I think Samuel L. Jackson's gonna have a coronary.
"Oooo, yeah!" Pinkie Pie chimed in, bouncing between the two ponies. "There could be basilisks and bunyips and balrogs and even world snakes!"
"What's a world snake?" Apple Bloom asked.
The pink earth pony gave her an enormous smile. "It's a snake as big as the world, silly!"
"What's a world snake?" Apple Bloom asked.
The pink earth pony gave her an enormous smile. "It's a snake as big as the world, silly!"
— It's A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door, Chapter 3
These snakes are not just big; they're absolutely enormous.
Swallowing a human whole is easy for them. In fact, it may not even be enough to satiate them. They may be able to swallow buildings. Or celestial bodies. Or the world. They could have fangs longer than trees and venom that can kill the gods. Or they could just be ordinary snakes that are a little overgrown. Or a lot.
This is a very common motif in mythology, as there are multiple mythical snakes around the world that reach incredible sizes. Giant snakes can also be used in other settings and genres, such as Horror or Science Fiction.
In order to qualify for this trope, the snake in question must be at least bigger than the Reticulated Python, the world's current largest snake species, that can grow up to 7.62 meters in length (that's 25 feet), and be big enough to swallow a person whole.
Sub-Trope to Dire Beast. Not to be confused with Basilisk and Cockatrice and Chinese Dragons, but may overlap with Sea Serpents. See also Snakes Are Sinister. Often the result of Scaled Up. For other unreasonably large animals, compare Mega Neko, Giant Spider, Giant Crab and Big Creepy-Crawlies. For other examples of giant reptiles, see Colossal Croc and Turtle Island.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Berserk: The Snake Baron's Apostle form is a giant cobra with humanoid arms and legs, which can be seen wreaking havoc across Midland during the Golden Age Arc.
- Call Girl in Another World: Demonic Beast Yarma Labith's true form is that of a giant snake, though he is capable of taking on a more humanoid form at will.
- Digimon Tamers: The second Deva that appears in this series is Sandiramon, a Holy Beast Digimon that represents the Snake in the Eastern Zodiac and takes the form of a giant, white and purple cobra, which terrorizes the subway in the real world. However, despite being a Perfect-level Digimon like all the other Deva, Sandiramon is surprisingly weak and is killed off thanks to the team effort of the three Adult-level Partner Digimon, something they would not be able to replicate against Indaramon (the Horse) and Vikaralamon (the Boar).
- Dragon Goes House-Hunting: It is revealed that Dearia used to apprentice under the Great Serpent, Jormungandr, who is the single largest creature ever introduced in the series. Dearia was barely the size of one of his master's scales.
- Naruto:
- The Kyodaija are a race of giant, sentient snakes that live within the Ryuchi Cave sage region and can be summoned by shinobi that have made a contract with them, the most famous of which being one of the series Big Bads, Orochimaru.
- During the Chunin Exams Arc, giant snakes indigenous to the Forty-Fourth Training Ground are encountered as an obstacle, Naruto in particular being eaten by one of them.
- One Piece: The Skypiea Arc has the Master of the Skies, a truly colossal blue anaconda with strands of fur on the sides of its body, whiskers and highly venomous fangs, who frequently chases after the heroes and at one point swallows Luffy whole (who believes he's stumbled in a weird cavern). The saga's flashback reveals that the people of Shandra worshipped a similar giant snake as their deity and we find out that the current giant anaconda was actually the young child of the former god (making her over 400 years old).
- Panzer World Galient: In episode 2, the chamber where Galient is kept is guarded by a giant serpent, who constricts Prince Joldy in an attempt to swallow him alive until Asbeth arrives and hacks the serpent's head off.
- The Seven Deadly Sins: While Melascula "the Faith" normally appears as a human-like woman, her true form is that of a giant white cobra, having been a normal snake that was turned into a giant demon when she found herself in the Demon Realm.
- Toriko: Mother Snake is one of the dreaded Eight Kings, the eight strongest animals in the world: it is a colossal pink snake long enough to circle a planet the size of Jupiter, so big that most of the time you can see its colossal body crossing the world. It's also so fast that he can makes perpetual hurricanes where he dash through an area, eat prey so fast they don't even realize they've been eaten and prey on space-faring food beyond the atmosphere. The final page of the manga shows the even bigger Space Taipan, a serpent so big it can swallow planets whole as part of its normal diet and its Capture Level makes even the hardest ingredients on earth puny by comparison.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Dartz's trump card is the "Divine Serpent Geh,"
which takes the form of an immeasurably large snake, although most of its body is concealed by the dark vortex it emerges from. And of course his deity, the God of Orichalcos (dubbed the "Great Leviathan"), which is by far the largest monster in the anime.
Comic Books
- Archie Comics: The Jaguar's origin story has him and his co-workers getting attacked by a giant, dinosaur-like serpent.
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In The Magnificent Seven (Minus Four) Caballeros!, the Cabelleros run into a gigantic anaconda that looks more like a titanoboa. After their raft is destroyed, Panchito throws a lasso around its neck so they can ride back to civilization on the back of the giant snake.
- Nnewts: The Snake Lord is a demonic serpent who is already larger than most of the characters, though his supernatural powers enable him to grow even larger at times. He grows to Kaiju size when he attempts to kill Herk in the first book, and later becomes even bigger when he goes One-Winged Angel as a constellation in the third book.
- Thor (Marvel Comics): Jormungand, also known as the Midgard Serpent and the World Serpent, is an antagonist in the comics. Like the myths the comic is based on, in most comics he is a gigantic snake, though other comics depict him as a dragon.
- Usagi Yojimbo: Lord Hibiki is a giant Snake who is second-in-command to the Big Bad, Lord Hikiji. So large that he can defend himself by grabbing attackers in his mouth and just toss them away.
Fan Works
- Blue (Silenta-Atestanto): A huge, monstrous snake attacks the main cast at one point. It captures Lailah with the intention of devouring her soon after. Unfortunately, it bites off more than it can chew...
- It's A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door: The final challenge faced by the heroes is a giant four-eyed serpent called a World Snake. It's stated the thing's eyes are the size of an Ursa Major, its teeth the size of Ponyville, its scales the size of an Ursa Minor, and its head the size of the area between Ponyville and Canterlot.
- Shadows over Meridian: Jade summons several giant serpents of the Shadow Realm to be used as flying steeds by herself and Phobos' soldiers. She calls her mount Onyx, while Tyrian (who has a knack for getting almost eaten by one of the serpents) names as Shadow Striker the one he claims as his own.
- Wandwood: Umbridge arranges to have a juvenile Jormungand (a creature based on Jörmungandr from Norse Mythology) released into the Black Lake during the second task of the Triwizard Tournament as sabotage. The adolescent serpent is 30 meters in length and it's mentioned that adults can be over 300 meters.
Films — Animation
- Aladdin (1992, Disney): In the climax, Jafar turns himself into a massive cobra.
Aladdin: Are you too afraid to fight me yourself, you cowardly snake?
Jafar: A snake, am I? Perhaps you would like to see how sssssssnakelike I can be! - The Mighty Kong: Kong fights a giant snake in one scene.
- Rango has Rattlesnake Jake, who probably wouldn't be that big to a human, but is enormous compared to the smaller animal characters.
- White Snake (2019): Blanca takes on the form of an enormous white snake after absorbing a massive amount of energy.
- In an early draft for The Transformers: The Movie, there was an Autobot named Rails who could change from a train to a gigantic robot serpent, though he was ultimately cut from the film. Rails would later be canonized in the Transformers Roleplaying Game.
Films — Live-Action
- Anaconda:
- While the snake from Anaconda (1997) is a downplayed example, being a fully-grown anaconda native to the Amazon big enough to pose a threat to humans, the snakes present in Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid and onward are more straightforward examples; the second movie has snakes that have been made massive from exposure to the blood orchid and through scientific experimentation with black orchids in the third and fourth movie.
- Anaconda (2025): Subverted when the film crew use a real life, normal-sized, and actually quite docile anaconda as the threat in their monster movie, but Double Subverted when they stumble into the hunting territory of a mythological, giant anaconda which appears to be even larger than the one in the original film, closer to the ones in Blood Orchid that grew so large because of an Applied Phlebotinum.
- Atragon: While absent in the final product, original drafts depicts the film's main Kaiju, Manda, to be a gigantic serpentine creature, with the production team calling it "Mammoth Snake". An old storyboard sees the then snake-like Manda constricting the Atragon with it's massive coils, but the monster was changed to an oriental dragon in the finished film.
- The Battle Wizard: Prince Tuan Yu must learn the skill of the Yin Yang Finger by drinking the blood of the Red Sacred Snake. The Prince eventually finds the Red Sacred Snake almost by mistake, falling into its mighty coils. The Prince still manage to win by biting, successfully drinking the Snake's blood in the process.
- The Cabin in the Woods: One of the monsters released in the Purge scene is a giant cobra that is seen eating a facility employee whole.
- Calamity Of Snakes revolves around an apartment full of people being stalked by hordes and hordes of serpents, the largest being a man-devouring gigantic boa.
- Conan the Barbarian (1982): Thulsa Doom has a giant python at the bottom of the pit of his Tower of Serpents. It keeps a treasure, a big gemstone called the Eye of the Serpent, and young virgins are sacrificed to it. It tries to attack Conan and ends up killed by him and Subotai (Conan impales its jaws with his sword, then Subotai shoots arrows in its head, then the heroes behead it for good measure).
- D-War: The Imoogi are a mythical race of gigantic snakes in Korean Mythology that surface every 500 years, the most virtuous of them all evolving into dragons. The main antagonist, Buraki, is a two-hundred-foot-long cobra who seeks to usurp the good Imoogi's ascension for himself.
- Gods of Egypt: Two fire-breathing giant cobras appear during one desert chase scene, pursuing Bek and Horus.
- The Jungle Book (2016): Kaa the Python is depicted as being so massive that her body is draped all over the tree, and she could easily fit Mowgli in her mouth, which is fitting, seeing as she tries to eat him before Baloo intervenes.
- King Cobra (1999): Downplayed. Seth was created from the genes of a king cobra and a diamondback rattlesnake, both of which are medium-sized snakes. After traveling the countryside and feeding on woodland animals for a few years, it's grown enormously and appears to be somewhat larger than a reticulated python.
- King Kong: Giant snakes are recurring foes for Kong, second only to the T. Rexpy:
- King Kong Escapes: Kong defends the human protagonists from a giant sea snake as they're trying to leave Mondo Island.
- King Kong (1976): Taking the place of the Meat-Eater dinosaur and Elasmosaurus he fought in the original, Kong has a tussle with an enormous boa constrictor.
- Godzilla vs. Kong: As a deliberate Mythology Gag, Kong again defends the humans from a serpent monster (known as Warbat), except now there are two of them and they can fly.
- King of Snake: The featured monster, like what the title implies, is a giant serpent. In this case, it grows Kaiju-sized as result of a botched experiment and was initially a Gentle Giant to its owner, a little girl, only going on a rampage because it was attacked first.
- The Lair of the White Worm: Dionan, the titular Worm, is a giant snake that slumbers in the Earth, portrayed as a Lovecraftian god that was once worshipped by the Pagans who lived in Derbyshire before Christianity came to England. Its only surviving worshipper is herself an immortal, vampiric snake woman who can disguise herself as a human, implied to be a result of her faith.
- Lockjaw: Rise of the Kulev Serpent: Lockjaw is a giant snake with the head of an alligator. As a magical spirit of vengeance, it will not stop once it has been summoned until it has killed those it was summoned to punish.
- Mowgli: Kaa, already an overly large snake in most adaptations of The Jungle Book, is reimagined in this movie as a colossal python.
- Snake (2018) is an unofficial Foreign Remake of Anaconda, above. The plot revolves around an expedition to an uncharted island to recover a miracle "fruit of life" capable of curing all diseases, but the fruit is guarded by the island's giant serpents, which the crew didn't find out until late into the film. This film actually spawns a trilogy, with the third movie having a serpent large enough to battle a dozen T. Rexpy-dinosaurs all at once.
- The Snake Prince ends with the titular Prince revealing his true form in the final scene after being exposed to Sulphur smoke — as a giant serpentine beast. This is one of the few examples where the serpent is on the side of good, and was merely a victim of Fantastic Racism from the ungrateful villagers who feared the good prince.
- The Sorcerer and the White Snake, an adaptation of the Chinese fable The Legend of the White Snake, probably contains the largest depiction of the titular character. When Bai Su-su reveals her monstrous, serpentine form and tries to chomp down Fahai, the latter needs to use himself to perform a Palate Propping and hold her jaws open.
- There are three SyFy Channel Original Movies about giant snake monsters: Boa (of prehistoric origin), Python (of genetically engineered origin), and the inevitable crossover Boa vs. Python.
Literature
- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair: The Green Witch turns herself into a giant snake to fight Rilian. Unfortunately for her, while Rilian Wouldn't Hit a Girl, he has no such qualms about hitting a snake.
- The Cost of Night: The serpent is big enough to swallow Houniman the horse in one breath.
- Doona: Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey has the human colonists on Doona being threatened by a migration of snakes big enough to kill and eat a horse.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs put giant snakes in several of his novels:
- Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle: A python encountered by Tarzan of the Apes is at least twenty feet long.
- Tarzan at the Earth's Core mentions Pellucidarian snakes large enough to swallow a hadrosaurnote whole.
- Harry Potter:
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The basilisk is a snake at least a hundred feet long, with poison so powerful it can kill if it gets on a person's skin.
- Downplayed with Nagini, Voldemort's pet snake who first appears in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. She is a very large snake, to be sure, but she's smaller than the basilisk.
- Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Waechter offers Nigel a job by mentioning that the NQB is having trouble with a giant snake rampaging through Brazil that is supposedly destined to devour the world, all of their more conventional weaponry doing nothing to slow it down.
- InCryptid: Several dimensions are mentioned as being home to various giant serpents or snake-shaped beings, many of which are the basis for snake cults. The one in Discount Armageddon is based around a dragon, but the one in Chaos Choreography actually manages to summon a giant interdimensional snake...on live TV.
- Journey to the West: The Red-Scaled Python is a monster encountered by the heroes: at night he appears as a colossal, non-descript being hidden by a cloud of red mist, with luminous eyes and his tongue acting as a pair of spears. At daybreak it turns back into a giant red snake, which dies after swallowing Sun Wukong and having the latter wreak havoc in his stomach. Notably, he's one of the few monsters being merely animalistic.
- The Kane Chronicles: Apophis, the Egyptian god of chaos, is a reality-warping Animalistic Abomination that takes the form of a cobra.
- "Pigeons from Hell (1938)": The loa Damballah also is referred to by his titles as the Big Serpent and the Snake God. Regular snakes that are in his service are nicknamed "little brothers".
- Sinbad the Sailor: Sinbad has encountered giant serpents in more than one of his adventures, notably in his third voyage in an Out of the Frying Pan moment — escaping from an island of man-eating giants, into an islet inhabited by a monstrous snake.
- Magic: The Gathering: In Time Streams, Kerrick's wizards summon a gigantic python and send it after Barrin. It swallows two of his compatriots whole and chases him up a tree before he summons a drake to kill it.
- Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness: It's revealed at the end of the Giving Ceremony that the Mountain King is a giant water serpent from Noyook.
- Redwall: As the series takes place in a Mouse World inhabited mainly by small woodland creatures such as mice, weasels, and moles, snakes, usually adders, are portrayed as giant monsters, essentially the world's equivalent of dragons.
- Spellsinger has a couple:
- A L'borean riding snake is more than forty feet long, and thick enough for up to four people to ride on it as if on a horse, with saddles and all.
- In The Time of the Transference, Jon-Tom, Mudge the otter, and their companions encounter a legless dragon at least five feet in diameter and well over a hundred feet long, which describes itself as "to a footed dragon as snakes are to lizards."
- Warrior Cats: A figure in the Clans' mythology is a giant snake called Mouthclaw, described as being big enough to swallow a lion whole, with deadly venomous fangs. The story claims that adders exist because she tricked an ancient LionClan warrior: in return for sparing her life, he demanded she shrink to the length of his tail... but he didn't specify that she couldn't multiply into a thousand snakes as she did so.
- In the Conan the Barbarian story The Scarlet Citadel, while imprisoned in Tsotha-lanti's dungeons, Conan encounters Satha, "the Old One, chiefest of Tsotha-lanti's pets" as described by fellow prisoner Pelias. Eighty feet long, with a triangular head the size of a horse and colorless venom strong enough that it burns "like a white-hot dagger" on contact with the skin. This snake is the greatest danger in the pits and was the method Tostha intended Conan to die from, which he only avoided by managing to stay motionless when Satha was near, even while a drop of venom burns him. He also inadvertently helps Conan escape by killing the former chief-turned-slave who came to kill him and letting Conan take his keys. As one of the "scaled people" he can see more than mortal eyes, so when seeing Pelias's "naked soul" he turns and flees.
Live-Action TV
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster of the Week in "Band Candy" is Lurconis, a large, snake-like demon that eats babies.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: In the episode "The King of Thieves", Hercules and Autolycus find an abandoned city - and its resident, a very hungry snake well over fifty feet long, and much faster and more aggressive than any snake that size should be.
Mythology & Religion
- Aboriginal Australian Myths: The Rainbow Serpent is an umbrella term for several snake divinities in these myths, most of which traditionally having little to do with each other. Some like Wungurr (from the "Wandjina-Wungurr" cultural complex in Kimberley) are essentially abstract Life Energy, while the Gamilaraay Garriya is simply a water monster. Examples of more concrete deities include Wonambi from the Wiradjuri and Wagyl from the Noongar, which are closer to what people typically envision the rainbow serpent to be (a Fertility God associated with water with intersex features responsible for shaping the landscape).
- Aztec Mythology: Quetzalcoatl is a rare benevolent example, being one of the most powerful deities in the pantheon whose most common form is a giant flying serpent with feathers. Contrary to popular depictions, he is almost never depicted as a winged serpent but as a snake covered in feathers.
- Brazilian Folklore: Boiúna is a monster described as an unusually large black snake. It regularly attacks fishermen, turning over their boats and swallowing them whole.
- Classical Mythology: As a general rule, Greek dragons were depicted in art as enormous snake with little additional embellishmet — traits such as legs, wings, and pseudo-mammalian heads mostly originate from Medieval art.
- Egyptian Mythology: Apep (or Apophis as the Greeks called him) is a giant, malevolent snake that is said to be the physical embodiment of darkness and chaos, whom the sun god Ra would do battle with during his journeys across the underworld every night. Depending on the story, it was said he lurked beneath the horizon, forbidden to enter the mortal kingdoms, and somewhere in a western mountain called Bakhu, where he lay in wait for Ra before the dawn, or after the sun set. Because of the many possibilities of his location, he eventually earned the epithet World-Encircler, and as a perpetual resident of the underworld (since Ra trapped him there), his roars would shake the underworld, while his movements caused earthquakes. There are also several other gigantic divine snakes that are actually heroic and assist Ra and the other gods at battling Apep, such as the guardian serpent Mehen, who protects Ra, his allies, and the solar barque from Apophis and other dangers that lurk in the Duat.
- Hindu Mythology has several, but perhaps the most famous is Ananta Shesha, a giant, multi-headed cobra who serves as the couch of Vishnu the Preserver. He is said to have anywhere from five to five million heads, each one constantly sings the glories of Vishnu from each of his mouths, while the entirity of all creation is carried on his hoods.
- Native American Mythology has many giant serpents within them, often being enemies to Giant Flyers like the Thunderbird. In eastern tribes' cases they are horned, being called the umbrella term Horned Serpent, like the Uktena from Cherokee Mythology which had crystals on its head.
- Norse Mythology: Jörmungandr the World Serpent is a Beast of the Apocalypse and a spawn of the Trickster God Loki and his mistress the jotunn Angrboda, banished by Odin to sleep in Midgard's ocean for fear of what it could do. It is said that it was large enough to wrap around the world and grasp its own tail.
- Philippine Mythology: The Bakunawa is an enormous Sea Serpent with a nasty habit of trying to swallow the moon. It is often used as an explanation for why lunar eclipses happen.
- Korean Mythology: The Imugi or Imoogi are lesser dragons that resemble giant serpents, and can ascend into full-fledged dragons in a number of ways, such as claiming a Yeouiju that fell form the Heavens. They are usually benevolent and often inhabit bodies of water like the ocean, lakes, or rivers.
- Japanese Mythology:
- Uwabami (lit. Gluttonous Eater in older times, currently python) were humongous snakes who were said to be able to devour horses whole in one gulp, as well as adore sakè. Jashin (serpent gods) were also pretty common, with the most famous one being the Kami of Mount Ibuki who was killed/killed Takeru Yamato, though only in certain versions of the myth (in others, the Kami is a massive white boar instead).
- Yamata no Orochi is often depicted as a colossal snake with 8 heads and 8 tails, though it is described as a dragon in the Kojiki and in other works.
- The Mapuche people of Chile have the legend of Trentren Vilu and Caicai Vilu (also known as Trengtreng or Tenten and Kaikai); they are gigantic serpent brothers who lived in the land and sea, respectively. One day, Caicai felt unappreciated by the humans and attacked them by sending a flood. Trentren helped the humans escape the rising water and then had a long battle with his brother, which shaped the land into Chile's current geography. Trentren won since Caicai didn't flood the entire world, although the sea level didn't lower. Now, years after their battle, Trentren manifests itself with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, while Caicai causes tsunamis and floods when it rolls around in its sleep.
- The Grootslang from South African folklore is described as a snake forty to fifty feet in length, sometimes with diamonds for eyes, that guards a fabulous treasure either in a cavern near the Orange River or in the pool of the King George Cataract at Aughrabies Falls. The legend is believed to have originated from exaggerated reports of local pythons, which can exceed twenty feet in length.
Music
- Taiwanese singer/popstar Jolin Tsai infamously rode a 30-meter animatronic snake during the climax of her January 2026 concert where she plays Medusa. It's the largest concert prop ever made in Taiwan.
Tabletop Games
- The Day After Ragnarok: After the Nazis are able to delay World War II just a bit longer, they use that to summon Jörmundgandr, whose head is stated to be 350 miles wide. While it was able to devour a good portion of America's naval fleet, it had yet to fully manifest within our dimension before the US Air Force flew the first atomic bomb on a plane straight into its eye. The consequences of its death, called Serpentfall, triggered a massive global cataclysm, with rain and tsunamis scattering its mutagenic blood and venom worldwide. Its body is now essentially a new mountain range reaching from Egypt, across Western Europe and to the British Isles and then looping around to cross North Africa.
- In Nomine: At its height, Jormungandr was so huge that it could coil around the entirety of the world. Currently, following centuries of recovery after being decapitated, it's only regrown to the point where its head is sixty yards long and it stands two stories tall when rearing up.
- The Transformers Roleplaying Game namedrops Rails, a large serpent-like Transformer, as an Autobot Titan.
Theme Parks
- Lost Island Theme Park has Matugani, the giant Emerald Serpent of Wisdom that serves as the basis of one of the park's roller coasters. Prowling the forests of the Yuta Earth Realm, she became a savior to the Yuta Tribe when trapped miners were able to find their way back to the surface through one of their burrowed tunnels, imparting a lesson onto them to better live in balance with nature.
Video Games
- In AereA there's the Accordion Snake, a cobra-like monster several times larger than you as a boss. Like every boss spawned by the Primordial Instruments, it's body is composed of musical tools, in this case an accordion whose bellows makes up parts of its midsection while having piano keys in place of frills.
- Act-Fancer: Cybernetick Hyper Weapon has Feurer, a titanic serpent bound to a statue who attacks either by biting you or breathing projectiles at you.
- Aliens: Armageddon has giant-sized versions of classic alien xenomorph breeds, thanks to Weyland-Yutani's experiments going horribly wrong. The alien chestbursters in particular are now humongous serpent-like monsters capable of swallowing unfortunate marines in a single gulp.
- Assassin's Creed Origins: One of the bosses is the God of the Dead, Apophis, who eats the hearts of the damned. It takes the form of a giant cobra and well... Its body is thicker than Bayek is tall. And its jaws are big enough to swallow ten of him. Just moving around is enough to cause earthquakes and destroy the temple in which the battle takes place.
- Banjo-Tooie has Ssslumber, a large green rattlesnake. He doesn't actually hurt Banjo and Kazooie, Banjo just needs to avoid waking him up by tiptoeing to get the Jiggy piece he's guarding, otherwise he temporarily swallows it if woken up.
- Battle Toads: Karnath is a giant villainous snake who appeared in the first game in the level named after him. He shows up as a boss in the Battle Toads arcade game.
- Big Karnak has a giant asp in the pyramid stage, who pursues after you as you climb up a pole. Said snake has it's head several times larger than your character, and it can also summon smaller versions of itself as backup, which is still pretty huge.
- Bladed Fury has a huge serpent-demon boss (simply called "The Serpent" in-game) who attacks you from underneath a lava pool, trying to chomp you from below in a single gulp.
- Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django: The Final Boss is the Eternal Piece Jormungandr, which threatens to destroy the world if unsealed. The arena takes place atop its coiled body, which seems to go on for eternity.
- Bot Gaiden: One of the bosses of the game is a gigantic robotic cobra called... Cobrabot.
- Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin: Subverted. When the player reaches the boss arena in the Nation of Fools, a giant snake erupts from the ground and menacingly stares at them. However, it soon takes on a feminine form, revealing itself to actually be the gorgon Medusa in disguise.
- Chaos Heat have it's first boss, a snake-mutant monstrosity sticking out of a hole with a splayed Flower Mouth that it uses to chomp you down in a single bite.
- Creatures of Ava: The Mahra'sik is a giant snake-like creature that makes its home in an abandoned Aleph base.
- The Crystal of Kings have its second boss being a river-dwelling serpent monster larger than the heroes, who can snatch the player in it's jaws and chomp their health away. Said serpent is only vulnerable in the head and upper neck, and players need to time their hits to damage and defeat it.
- Deadstorm Pirates: The Cavern Serpent is a gigantic snake monster fought in a Minecart Madness level, where it tries swallowing you, minecart and all.
- Deadly Rooms of Death: The so-called "Master Intellect" room on Level 7 of King Dugan's Dungeon contains a serpent 1500 feet long, and shortening by 5 feet per turn, forcing the player to complete certain tasks before it shrinks away to nothing.
- The Divide: Enemies Within: Two giant alien serpentine monsters appear, a blue giant snake-creature in the frost caves, and a green version later on that periodically sticks out from a wall full of holes to ambush you.
- Elden Ring: The God-Devouring Serpent was a gigantic snake worshipped as a god. The demigod Rykard willingly fed himself to it, gaining control of its body from the inside, transforming into a demonic-looking serpent-man hybrid.
- Final Fantasy VII: The Midgar Zolom (actually a "Blind Idiot" Translation of "Midgardsormr") is a snake that "can grow over 30 feet tall." Its huge silhouette can be seen as it stalks the player in the marsh and, once you see it in battle, you realize that the "30 feet tall" thing is just referring to the part of its body that it keeps elevated: It's actually closer to 120 feet long.
- Frogmonster: Two of the bosses:
- The Long Beast boss is a giant snake-monster, that you fight after jumping down a chasm. You reach a circular arena surrounded by walls, but then the Long Beast raises it's massive head, hisses at you, and you realize the arena's walls are actually parts of the boss' body. This giant snake can shoot Eye Beams for good measure.
- Djumbo, a hooded serpent of similar size, is a later boss fought using an identical template, but the area is far more cramped.
- God of War (PS4): Taking place in Norse mythology, one of the creatures Kratos and his son encounters is the World Serpent, Jormungand. He is decidedly less antagonistic here then normally portrayed.
- Guilty Gear Xrd: Answer, a ninja-secretary, summons a massive red snake for his instant kill that smacks around his opponent before it devours them whole. It then disperses into a trail of leaves.
- Hercs Adventure: The guardian of the Golden Fleece is a giant, multi-segmented serpent several times the size of the hero.
- Heroes of Jin Yong has giant serpents as not-too-common enemies in the underground caverns, where their sprite size is roughly larger than your human protagonist's. However they're weak enemies who die after a tiny amount of hits.
- Horizon Forbidden West: The Slitherfang is a giant robot snake with the ability to spit acid, constrict its opponents, and shoot lightning out of the rattle on its tail. Like some of their organic predecessors, they're primarily found in the desert.
- Jurassic World Alive: The Apex and Unique Raid bosses Hydra Boa and Troodoboa are large enough that even when coiled they stretch the entire width of the Jurassic World main thoroughfare and still look the giant sauropods like Brachiosaurus in the eye. Their playable versions while significantly smaller, are still the largest non-dinosaur creatures in the game, alongside the other snake hybrids Spinoconstrictor and Dilophoboa. Fittingly, this is due to them all sharing the same rig and animations made for the massive Titanoboa and Titanoboa Gen 2, the latter of which is needed to hybridize and level up Troodoboa, and the former needed to hybridize and level up both Dilophoboa and Spinoconstrictor.
- Jurassic World: The Game:
- Titanoboa, Dilophoboa, and Gigantophis easily rank among the game's largest Cenozoic creatures, as they are big enough to occupy at a significant portion of their entire enclosures, which are big enough to house the elephant-sized sloths Megatherium and Eremotherium, among other mammalian giants. Their feeding animations also come off as a little overkill, since the dodos used to feed all Cenozoic predators are small enough that the snakes can swallow them whole without effort or risk of injury.
- The snake boss Ouroboros could easily be considered a contender for the largest creature in the game, as it's arena is little more than a small canyon and it's still big enough to take up most of the space inside it.
- Krut: The Mythic Wings, a game based on Thai myths, have two different naga (giant serpentine monsters with draconic features from Thai folklore) as bosses. The first boss is a benevolent Green Naga who fights you in a Secret Test of Character, and later you battle the Black Naga in the seas who overlaps with being a Sea Serpent.
- The Last Faith have an area in the castle filled with gigantic serpents, each of them large enough to swallow your protagonist with a single gulp. You need to fight their heads, one at a time, to proceed.
- The Legend of Dragoon: the third major boss is Uroborus, a giant, seemingly eyeless snake who guards the exit of a seaside cavern the heroes have to cross to reach Basil. He can attack by either gnawing at the characters, spitting liquid poison or toxic gas and, as a gimmick, can position himself so that Lavitz and Dart's melee attacks cannot reach him, forcing them to rely on either Shana's arrows or spells.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess features Lanayru, one of the Spirits of Light whom took on the form of a serpent. Unlike most of the other examples, Lanayru is a benign spirit that warns Link of the dark power.
- Legends of Runeterra: The Celestial aptly titled "the Serpent" is a massive cobra made of stardust. Ironically it's actually one of the weakest celestial units stat-wise, but costs 0-mana and has the Challenger keyword which lets it handpick an early-game enemy to deal damage to in combat.
- Metal Slug Code: J: The guardian / boss of the pyramid's inner sanctum, Apep the great serpent, is a giant water-dwelling cobra who attacks players on floating islets from underneath. The player characters needs to jump from one platform to another to avoid getting devoured, while firing back at Apep. Once Apep's health is down to its last bar though it simply swims away rather than fighting players to the death.
- Monster Hunter: In a game full of giant monsters there are a few big snakes to go around.
- In the first game, a monster known as the Crypt Hydra, a mummified two-headed snake, was meant to be the final boss but was ultimately cut out.
- Monster Hunter Frontier introduces the Laviente and its variants (Violent Laviente and Starving Laviente), who are the second largest monsters fought in the franchise and resemble giant snakes with tusks and fins, though they're not classified as snakes proper, they do resemble the part.
- Monster Hunter 4/4 Ultimate: One of the mid-game monsters is Najarala, a Snake Wyvern who measures to a maximum of 35 meters long and fight by constricting opponents, they also have fangs and forked togues inside their beaks. Also introduced in the same game is Dalamadur, a colossal Elder Dragon that resembles a snake with fangs and a forked tongue and constricts around the arena where it is fought.
- Ninja Emaki have an obscure giant snake Yōkai, a gigantic albino Uwabami, serving as a boss.
- Persona: Black Viper is a recurring spell in the series that's unique to certain high-level Personas. When cast, a massive snake head larger than most Shadows appears and bites the target, causing enormous damage. In fact, it's the strongest single target spell available, and since it does Almighty damage, nothing has any resistance or immunity to it.
- Pokémon: Onix is a massive rock-type Pokemon in the form of a giant snake. It is the tallest rock-type in the world.
- Resident Evil 1 features the Yawn, a snake grown to giant size by the T-Virus. It has the ability to inflict "poison" status on Jill or Chris. If that's not bad enough, it's encountered twice.
- RuneScape has Juna, a gigantic snake guarding the tears of Guthix. However, she is throughly benevolent and grants access to the player in exchange for stories to stave off her boredom.
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice: The Wolf can encounter the Serpent God, a giant white snake worshipped by the people of the Sunken Valley.
- Shadow of the Colossus has Phalanx, which is a gigantic winged snake that spends the whole battle just peacefully flying around in the sky. As is typical with bosses from this game, you have to find some way to climb on it.
- Subverted in Shadowgate. After crossing a bridge, the player character encounters a giant snake. The character prepares to fight the snake, but then takes a better look and discovers it's actually a statue.
- Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse: Sheesha of the Divine Powers is an absolutely enormous fiery snake that can grow big enough to curl around the sun. In the game, it's the only enemy that's depicted with a 3D model. Its sheer size and power drives a major part of the plot, as the multiple factions in opposition to the Divine Powers are forced to team up to take it down.
- Slither.io: Snakes grow longer as they eat neon dots scattered around the arena or dropped from other snakes after they are killed. It's possible to grow so much that the snake reaches tens of thousands of units in length (the growth stops eventually, so it's not possible to grow long enough to circle the whole map), with them also being thicker than smaller ones.
- Songs for a Hero have it's first boss, the Queen Cobra, a gigantic snake monster whose head is larger than your body.
- Sonic Forces: While Sonic is exploring the Luminous Forest, Amy picks up an unidentified life form in her radar, which turns out to be a giant snake that erupts from the ground. Enraged by the noise of the battle between the heroes and Eggman's robots, it attacks Sonic and manages to swallow him, though the hedgehog forces it to regurgitate him by attacking its guts. An illusory, much larger version of the same snake is later used as the arena during the first boss battle against Infinite.
- Space Debris has a giant lava serpent as the boss on the Lethal Lava Land planet. Said serpent can spit fireballs and periodically sticks its head in and out of the lava attempting to lash out at the heroes.
- Spinmaster have giant snakes (large enough to swallow the players in one bite) sticking out of pots as enemies.
- Spiritual Assassin Taromaru has a gigantic serpent monster as a boss in the bamboo forest, alongside it's handler. The two of them are disguised as a mother and son, and reveals themselves with the boy losing his head and a serpentine monster spawning from his neck-stump, stretching for several hundred meters, while the mother reveals herself to be the monster's controller as she rides on the serpent's head and orders it to attack.
- Super Ninja Meow Cat: King Cobra, the boss of level 5, is a giant cobra.
- Them's Fightin' Herds: The first real boss in the game's story mode is a huge cobra, which is a scaled up version of the regular enemy snakes with it's own moves and fight phases.
- Tomb Raider III has giant snakes as low-level enemies in the India and Nevada Desert levels. Comparing them to Lara, they appear to be some fifteen feet long (believable for Indian cobras, not so much for North American rattlesnakes), and venomous.
- ULTRAKILL has The Leviathan, a titanic, serpentine Demon that serves as the boss of Wrath.
- Wario Land II: Wario fights a giant snake in his castle basement as the first boss.
- Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair: The second boss is a gigantic Segmented Serpent monster whose head's sprite size is roughly the same as the player's entire character.
Web Animation
- RWBY: The King Tiajitu is a giant snake Grimm with two heads. Ren encounters and defeats one in "The Emerald Forest".
Webcomics
- Homestuck:
- The Denizens, mystical figures that both help and hinder Sburb players, are giant snake-like creatures. Well, most of them - those who are designed for particularly weak in combat players, are small.
- Cherubim turn into serpents with a length of one astronomical unit (149,597,871 km, the distance between the Sun and the Earth) when they mate.
- Slightly Damned: The deserts of the Dragon Island Archipelago are home to species of snake known as the Cactus Cobra, which are massive apex predators big enough to eat a gazelle.
Web Original
- Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel): During "Enemy Unexplained", one of the weird encounters US military personnel had in Vietnam was with a rather large serpent. So large, in fact, that it left a trail where it slithered and almost ended up swallowing the US military helicopter observing it whole.
- Emoji Kitchen: The result of snake 🐍 plus city 🌆 is a giant snake coiled around a skyscraper.
- Neopets has the Snowager — a giant ice snake with dangerous breath that lives in a cave and hoards treasure.
- Prehistoric Emergence: The presence of giant, prehistoric snakes have led to India and Columbia to declare a national emergency. The Vasuki indicus in particular is shown to attack humans unprovoked, and many of the locals have taken to thinking it's a divine beast sent by Shiva to destroy them.
- War Time Stories: The titular "El Diablo" from the episode "Something They Call "El Diablo"" is a giant anaconda capable of crushing and eating entire groups of cattle without effort. It's so massive, in fact, that when its seen traveling the river between Nicaragua and Honduras it's initially mistaken for a boat. The US Army Engineers that witness the creature even lampshade that it might very likely be Immune to Bullets given its size, speed, and tough hide.
Western Animation
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: In "The Serpent's Pass", the Gaang, Suki, and two soon-to-become-parents try to go through the Serpent Pass, which was named after the giant serpentine creature that resides in it.
- Conan the Adventurer: While most of his snake-themed minions qualify more as lizard people, Demon-God Set himself's true form is a massive cobra so big he can actually eat a rather large human without noticing.
- Dragons: The Nine Realms: While not big enough to wrap around the world, the Apex Predator Jörmungandr is still tall enough to prey on big dragons like the Sky Torcher.
- DuckTales (2017): In "The Rumble for Ragnarok", Scrooge McDuck and crew take on Jormungandr himself to decide the fate of the Earth... in the form of a wrestling match, with Scrooge playing the part of the Heel to the hilt. Jormungandr's true form is a snake big enough to encircle all of Earth, but for the wrestling match's sake he assumes a human-sized snake-person form.
- Final Space: The Episode "The Great Surrender" introduces Werthrent, a gigantic fire snake deity of Ash's homeworld who would accept regular sacrifices from her people (of whom her sister Harp was one, and what she almost became). The people of Ash's planet believed that whoever was consumed by Werthrent would be treated to an eternity of joy. In actuality, those consumed by Werthrent were kept inside him where he basically drained their wellness from them, leaving them zombie-like husks who are forced to continue living inside of Werthrent, and are driven mad by the whole experience. This included Ash's sister, Harp.
- Freakazoid!: Cobra Queen has two large cobras as pets.
- G.I. Joe: Renegades: Cobra Commander has a giant pet cobra named Serpentor, which he feeds people to. Its head is about the size of his torso even without counting the hood.
- Godzilla: The Series: The monster King Cobra is a gigantic mutated cobra.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: One episode features a snake cult consisting of a handful of geeks obsessed with a giant serpent. It's ultimately subverted in that the snake in question isn't that large at all.
- Jackie Chan Adventures: Jackie finds the Snake Talisman in the Central American Temple of Culebra Gigante"—Spanish for "gigantic snake". Naturally, he has to fight the snake to get away with the Talisman.
- The Legend of Tarzan: Hista, the Monster of the Week in "The Challenger", is a gigantic python that hunts gorillas.
- Megas XLR: Zarek, an enemy of the S-Force, commands a massive mecha snake called the Star Serpent.
- Molly of Denali: In "Cinder Cones and Broken Drones," Doe'gwo'ah is an enormous snake large enough to coil around mountains and strong enough to trigger volcanic eruptions.
- Ninjago has The Great Devourer, a giant snake that was sealed away years ago with the power of four snake fangs. Pythor, the villain of season one, sought to release it upon Ninjago City as revenge for the Serpentine being sealed underground years ago. It also turned Lord Garmadon evil when it bit him when he was a child (and The Great Devourer was very small), injecting him with its malevolent venom. Garmadon was the one who ultimately destroyed it.
- Primal (2019) has a titanoboa-sized snake as the main antagonist in the episode "River of Snakes".
- Redwall: Asmodeus Poisonteeth is a massive adder treated with the terror and dread of a dragon by the denizens of Mossflower, incapacitating anybeast he comes across with his hypnotic gaze before going in for the kill with his venomous fangs.
- Star Trek: The Animated Series has the episode "How Shaper Than a Serpent's Tooth", in which the Enterprise encounters another spacecraft that's shaped like a giant serpent with wings behind its head. This craft is helmed by Kukulkan, an Ancient Astronaut who visited Earth long, long ago; he's a very large snakelike fellow that inspired the civilizations of the Mayans, the Toltecs and the early Chinese.
Real Life
- The Paleogene period hosted a wide variety of giant snakes.
- The largest known snake species to ever exist was Vasuki indicus from India, then an island continent. It's estimated that it grew up to 14.8 meters (48 feet) long. As it probably inhabited coastal swamps when it was alive, it may have been amphibious and would have mostly eaten fish, other reptiles, and mammals, among which were the early, semi-terrestrial ancestors of whales.
- The previous record holder (lengthwise) was Titanoboa cerrejonensis, a member of the boa constrictor family that existed in the Paleocene Epoch (around 60 million years ago) that grew to be at least 13 meters (42 feet 3 inches) in length and weighed more than a ton (making it heavier then Vasuki). Given its massive bulk, it spent its life in the Amazonian swamps of modern-day Colombia. If Titanoboa still lived today, it could kill and eat a full-grown horse. While it was initially thought to be an apex predator that fed on large mammals and crocodiles, more recent discoveries of fossils of its head and jaws have led scientists to believe that it was instead a specialist fish-hunter.
- Third to Titanoboa and Vasuki, Gigantophis was a large prehistoric snake that lived in North Africa 40 million years ago, estimated to be over 10 meters long; though a later study adjusted this length estimate to 6.9 meters, much closer in size to the largest extant snakes. Like Titanoboa and Vasuki, it probably lived in hot, swampy environments (North Africa wasn't a desert yet), where it fed on large fish and mid-sized mammals, such as the pig-sized ancestors of elephants.
- Palaeophiids were a group of large sea snakes, members of whom could grow up to 5 to 12 metres.
- Measuring living snakes isn't an easy task, but as far as anyone knows, the largest extant snakes are the Reticulated Python (Malayopython reticulatus), which can reach 25 feet, and the Green Anaconda (Eunectes murinus), whose maximum length is unknown but several skins exist which came from individuals at least 24 feet long.note Given the anaconda's proportions, a 24-footer would weigh in the neighborhood of 400 pounds. The longest extant venomous snake is the King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah), with a record length of 18 feet and an average of over 10. Besides its extreme length and potent venom, the King Cobra is also a highly alert snake with the capacity to raise almost half of its body length off the ground, meaning it's a Great Serpent that can look the average human in the eye. Naturally, it was an inspiration for myths and religious practices in the places where it's native. The Basilisk is probably based on cobra sightings.
