Bystanders rush to Taylor’s rescue.
Bystanders rush to Taylor’s rescue.
She inadvertently starred in her first animal horror movie.

An actress from "Raised By Wolves" had to be hospitalized after getting mauled by an angry seal in South Africa — in a scene she compared to something out of the movie "Jaws."

The clip is currently making waves online amid a spike in pinniped attacks.

The bizarre encounter occurred Wednesday while the South African-born actress, who was raised in Los Angeles, was swimming in the ocean off Clifton Beach in Cape Town, Jam Press reported.

"Be careful swimming at Clifton! I was attacked by a seal in the water," victim Loulou Taylor, who plays Cassia in the HBO Max series, wrote in an Instagram story describing her real-life horror movie scene, the Citizen reported.


The clip posted on social media starts off innocently enough with the Cape fur seal pup waddling into the water. The blubbery brigand then makes a beeline for a young boy frolicking in the waves as bystanders urge the youngster to "get out of the water." Unfortunately, the meat torpedo is on top of the youth in seconds and starts attacking him before bystanders drag the perturbed pinniped off and carry the boy to shore.

But the seal's rampage is far from finished. The sea-rial mauler swims out to deeper water where, Taylor is treading water, and begins savaging her as she screams in terror. "The Flat Tires" star tries to fight off the frenzied marine mammal but to no avail, prompting eyewitnesses to rush out into the ocean to her rescue. She is finally dragged to safety while a man grabs the seal by the tail and tosses it back into the drink after everyone's out.

According to Taylor's Instagram story, she was "bitten 6 times, requiring an ER visit and strong antibiotics."

"They have big teeth," exclaimed the actress, who later uploaded a fan picture of the iconic "Jaws" poster with the shark swapped out for a seal. Two people were treated for bite wounds following the savage attack.

Thankfully, it appeared that the thespian is recovering well: Taylor posted a "status update" later that Wednesday, in which she said she was "on the mend."

The Taylor attributed South Africa's recent spike in seal attacks "to an algae bloom that releases a neurotoxin which triggers aggressive behavior."

"What might cause the algae blooms?" Taylor mused. "More than likely global warming/water pollution."

Indeed wildlife experts postulated that the seal's rampage was due to a "swelling of the brain caused by domoic acid poisoning from a red tide algae bloom," the Daily Maverick reported.

The seal attacks a boy in the shallows.
The seal attacks a boy in the shallows.
However, officials with the Hout Bay Seal Rescue Centre claim that the animal was stressed out by the throngs of beachgoers surrounding it.

"Any predator that is surrounded and harassed like the seal was would have reacted the same way, but of course, the video doesn't show the part where the seal is being stressed by a crowd of people surrounding it," the org's marketing director Dune Spence-Ross told News24.

"Yesterday, the beachgoers were lucky... it was only a yearling approximately 12 months old, weighing no more than 10kg by the looks of it," she added. "If that was a fully grown seal, the headlines would have been very different."

Investigations into the attack are ongoing with Cape Town officials noting that similar incidents involving aggressive seals transpired in Noordhoek and Fish Hoek in recent months, Jam Press reported.

In light of the attack, the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) is imploring beachgoers to always maintain a safe distance from marine wildlife.

This isn't the first time someone has been mauled by a seemingly nonthreatening creature. In August, an elderly Russian tourist was bitten on the derriere and nearly drowned by an aggressive sea turtle while swimming in Italy.