The giant squid's elusive nature and fearsome appearance have long made it a popular subject of legends and folk tales. Its popularity as an image continues today with references and depictions in literature, film, television, and video games. Often, the giant squid is represented as being in dramatic, evenly matched combat with a sperm whale. However, this powerful image is no longer considered accurate given the evidence that exists for a simpler predator-prey relationship between whale and squid, with the whale being the predator and the squid the prey, though sucker scars have been seen on sperm whale skin.
Books and comics
(Alphabetical by author)
In Book 27 (The Exposed) of K. A. Applegate's Animorphs book series, Rachel and Tobias morph into sperm whales to find a giant squid, with the rest of the group morphing into squid to find the Pemalite ship hidden on the ocean floor. Peter Benchley's novel Beast and its television film adaptation feature a giant squid terrorizing Bermuda. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown includes the body of a giant squid kept in storage at the Smithsonian Institution. Arthur C. Clarke used giant squid in many of his works. In The Deep Range, a squid of exaggerated size is captured and exhibited. In the short story "Big Game Hunt", a device capable of controlling the behavior of invertebrates is used in an attempt to capture and film a giant squid. In Childhood's End, one of the characters stows away on an alien spacecraft by hiding inside a model of a giant squid battling a whale. A giant squid is a key player in Michael Crichton's novel Sphere, as well as in the film version. James Bond fights a giant squid in Ian Fleming's book, Dr. No. The scene is absent from the film adaption. A giant squid is mentioned in the book Andrew Lost in the Deep by J. C. Greenburg. The 2023 novel Whalefall by Daniel Kraus details a teenage scuba diver who encounters a giant squid being chased by a large bull sperm whale while diving off the coast of Monterey, California. The diver is ensnared by the squid and swallowed along with it when the whale appears to capture its prey. The squid is explicitly identified as Architeuthis, but is inaccurately described as displaying prominent bioluminescence. H. P. Lovecraft frequently used tentacled, squid-like monsters in his Cthulhu Mythos, most notably the titular entity, Cthulhu. The giant squid specimen currently housed in the Darwin Centre at London's Natural History Museum forms a key role in the plot of fantasy author China Miéville's 2010 novel Kraken. Chapter 59 ("Squid") of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick details the Pequod's encounter with a giant squid. The creature used by Ozymandias in Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Jim Higgins' comic book series Watchmen resembles the likeness of a squid. James Rollins' The Judas Strain (2007), the fourth book in his SIGMA Force series, provides detailed descriptions of sightings of schools of giant predatory attacks by Taningia danae squid in the waters off the island of Pusat and graphic descriptions of collaborative squid attacks on several characters. A giant squid dwells in the lake at Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books. It seems to be friendly towards the students, sometimes acting as a lifeguard when they swim or fall in the lake. A giant squid acts as a minor character in Charles Sheffield's novel The Web Between the Worlds. Various giant squids are mentioned in Tentacles, the sequel to Cryptid Hunters, by Roland Smith. The character E-Wolf is hired to capture a giant squid for the Northwest Zoo and Aquarium. Smith portrays the squids as pack hunters, when in real life they are solitary. In J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the Fellowship battle the Watcher in the Water, a monster that lurks in the waters of the Sirannon, beneath the western walls of Moria. Although Tolkien's description is vague, the creature is frequently depicted as a giant squid or kraken with varying, often exaggerated, numbers of tentacles, such as in the 2001 film. The River Moth, which flows through author Jeff VanderMeer's fictional city of Ambergris, is inhabited by giant squid. The city is named after ambergris, a substance secreted by sperm whales. Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, fights a band of seven giant squid in Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. In the 1954 film adaptation, there is only one giant squid, which was portrayed by a large prop and served as the film's antagonist. In H. G. Wells' "The Sea Raiders", a voracious swarm of giant squids, of the fictional species Haploteuthis ferox, slay a total of eleven people in boats and attack a man on shore. John Wyndham's book The Kraken Wakes depicts an invasion of squid-like aliens.
Film and television
Film (Chronological)
John Wayne and Ray Milland battle a giant squid in the climax to Cecil B. DeMille's 1943 film Reap the Wild Wind. Walt Disney's 1954 adaptation, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, features a scene where Capt. Nemo's Nautilus is attacked by a giant squid. A giant squid appears in the film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). In the film The Pagemaster (1994), Adventure, searching for a book to help Richard overcome his fear of heights, picks out Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and turns to a page with an illustration of a giant squid. Immediately, water gushes out of the book and the giant squid's tentacles emerge as Richard and Adventure ascend a ladder to escape. The Beast (1996), a film with William Petersen and Karen Sillas and based on Peter Benchley's novel, is about a giant squid terrorizing a Pacific Northwest island. At the end of the film Rugrats Go Wild (2003), Nigel Thornberry and the Rugrats see a live giant squid. The title of the film The Squid and the Whale (2005) refers to the popularly imagined combat between sperm whale and giant squid, specifically as depicted in the diorama at New York's American Museum of Natural History, which the main character visits in the final scene of the film. A blue, bioluminescent giant squid makes an appearance in the 2016 Disney/Pixar animated film, Finding Dory as an antagonist. A giant squid Titan, given the codename "MireSquid", appears in the 2017 science fiction kaiju film Kong: Skull Island, where the titular monster, Kong, subdues and eats one.
Television (Alphabetical by series)
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