Water that delivers the real horror of modern man out in the world of killer critters. While on a fishing expedition, a foursome is attacked and stranded by a massive crocodile. A war of attrition ensues with the killer croc able to wait out the humans who are marooned high up in a tree. What follows is a harrowing battle of wits and will, ending with a plot twist you rarely see even in genre films.

Honorable Mention: But if you prefer your croc attacks on the sillier side of things, there's always the 1999 cult classic Lake Placid (and apparently the 5 sequels that followed it).

The Ghost and the Darkness

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We haven't covered lions, tigers, or bears yet, so let's remedy that now. The Ghost and the Darkness has one of the best titles in movie history as well as a precedent in the real world. The 1996 adventure-thriller is a fictionalized account of the Tsavo lions who killed railway workers in Kenya in the waning years of the 19th century. It also helps to have Michael Douglas, Val Kilmer, and John Kani as your badass hunters tasked with taking down the lions.

With the railroad suffering setbacks due to the lion attacks, Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson (Kilmer) is sent to solve the problem. He's joined by the local Kenyan foreman Samuel (Kani) and eventually aided by the legendary hunter, Charles Remington (Douglas). But these lions don't hunt like any that the locals have ever seen before; at most, they've seen one lone man-hunter, not two working in concert. What follows is a fantastic cat-and-mouse game where the humans are the mice for once, at least until their ability to outsmart their more powerful opponents and work together eventually saves the day (and the railroad).

Honorable Mention: The Hunter, a relatively recent Australian film that stars Willem Dafoe as a mercenary tasked with tracking down the last remaining Tasmanian tiger, a.k.a. a thylacine. It's more of a philosophical thriller and a commentary of Big Pharma and the commoditization of natural resources to the point of literal extinction, but it's also a fantastic portrayal of a competent, dedicated, and single-minded hunter in search of his prey, thanks to Dafoe's performance.

The Grey

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The Grey, i.e. Liam Neeson vs. Wolves, might just be the go-to "Man vs Wolves" movie of all time. The 2011 flick came right in the thick of the "reNeesonce" and was right in the wheelhouse of writer-director Joe Carnahan; it's also adapted from the short story "Ghost Walker" by Ian MacKenzie Jeffers, who co-wrote the screenplay with Carnahan.

On the surface, The Grey follows an expert marksman (Neeson) whose job is to protect Alaskan oil drillers from attacks by grey wolves. He's put to the ultimate test when a plane crash dumps him and a group of workers in the middle of the wolves' territory. But dig a little deeper and you'll find a rich selection of philosophical struggles for each and every man out there in the wild being hunted by wolves. Religious theorizing, family relationships, terminal illness, and thoughts of suicide; these are all discussed at various points in the film, even as the wolves close their noose on the men. It's as bleak as the Alaskan winter but final fight between the Alpha man and the Alpha wolf has one of the best (and most ambiguous) resolutions you'll ever see.

Honorable Mention: If you prefer your "Man and his wolf-dog" stories on the slightly more positive side, there's always White Fang and Call of the Wild

The Edge

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You've had your lions and tigers, so it's time for bears. The Edge is one of those oh so very 90s movies that is also infinitely rewatchable and holds up even more than 20 years later. Written by David Mamet, this adventure story finds a trio of men stranded in the Alaskan wilderness (a go-to place for these types of survival stories) and stalked by a massive Kodiak bear with a taste for man-flesh. But under the surface of this surprisingly drawn-out survival story is a battle of wills between man and beast, and between the men themselves.

The wily billionaire (Anthony Hopkins) believes that his wife (Elle MacPherson) has been cheating on him with the handsome young photographer (Alec Baldwin). You might think that the billionaire is the one with an elaborate plan to take out the would-be usurper, and you might be right; The Edge keeps you guessing. So while the challenge of surviving the unforgiving wilderness and outwitting the relentlessly pursuing bear definitely give the movie its action beats, the undercurrent of tension comes from the age-old competition between the two leading men.

Honorable mentions: I know, "Where's The Revenant?" I hear you shrieking. It's definitely a better film when it comes to straight-up revenge, and it features one helluva bear fight, but it's so close to the current consciousness that I opted to give the edge to, well, The Edge. It's still a perfect example of "Man vs Beast" movies, as are Backcountry and Grizzly Man when it comes to bear battlin'.

The Birds

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The Top 3 are some of your all-time classics here, and no one's done "Man vs Birds" better than Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 Oscar-nominated flock flick, The Birds. Hitchcock literally put the murder in "a murder of crows" with this loose adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's short story by the same name. That original 1952 story took place in Britain and the sudden bird attacks were most likely an allegory for the Nazi Blitz on London during World War II.

Hitchcock took this idea in a different direction, or rather he tasked eponymous screenwriter Evan Hunter with doing just that. What they came up with was a tale about a young socialite who meets and eventually gets close to a defense attorney who's visiting his family in California's Bodega Bay. But when unexplained bird attacks start to gain in frequency and ferocity, the group finds themselves in a battle for their very lives against creatures they would normally have taken for granted. It's a curious pairing and blending of genres as the story goes from a sort of romantic comedy to a shockingly dark horror tale. It also features a sort of inversion of the natural pecking order, if you will, with humans suddenly finding themselves under attack by lesser beasts. It's a classic, and a must-watch if you haven't already.

Honorable Mention: Literally any Jurassic Park movie. Why? Because birds are modern dinosaurs, obv.

Jurassic Park

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We bend the rules a bit on this one: Man and dinosaurs may never have co-existed the way that Jurassic Park shows us on the big screen, but our fates surely would have played out similar to the way Michael Crichton's stories depict them. It's a good thing we puny humans never had to survive a world in which these mighty "terrible lizards" were hunting us because we probably wouldn't have. (In fact, it's thanks to their mass extinction that we got a chance to evolve at all, but that's neither here nor there.) It's not just the massive size of these beasts that make them so terrifying, it's also their very exotic nature as animals that once existed on this planet but have been gone for so long as to make them completely alien to us.

That, of course, is the draw to the title theme park; the danger, the intrigue, the glimpse into the distant and presumed dead past. It's also the reason that the humans in this story are so unavoidably screwed. At the end of the day, man's ingenuity, cleverness, and teamwork are just enough to stay a step ahead of (most of) the prehistoric predators, but it's their own hierarchy of the food chain that ends up giving the much smaller mammals a chance to escape. If the T. rex hadn't wanted to snack on some Velociraptors, there wouldn't be any hominids left to tell the tale, just like if an asteroid hadn't wiped out the biggest, baddest creatures ever to walk the Earth (meat-eating and veggie-saurs alike), we puny humans never would have had a chance to begin with.

Honorable Mention: If you just can't get enough Crichton, check out Congo, a bonkers trip through the African jungle that includes many, many creatures that want to kill us, including albino gorillas whose only weakness is a frickin' laser.

Jaws

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You knew this one was coming. Sure, it may have been a pop culture component in demonizing sharks, and yes, it probably ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster and signaled the slow, protracted death of cinema as an art form, but there's no denying the terror, the staying power, and the sheer perfection of Jaws.

In addition to the surface-level battle between men and one very hungry shark, a conflict that can be seen through the lens of everything from evolution (ie life's emergence from the deadly seas onto land) to a retelling of "Old Man and the Sea" or "Moby-Dick", Jaws dips a toe into the frustration that almost always exists between common sense and bureaucracy, or the pursuit of the almighty dollar. There's any number of ways to view Jaws, but the best way to do it, in my humble opinion, is with a big Coke, a bucket of buttered popcorn, and sold-out crowd at your local cinema this summer, should that option be available to you.

Honorable Mention: Often imitated, never duplicated, there's no shortage of shark-attack movies that wish they were the next Jaws. Here are a few try-hards and parodies alike: Open Water, The Shallows, Orca, Deep Blue Sea (just for a few more seconds of Samuel L. Jackson), and The Meg.

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