Weird Movies About Rabbits for Easter

It’s that time of year when spring breakers, mother nature and religious observers celebrate renewal, rebirth and general fecundity under the paw of springtime’s lop-eared mascot: rabbits, the Duggars of the animal kingdom. While the season’s eggy pastels and spiritual traditions aren’t exactly glamorous big screen material, its furry totem has spawned a litter of offbeat, brilliant, touching and terrifying rabbit-themed reels, from Donnie Darko to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Watership Down. Bunnies have hopped out of Disney storyboards to become complicated narrative figures in B-horror movies, psychological thrillers and arthouse films– celebrate the season with the weird, wild and unforgettable stories they inspired.

Harvey – Jimmy Stewart makes alcoholic hallucinosis look endearing as Elwood P. Dowd, a wealthy eccentric and amiable souse who befriends a giant invisible rabbit named Harvey. The relationship puzzles and frustrates his family, who try to commit Elwood so they can take his house. But when those around him have their own encounters with Harvey, they begin to come around to Elwood’s droll and open-hearted outlook on life. The 1950 movie adaptation of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winning comedy play is vague about Harvey’s actual existence, but the six-foot rabbit (along with Stewart’s bittersweet performance as the battered but still credulous Dowd) anchors deeper themes of addiction, rationality and delusion, mysticism and faith.

Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! –  Mentally and physically disabled teen Nicholas is obsessed with Easter, his favorite holiday. But when his mom’s lowlife boyfriend brings his sleazy friends over to celebrate Christ’s resurrection by tormenting Nicholas and his pet rabbit, a madman wearing a bunny mask shows up to unleash a night of gory vengeance. With the horror genre claiming the most rabbit movies by far, this cult exploitation slasher from director Chad Ferrin (Someone’s Knocking at the Door) was so low budget that he scripted the house it was filmed in as “under construction” so it could be covered in splatter-resistant plastic tarps.. Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! holds a sharply polarized Rotten Tomatoes ratio of 100% (critic) to 6% (audience), teasing trashtastic carnage that’s not for the faint of heart.

Mr. Horatio Knibbles – Few things are more terrifying than British children’s programming in the 60s and 70s (Noseybonk and Mr. Chuckle Teeth, Worzel Gummidge et al.), and the nightmare-fuel rabbit at the center of this 1971 “family comedy” makes Donnie Darko’s Frank look like a Walmart greeter. When bullied child Mary feels disappointed that she didn’t get a rabbit for her birthday, an imaginary six-foot coney in a waistcoat and top hat who talks like Anthony Hopkins appears to help her pull pranks on her haters– with a nod to the wardrobe department for transforming a gentle prey animal into a grotesque lazy-eyed monster who watches little girls.

While its uncertain whether Knibbles is a figment of Mary’s loneliness, a Pan-like lord of mischief, or a straight up predator allegory, kids across the UK developed PTSD from his haunting visage– along with the film’s disturbing sound editing, fever-dream cinematography and grim dialogue, like one scene in which Mary prepares her playmates to set eyes upon ghastly lagomorph Hannibal Lecter:

Mary: Now, does everyone solemnly swear they really and truly love rabbits?

Children: We do!

Mary: And do you all solemnly swear you won’t scream?

Children: We do!

The Adventures of the American Rabbit – This 1986 animated cult classic carries many of the decade’s pop culture hallmarks: rollerskating, voice stars Lorenzo Music (the voice of Garfield and Smothers Brothers/Bob Newhart Show writer), the legendary Hal Smith (DuckTales, Scooby Doo, The Smurfs) and Barry Gordon (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and an American/Japanese creative partnership as the island nation began to interact with the west via technology, video games, martial arts and film. Gordon voices Rob Rabbit, a dorky bunny who discovers that he can turn into a star-spangled superhero wearing golden roller skates. When a motorcycle gang of jackals destroys the piano bar he works at and goes on a rampage to take over New York City, Rob must break out his secret superpowers and traverse American landmarks like the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls and the Statue of Liberty to defeat them.

The show’s creators based the American/Japanese co-production on pop artist Stewart Moskowitz’s poster character; many major Japanese companies adopted Moskowitz’s characters as mascots in the early 80s.

Rabbits – David Lynch calls his inscrutable 2002 horror web film series (which also appeared as part of his movie Inland Empire) a sitcom, but its surrealist tones hint at a fearful and unsettling mystery with all the classic Lynchian hallmarks of a slowly unfolding panic attack. Eight short episodes follow the strange co-existence and disjointed conversations between three humanoid rabbits (Scott Coffey, Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts), set to an ominous keyboard progression and interrupted by a random laugh track. The uncanny events unfold entirely within a dim box set representing an art deco living room, its uneasy atmosphere building through a series of strange events like a burning hole appearing on the wall, incantations of poetry, and a strange knock at the door from (perhaps?) “the man in the green suit.” The Beatrix Potter-like animals clash with Lynch’s liminal vibe and disordered elements–prepare to feel bored, nostalgic and creeped out all at once.

Rabbit á la Berlin – The shrewd, poignant 2010 Oscar-nominated story tells the true history of the Berlin Wall  through the eyes of thousands of wild rabbits who lived in its Death Zone. Thriving in the enclosed, grassy no man’s land between the walls for 28 years, the rabbits found themselves displaced with the fall of the Wall in 1989, which had catastrophic consequences for their safety. The political allegory offers a “nature documentary about socialism” that studies a totalitarian system and makes sense of Eastern Europe’s social history from the rabbits’ unique perspective, as Germany faced a challenging reunification and adjusted to a strange new post-communist world. “For people living for 40 or 50 years in the communist system, they had a kind of security,” says director Bartek Konopka. “Then they lost it and had to start a new life.” The bright-eyed, fragile creatures serve as heart-yanking symbols of the people caught in the middle of the era’s political turmoil.

Night of the Lepus – Fears about animal overpopulation threatening farming interests culminated in 1972 in a ridiculously campy horror film that now has cult status for its notoriously bad production. Based on Russell Braddon’s sci-fi novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit, an Arizona rancher fights a rabbit infestation with chemicals—and when they mutate into bloodthirsty giants with a taste for human flesh, all hopping hell breaks loose. Shot in Arizona, the film used domestic rabbits filmed against miniature models and actors dressed in rabbit costumes for the attack scenes. With its director, writer, producer and character actors (Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley, Janet Leigh) all bringing Western film backgrounds, Night of the Lepus was doomed. Critics widely panned it for its ridiculous premise, wooden acting, roaring bunnies and dismal special effects, but the film’s biggest failure is its inability to make the rabbits seem scary.

The Nasty Rabbit – The 1964 hammy spy comedy starring Arch Hall Jr. and Sr. (Eegah) brings Soviet spies to the U.S. to release a disease-carrying rabbit in an adorable act of biological warfare. The bunny, transported to a dude ranch on the continental divide to unleash pestilence on the dirty capitalists, becomes the target of an international ring of counterespionage agents trying to get their hands on a plague that could wipe out the planet. Originally titled Spies-A-Go-Go, the low-budget Dr. Strangelove (released the same year) is light on political satire and heavy on slapstick farce, capitalizing on the era’s spy craze and a growing rock n roll scene. Walking ethnic stereotypes bumble around and clobber each other, the rabbit offers MST3K-style commentary in a chipmunk voice, and a young Richard Kiel and John Waters star Liz Renay appear in the delirious camp masterpiece.

Here Comes Peter Cottontail – Vincent Price voices the evil bunny and Easter-grinch January Q Irontail in the 1971 stop-motion Rankin and Bass television special. Peter is a young bunny who makes candy and decorates Easter Eggs in April Valley, the holiday analogue to the South Pole. But when Peter becomes the next leader of April Valley, the malicious and reclusive Irontail plots to take Peter’s job. His goal? To ruin Easter for children as revenge after a kid accidentally rollerskated over his tail, forcing him to wear a prosthetic tail made of iron. With the help of a time machine, Peter embarks on a holiday-hopping quest to unload his eggs and claim the Easter throne while Irontail tries to thwart him along the way (while riding his pet bat Montresor named after a character in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and unleashing Price’s signature chilling laugh). Danny Kaye, Joan Gardner, Paul Frees and Casey Kasem also lend their voices to the darkly eccentric retro tale.