The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
The Ghost and the Darkness is a fictionalized retelling of a real-life series of lion attacks in 1898 as the British government attempted to build a railway bridge across Kenya’s Tsavo River. The lions became known as the Ghost and the Darkness, which gave the film its haunting title.
The filmmakers used real lions, and sought the tamest ones possible: brothers d Bongo and Caesar, brought in from a zoo in Onatario, Canada, as well as four additional lions brought in from the U.S. and Canada, according to Fiction Machine, which notes that only a single animatronic animal was used.
For obvious reasons, the lions almost never shares the screen with humans, including stars Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas. Shots were digitally combined in post production to make it appear that the men and lions were interacting.
The shoot did not go smoothly, but it wasn’t the lions’ fault: “We had snake bites, scorpion bites, tick bite fever, people getting hit by lightning, floods, torrential rains and lightning storms, hippos chasing people through the water, cars getting swept into the water, and several deaths of crew members, including two drownings,” director Stephen Hopkins later told the Los Angeles Daily News.
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