The introduction to this volume is intended as a tool for future study of Animal Horror Cinema. It first defines this type of Cinema as films that describe how a particular animal or an animal species commit a transgression against humanity and then recounts the punishment the animal must suffer as a consequence. The introductory chapter then discusses how Animal Horror Cinema both cements and complicates the basic conceptual separation of the human and non-human animal and how it raises crucial questions concerning human and animal ethics and the Anthropocene; the present era when humanity itself has become a destructive geological force. This chapter also discusses how the study of Animal Horror Cinema frequently explores matters of colonialism and postcolonialism, and how the genre interrogates gender and sexuality through the animal.