Bunnies. They’re cute and fluffy and no one in their right mind would find them terrifying, right? I mean you could be one of those rational people or you could be the one giving the side eye to the Easter Bunny wondering how it came to be a thing. I mean if you think about it having a six foot tall anthropomorphic bunny dispense candy filled eggs to small children is a flamboyantly bizarre way to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, a man who by no reports owned bunnies. What gives?

This is where things go from curious to terrifying. The Easter Bunny is actually a Germanic tradition which makes sense. I mean who else could come up with a nightmare bunny than the same culture that spurned so many cannibalism-friendly fairy tales? Or the later moral tomes like Shock-Headed Peter where a small girl bursts into flames for playing with matches while other children starve, have their fingers cut off, or are wished into a proverbial cornfield via magic umbrella? Good stuff. I’m sure these are exactly the right people to be in charge of the freaky bunny brigade.

They say the Easter Bunny was imported to the US in the 1700’s from these early Germanic immigrants who carried with them a Pagan tradition celebrating Osterhaws their favorite egg-laying hare. The children would spend every year making nests for this magical creature to lay colored eggs in which at some point was replaced with baskets and candy. How delightfully whimsical and terribly odd! I mean why did this rabbit lay eggs in first place? That’s where things take a turn for the weird. Not weird as in mildly strange but weird as in, “Well, clearly someone’s been taking too much acid.” You see the Easter Bunny actually started life as a bird but at some point our little feathered friend broke her wing. Taking pity on the poor creature Oester, the fertility goddess at the time, decided to turn the bird into a rabbit to ease its suffering as rabbits don’t have wings. This is so typical of a goddess to do. She could have just fixed the bird’s wing, instead she accidentally created some sort of chimera creature – a rabbit who still continued to lay eggs like the bird it once was. If that’s not unnerving enough I’m still completely uncertain whose bright idea it was to start dressing up as this poor unfortunate beast so they could run around giving candy and hugs to strange children before snapping a quick photo of the screaming babes’ horrified reactions. I’m just fascinated with the idea of where this is going to go in the future. I suspect it’ll end up being even more confusing.

But the Easter bunny is merely the most visible of our creepy critters today. In fact bunnies and hares have been infiltrating our culture for hundreds of years. Just look back at some of my favorite little medieval mysteries – battle hares. Battle hares? I hear you ask. Yes, battle hares. The heavily armored frequently vicious lagamorphian conquerors of olde that were doodled in the margins of manuscripts by the scribes of the time. They’re seen charging into battle on the backs of hounds, keeping snails like falcons, wielding swords, and occasionally skinning and flaying the odd human. Clearly someone had some issues. But the best part about battle hares is their mystery. No one really knows why they became such a thing. They’re like gargoyles: strange, ever present, and totally baffling. There’s always this odd sense we’re missing half the joke but maybe not seeing as the modern day incarnation of this is one of the funniest moments in a comedic movie… The killer bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It seems fitting a modern day battle hare would show up here.

And Monty Python is far from the only movie to have scary bunnies in it. When I was knee high to a grasshopper I was forever psychologically scarred by one scene from Critters where the Easter Bunny was summarily disemboweled and eaten by the aforementioned critters in an orgy of fake blood and screaming reserved only for the corniest of B-rated movies. Maybe this is why I have no memories of the Easter Bunny in my own childhood. Maybe from four on I knew the cold hard truth – that the Easter Bunny was dead, eaten alive by snaggletoothed muppets…

But the Critters Easter Bunny scene wasn’t even remotely as gory as a cartoon I witnessed a year or two later: Watership Down. I don’t know what was going on in the late 70’s and 80’s but WOW was some of the children’s programming at the time messed up. Watership Down opens to a scene of absolute bunny carnage and the orgy of slaughter continues through the entire film as the rabbits are set upon by other rabbits, ravenous dogs, hawks, and god knows what else. Quite frankly I can’t really say because I didn’t make it through the whole thing. And now Netflix is running a modern version because why not spread the terror to a fresh generation? I’m sure the story probably has a lot of moral fiber and life lessons but all that gets a bit lost in all the bloodshed.

I guess when you’re little kid it’s pretty easy to make bunnies unsettling. It’s a bit harder when you’re older but I think Donnie Darko did a fairly good job of making a teenage me cock my head to the side and give a quizzical expression. Frank the Bunny. Who is Frank the Bunny? Why is he a bunny? Why is he a scary bunny? Was this some sort of metaphor? An artistic expression from a deranged mind? A zombie bunny? A random hallucination? And why does making an actor whisper and move slowly suddenly make them infinitely creepier? And why is Frank a doomsday bunny? Shouldn’t the end times be heralded in by something less fluffy? I don’t know but it works! And so Frank the Bunny will always have a special place in my twisted little mind.

OK Frank the Bunny is perfect for a teenage mind but surely adults can’t be creeped out by bunnies, right? Right? Well I don’t know… I think there’s still plenty out there to unsettle the best among us. My personal favorite are the rabbits from David Lynch’s play Rabbits. Just imagine a whole family of depressed anthropomorphic bunnies languishing around a stage caterwauling and wailing, making strange gestures, and creeping around to the a soundtrack I am fairly certain was created just to annoy the neighbors. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! It means you’ve broken from reality. Stop eating that jimsonweed and get back to work! Actually I am not the only one that couldn’t get through this one. It’s literally being used by scientists to make human subjects uncomfortable. I am not sure if that’s scientific method or torture but I wouldn’t be surprised if any of the fine people participating in that experiment came home with a raging case of leporiphobia, otherwise known as a pathological fear of bunnies. You knew I had to mention that at some point in this article…

Scary bunnies has become such a phenomenon that you can now find parody versions scattered throughout all sorts of media. In fact if you want to make yourself question humanity just go to Etsy and type in “scary bunny.” The smorgasbord of lapine horror you’ll find there promises to be truly overwhelming. And of course we wouldn’t be happy if we didn’t continue to see terrifying bunnies in children’s movies. Squint from Ice Age: Continental Drift is probably the most perfect parody I have ever seen. Bouncing to life with a face even a mother couldn’t love this psychotic fuzzy pirate fits right in! And I can’t really wrap up this article without mentioning Něco z Alenky, released in English under the title Alice, this 1988 film portrays the white rabbit as a stop motion taxidermied bunny who eats pine shavings to keep himself stuffed. It just gets weirder from there…

And if you happen to be an adult with a warped sense of humor I can’t help but recommend the Book of Bunny Suicides. Here hapless hares hope to end it all in only the most bizarre of ways. There’s not a drop of blood anywhere to be seen as their artist knows the comedic value of anticipation. This is the perfect coffee table book for the morbid bunny lover in all of us. And hey if you want to know when in history bunnies really did come close to taking over the world hop on over to my article Napolean and the Hares from Hell where you can read a true story about one of the world’s greatest military minds nearly eaten alive by a swarm of angry fluffballs.