The Velociraptors from Jurassic Park
All the villainesses I’ve featured in these posts so far have been reasonably complex figures, with equally complex motivation – but not these girls. The velociraptors of Jurassic Park (specifically Jurassic Park; I never saw the sequels and I’m definitely not counting the raptors who respond to Chris Pratt’s commands in Jurassic World) don’t want anything beyond hunting people down and eating them.
But the way in which they do so makes them the key antagonists of the film, and the lead-up to their first onscreen appearance is a masterclass in building a sense of dread. The opening sequence involves a team of men transferring an unseen creature from a crate into a walled facility, and the apprehension on their faces (along with the weapons they wield) speaks for itself. Before the scene is over, an unfortunate worker is pulled to his death by whatever’s in the crate – we don’t get the slightest glimpse; we can only hear its unholy shrieks and screams.
With just a fossilized claw, Alan Grant scares the crap out of an obnoxious kid by explaining the hunting techniques of the raptors (“you’re alive when they start to eat you”) and much later, he holds a baby one in his bare hands, realizing what it is: “raptors… you’ve bred raptors?” Right now it’s harmless, but already the audience is trying to imagine what this little thing of teeth and claws might look like when it’s fully grown.
They’re taken to the velociraptor enclosure, where the gamekeeper delivers an ominous backstory: “we bred eight originally, but when she came in, she took over the pride and killed all but two of the others. That one – when she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.” After explaining how the raptors were attacking different parts of the fence during feeding time, looking for weaknesses, he turns to them with a half-grim, half-admiring look on his face: “they remember.”
At this point we’re about twenty-five minutes in and we still haven’t actually seen them. It’s not until the last half-hour of the film in its entirety that we finally get a good look, after they’ve taken out the gamekeeper (arguably the most capable human on the island) by tricking him into looking one way while they sneak up on him from another – just as Alan described at the start of the film.
Now that they’re Unseen No More, the hits just keep on coming. Nobody can forget Ellie escaping the maintenance shed by the skin of her teeth, or the terrifying cat-and-mouse hunt in the kitchen, or Lex falling through the roof and nearly getting her leg chomped, or my personal favourite: Ellie stating “[we’re safe] unless they’ve learned how to open doors.” The film then cuts immediately to a raptor doing exactly that.
Whereas the other dinosaurs are portrayed as animals, who simply act according to their natures, the velociraptors veer a little closer to genuine, deliberate monsters. There is a malevolence in their design that sets them apart from the rest of the creatures in the park, and their combination of intelligence, speed and cooperative hunting tactics makes them absolutely terrifying. Like the gamekeeper says, there’s something in the way they look at their prey that taps into our primal fear of being hunted, cornered – of there being no escape from a bloody and violent death.
It's no surprise that they ended up being the go-to villain for the franchise, even as their impact is diluted with each passing sequel. But in Jurassic Park at least, the threat they pose looms large over the entire film, and it’s not for nothing their leader has since been immortalized as “clever girl.”
