Death Of A Child / Live-Action Films

Children dying in live-action movies.

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General:

General

• Low-grade monster movies tend to apply this trope with glee, killing young children to show how dangerous their monsters are.
  • The Blob (1988). Meg rescues her child brother, Kevin and his friend, Eddie. Right before they climb out of the sewer, Eddie is pulled underwater screaming. Moments later, he pops out of the water again. Half melted. Still screaming.
  • Lampshaded in Feast, where a timid boy is introduced with the captioned advantage "Fits into small spaces", a common rationale for this trope in film... but the "small space" he fits into turns out to be a monster's gullet.
  • Broken rather spectacularly twice in Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds. In the opening scene of the film Biker Queen, one of the protagonists of the film, kills a dog with a shotgun, and the camera lingers on the dog's mostly blown apart corpse. Later in the film, another character, Greg Swank, heroically attempts to save an infant from imminent doom. Regretfully, he is unable to save the baby, and, in fact, throws the infant into the air as a distraction, at which point the infant strikes the asphalt and is summarily devoured by monsters.
  • Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem: A father and his son have gone into the woods, where facehuggers give them both a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong. Later, the predalien finds its way into a maternity ward, where it impregnates a pregnant mother and several babies with soon-to-be chestbursters. The resulting bodies are partially seen later on in the movie.
  • Dinocroc when the monster eats the protagonist's 12-year-old brother, leaving nothing behind but his head.
  • Piranha 3DD ends with a mutated piranha that can crawl on land decapitating a young boy taking photographs of it. Director John Gulager says he received multiple petitions to not include this scene in the film.
  • The Swarm (1978) showed a grammar school under attack by killer bees. Not all of the children made it inside in time.
  • In Mimic, the two kids are horribly slaughtered. The engineering of the artificial Judas Breed to begin with was prompted by a plague of roaches in Manhattan which carried an incurable disease that disproportionately killed children.
  • Alien 2: On Earth: After a spacecraft returns to Earth with its occupants missing, a girl on a beach discovers a weird, blue, pulsating rock. Soon after the discovery, her mother finds the girl dead, her face having been ripped off.

Specific movies:

#-L

• 28 Days Later has children among the many discarded bodies around the manor house- presumably Infected- and we see quite clearly a dead infant in the arms of its mother with a pacifier in its mouth, part of a multi-generational dead family. There's also an attack by a preteen boy Infected.
• 28 Weeks Later: The child in the very beginning of the movie escaped his Infected parents, but it's implied he's dead as the Infected burst into the farm and killed everyone but Don and Alice.
• In 71: Into the Fire, a North Korean child soldier is one of Kap-Joo's first kills.
• The ABCs of Death and its sequel ABCs of Death 2 both have no problems depicting children getting killed. For example, the former ends the segment "T is for Toilet" with the boy getting his head crushed as his father watches in horror (though the segment's animator later made a sequel called "Ghost Burger" which revealed said character to be alive), while the latter ends the segment "X is for Xylophone" by having the little girl playing with her xylophone being torn apart and made into a gory version of the instrument by her grandmother.
• Across the Universe (2007): Jo-Jo's little brother was killed in the Detroit riot, with him introduced attending his funeral along with their family.
• Alien:
  • In Aliens, Newt's brother is said to have died before the Colonial Marines reach the planet.
  • In Alien³, not only does Newt die in the very beginning, we get to see the autopsy.
• In Alice, Sweet Alice, Karen (portrayed by a young Brooke Shields) is strangled to death, stuffed inside a bench compartment, and set on fire by a hooded and masked figure in a church. A police photo of her body is shown later in the film.
• In Alligator a boy is eaten by the giant alligator after two of his friends push him off the diving board of his pool while pretending to be pirates. The two friends had no idea there was a predatory alligator in the pool and thought the boy was just being chicken in their casual pirate play. Once they realized what's going on, they ran away in terror and fright of committing an Accidental Murder.
• An American Crime is a dramatization of the story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl from Indianapolis who died in 1965 as a result of severe physical abuse by her babysitter Gertrude Baniszewski.
• ...And Justice for All: Jay has a breakdown over the fact a client he got off on a murder charge later murdered two kids, and Kirkland's sympathetic while horrified hearing of this.
• Anna and the King is the only dramatization of Anna Leonowens' story to depict the death of the Fa-ying (Princess Chandrmondol), King Mongkut's favourite daughter. The real Fa-ying really did die, and Anna in her book says the little princess really did summon her, but she did not arrive in time to say goodbye. It was Margaret Landon's novelization that said she did. The Fa-ying's death affected both Anna and Mongkut profoundly.
• The plot of Antichrist is kicked off by the lead couple's young child falling out a window. Their parents were in the middle of sex while it happened, and consequently the child's mother blames herself for the death, fueling her own self loathing.
• In Army of Frankensteins, Walton shoots Igor In the Back for spying on his meeting with Booth.
• The original John Carpenter directed Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) was considered quite violent for its time, mainly because of the scene that triggers the plot. A young girl walks up to an ice cream truck just as a gang leader kills the driver for not paying protection money. In any other movie, she would have gotten away and become the MacGuffin of the story. Instead, the gang leader shoots her through the heart right on camera. Her father witnesses the act, kills the gang leader, and he becomes the MacGuffin.
• In Bedevilled, Man-jong's (presumed) daughter, Yeon-Hee, bites him on his leg when he and Kim Bok-nam are in the middle of a vitriolic argument after the two of them tried to run away from him. Man-jong shoves Yeon-Hee head-first onto a pile of rocks, where she suffers a fatal blow to her skull.
• Played for Laughs in the British TV movie Bernard and the Genie. When the title characters take over for the shopping centre Santa they start granting wishes for the children who visit them. At one point a boy and his baby sister make their wishes and just after their mother asks the toddler what she wished for and she answers "Snow" and the brother gives a mischevious look she explodes, implying that's what the brother wished for.
• The otherwise forgettable Beware! Children at Play ends with a five-minute sequence of an angry mob murdering the feral children.
• Blood Quantum has an infant being devoured by its zombie infected mother. An earlier scene also had a zombified little girl being put down as a Mercy Kill.
• One part in Bram Stoker's Dracula has Dracula give his brides an infant and they carry it off, presumably to feed on it.
• In The Bunnyman Massacre, The opening scene has the titular bunnyman mulching a schoolbus full of kids with a chainsaw. Some have the quick thinking to get away through the windows.
• In Canyon Passage, a female settler and her baby are cut down onscreen by the Indians, and when Logan and his posse arrive at the Dance homestead, they learn that Ben Dance and his 10 year old son Asa have been killed.
• In The Children, all of the kids possessed by the fog are eventually killed.
  • In another unrelated older film also called The Children the plot hinges on the titular five children dying and then turning into zombies as a result, before engaging on a killing spree around town, which includes their parents. Also, one of the five kids' younger brother dies as well while their baby sibling is born at the end of the film under the implication that they too have become a zombie.
• In Come Drink With Me, a child monk suffers a nasty Eye Scream while eavesdropping on the villains via flung poisoned needle, followed by a graphic Mercy Kill.
• Corsage: Franz and Elisabeth's oldest child, Sophie, died as an infant. Her death still haunts her parents 20 years later.
• Count Yorga: Earlier in the film when Erica starts to turn, Micheal and Paul find her feeding on her pet kitten. Later when Hayes is talking with his girlfriend about if she would believe that vampires are real while getting ready to leave. She mentions she would after hearing a news report of a baby being found in a swamp with it's neck chewed up and drained of blood. There was meant to be scene showing one of Yorga's brides feeding on said baby, but the film was already pushing MPAA limits with the kitten scene, so it was cut.
• The 1909 short film The Country Doctor is about two young girls who fall ill with unspecified illnesses around the same time. The titular doctor is forced to choose between helping his daughter and helping his neighbor. He helps cure his neighbor's daughter, but his own child dies of her illness.
• Cross of Iron doesn't shy away from showing dead child soldiers and makes a point to show that children aren't spared from the ravages of war.
• The turning point in King Vidor's silent classic The Crowd comes when the protagonist's little daughter is run over and killed by a truck.
• Uwe Boll's Darfur. No one is safe from the Janjaweed, children get killed just as often as adults, and at one point a baby is impaled on a wooden spike, and it's shown in full detail What makes this even more heartbreaking is that it's Truth in Television.
• The first death in The Day After is that of a young girl in a red dress who is afraid to take shelter in the basement of a Kansas City office building. She's reassured by a guard, but shortly after the first bomb drops on the outskirts of the city she's trampled by a panicked crowd. Seconds later, dozens of children are vaporized when bombs fall on Kansas City and Whiteman AFB, including Airman McCoy's infant child and a class of preteens.
• The 1962 film version of The Day of the Triffids includes a scene inside a doomed aircraft that prominently features a child passenger, who is presumably killed along with everyone else when the aircraft crashes shortly afterward.
• In Dead Birds, William accidentally shoots a child while fleeing the bank at the beginning.
• The final battle in Death Valley is triggered by the hero Jin-fu witnessing a young boy he had befriended getting killed by the main villain in an attempt to intimidate him, prompting Jin-Fu's R Oaring Rampage Of Revenge which sets up the film's climatic finale.
• In Demon Knight Danny is a young boy who joins the heroes after his parents were murdered by the Collector, near the end he is transformed into a demon and explodes after being thrown into a barrier.
• The adorable almost-five Jess is killed off in a car crash just a few minutes into The Descent, traumatizing her mother for the rest of the film.
• Die Hard 2: The main villain actually crashes an airplane full of people by giving wrong landing instructions. Before the plane crashes, we see a little girl playing with a little doll, and after it crashes, we see McClane (the hero) walking through the wrecked airplane and soon finding the half-burnt doll. It is later stated nobody in that plane made it out of there alive, adding insult to the injury.
• The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Even though we never actually see the kid outside a picture at the end, Eleanor and Conor's son dying is the source of all the film's drama.
• The start of A Dog's Purpose begins with the protagonist being born and living as a stray puppy. He gets caught by dog-catchers and then it cuts to his next reincarnation.
• Don't Look Now, a late 60s thriller with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, opens with an architect and wife's daughter drowning in a lake. This prompts the narrative of the rest of the film.
• In Down, A posessed elevator full of people shoots upwards through the top of the building. While it speeds up, the bottom of the elevator buckles and falls, leaving many people to fall and die violently in the shaft, including a young boy and girl.
• In Downfall Frau Goebbels personally poisons her six children to "save" them from a world without Naziism. Also a real life example. The (admittedly somewhat older) Hitler Youth carrying the battle on the streets don't fare too well either, though it's implied that one (who left his post) survived.
• In Eden Lake, Adam, Paige, Harry, and Cooper all die over the course of the movie. Of course, three of them are part of the bad guys, but their deaths are still shocking.
• In The Element of Crime, since the movie is about a child killer, yet we still manage to get unexpected infant deaths.
• In Enemy at the Gates, Sacha, the Russian tween who's been reporting German positions to Soviet snipers during the siege of Stalingrad, is hanged by Major Koenig to bring rival sniper Zaitsev out of hiding.
• The Eunuch: The titular Villain Protagonist is introduced killing the family of a rival lord, including their young son, whom he flung into the direction of a halberd held upright turning the child into Half the Boy he Used to be.
• Face/Off begins with Castor Troy attempting to assassinate FBI Agent Sean Archer, only to accidentally kill Archer's young son in the process.
• Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald: A henchwoman of Grindelwald uses the Killing Curse on a young French muggle boy after Grindelwald murders his parents. This is also used in the backstory of the real Corvus Lestrange.
• Fearless: Carla's infant son and several other children are killed in a horrific plane crash.
• Fear Street: In Part 2:1978, one of the counselors goes on a rampage through the camp with an axe during a night activity between Sunnyvale and Shadyside.
  • A pudgy nerd is killed by an axe to the head after kids from another camp make fun of him and egg him. Poor kid.
  • Sean, Jesse, Rod & Stacey, 4 tween-age Shadyside campers are hacked up into bits in a cabin after the Sunnyvale jailer grabs the lantern and leaves, telling them to stay.
• The B-horror movie Flesh Eating Mothers. The titular mothers are turned into cannibals, and one mother eats a character's baby brother.
• The Disaster Movie genre tends to use this trope at least once per movie to show the devastation of the disasters, but Fire Twister has a notable subverted example. It only has a little girl making it alive from the fire twister without any serious injury, and Scott goes to bring her mother down from a tree she got thrown into.
• At the end of Five, Roseanne's baby—the first child born after the apocalypse— dies while she is trekking back to the cliff house from the Ghost City.
• For a Few Dollars More: Indio invades an enemy's house, and asks his companions to kill the guy's wife and baby outside (off-screen). He shoots the guy later.
• In For Colored Girls, Crystal's two young children are killed by their father because his PTSD-fueled delusions have led him to believe that the children aren't his and that this was the reason why Crystal refuses to marry him. He drops them from the sixth-floor of their apartment building.
• As in real life, Neil's very young daughter dies of brain cancer early on in First Man. The already stoic Armstrong withdraws from his family and throws himself into his dangerous work as an astronaut instead of grieving properly.
• Little Maria in Frankenstein (1931) is thrown into the water by the Monster and drowns. Followed by an emotional scene of her father carrying the lifeless body of his daughter across town.
• In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy also wiped out every single non-adult in Springwood.
• The beginning of Freddy vs. Jason has Freddy (himself a former child rapist and killer, whose victims now consist primarily of teens) murdering a little girl offscreen. What is presumably her spirit shows up later in the Dream World, missing eyes.
• Funny Games: The family dog is the first to go, and next to die is the son. Both die in pretty brutal ways too.
• Played with in Ghost Ship. Katie survives the razor wire murder scene, but only because she is too small. She is later murdered anyway by two insane crew members, and she becomes a ghost.
• The 1954 Gojira film:
  • There's a scene which shows a mother comforting her two children during Godzilla's rampage in Tokyo. It's heavily implied that they were killed by the titular monster.
  • Likewise, the extremely unnerving scene where two soldiers use a Geiger counter on the body of a little girl...and it goes berserk.
• Golden Swallow has a graphic Seppuku committed by a young boy, in order to prove his innocence over the theft of an expensive goose.
• Good Manners has poor little Maurício experiencing an unpleasant fate from his classmate Joel's jaws as a consequence of unwittingly accompanying him to a trip to the shopping mall even after closing hours and the full moon's rise.
• In The Good Son, we find out that Henry's toddler brother Richard died before the events of the film: Henry killed him, and later Henry dies when his mother chooses Mark over him after they end up dangling from a cliff.
• Grave Encounters 2: The undead satanic doctor slices a baby and spills its blood all over a tied up patient. While you don't see the wound on the baby itself, it's still very visceral from the angle it's shot.
• In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, it's revealed that Peter had thousands of half-brothers and sisters, all of whom were murdered by Ego for not inheriting the Celestial gene. Gamora and Nebula even stumble upon an entire cave full of skeletons, many of which clearly belonged to small children.
• In The Guilty, Iben and Michael's infant son Oliver was killed by Iben during one of her psychotic episodes. Both parents are horrified when they realize what has happened.
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch, where the aim of the Big Bad is killing America's children with Halloween masks. One boy is shown being killed onscreen as the mask replaces his head with snakes and insects, and the film ends with the heroes being too late to stop the masks from activating en masse.
• The Happening: The two slightly older kids the protagonists pick up halfway through the film get themselves killed when they harass some people who have barricaded themselves inside their home. They get a rather brutal treatment, too. The first kid takes a buckshot blast point blank in the chest, and you get to see it come out his back. The second thankfully gets a Gory Discretion Shot when he gets the same treatment to the head, but we're treated to the wound afterward.
• Hardball has one of the little league members, an 8 year old boy named Jarius aka "G-Baby", being killed during a gang shootout as he and his older brother walk home.
• In Hellboy (2019), Baba Yaga's chicken-walking hut has the corpses of several butchered children shown hanging from meat hooks in her larder.
• Hellraiser: Inferno. Joseph's case is to look for a missing child who is slowly being killed by the serial killer the Engineer by cutting off the boy's fingers one by one and Joseph's daughter is frozen to death right in front of him. Neither of them were real however, but part of Joseph's torture in Hell.
• Hereditary: 45 minutes into the movie, Charlie (a creepy 13-year-old girl who has been the focal point of the movie so far) accidentally eats walnuts. As her (stoned) older brother is frantically driving her to the hospital, Charlie rolls down the window to try to get some air. She leans out, but Peter swerves suddenly to avoid hitting an animal in the road, and Charlie is horrifyingly decapitated by a telephone pole.
• "Hocus Pocus" opens in 1693 in Salem with the elderly Sanderson Sisters luring young Emily Binks to their cottage and sucking her life out to get younger.
• In Hooded Angels, Hannah's three year old son Tommy is shot and killed by one of the Confederate militia during the sacking of Silver Creek. It is this event, even for than her rape, that turns her into a vigilante and than an outlaw.
• The Host (2006): The entire plot is driven around a 13-year old girl being kidnapped by a giant sea monster, and she gets eaten by the monster near the end.
• The House That Jack Built sees the titular character, a remorseless Serial Killer, reminisce about his numerous heinous crimes. Amongst the more horrifying ones, is the time he murdered a mother's two young boys, proceeded to prop up to their corpses for a grotesque parody of a family picnic which he forced the mother to participate in at gunpoint, before killing her too.
• The Hunger Games:
  • The entire premise hinges on twelve to eighteen year old kids brutally killing one another.
  • The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 with the bombing of District 12, which claimed thousands of lives, including children.
  • The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. Dozens of capitol children are blown up onscreen. The ones that might have survived fall victim to the fire bombs.
• In Bruges:
  • The entire plot is driven by the fact that Colin Farrell's character accidentally shot a five-year old.
  • Killing children is the Big Bad's personal Moral Event Horizon. When tricked into thinking he's done so, he kills himself.
• Instructions Not Included (No se Aceptan Devoluciones) , in which little Maggie dies of illness at the end.
• In the Fade: Katja and Nuri's son Rocco, six years old, is killed along with Nuri. This clearly affects Katja's actions in the film even more than Nuri's death, and she spends her last scene before the end reminiscing about him via a video she has on her phone.
• The biopic Isadora, with Vanessa Redgrave playing the tragic mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, has an understated yet harrowing scene where you see the protagonist's young son and daughter and their nanny drown in a car that has run into the River Seine. She starts to go a little mad after this.
• Jaws: The shark's second victim is a dog, which disappears after chasing a thrown stick into the ocean. Mere moments later, a young boy on a raft is gruesomely devoured on-screen.
• Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons has a rare (and rather shocking to western eyes) comedic example at the beginning, when a giant fish demon attacks a village. It makes several attempts to eat an infant in a basket, which is repeatedly saved by dramatic and improbable kung-fu stunts involving springy bamboo, but in the end, the rescuers' efforts are in vain, and the baby is swallowed whole.
• Kamen Rider Amazons: The Last Judgement has Haruka discovering the young orphans that took him in are domesticated Amazons (created from The Rival's Amazon DNA) whose overseer is conditioning into livestock for a Corrupt Corporate Executive to feed to rich people. Haruka's kindness re-kindles orphan Muku's will to live, who kick-starts a rebellion after doing away with the politician that would've eaten her. The two fight Neo Alpha but are overpowered and driven to death's door. Muku spurs Haruka into consuming her to repair his own wounds, forcing him to cross his one line to survive. Jin (Who's also planning to kill the kids since they're Amazons) crosses his own line to murder the overseer. Haruka stops him from murdering the orphans, Driven to Suicide afterward from what he'd been forced to do to Muku. He's stopped just in time by Mizuki.
• Killers of the Flower Moon: Little Anna Burkhart tragically dies by whooping cough, and her mother is briefly seen sobbing over her corpse. The news is impassively delivered by Agent White to her imprisoned father and grand-uncle, causing the greatest show of remorse and grief thus seen from the former.
• In The Killer That Stalked New York (a 1950 film Very Loosely Based on the 1947 New York City smallpox outbreak), six-year-old Walda succumbs to smallpox. Her mother accuses Dr. Wood, who failed to save Walda's life, of being a murderer.
• The Last Witch Hunter: Kaulder's not-yet-teen daughter Elizabeth dying from Black Death is important part of his backstory.
• Sergio Leone obviously likes this trope.
  • At the beginning of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Angel Eyes shoots a man he was paid to kill, then shoots his young son, who was rushing down the stairs with a rifle to investigate. However, the younger son does survive.
  • Henry Fonda's character Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West kills Jill's family in his introduction scene, including a little boy. Not only that, but he saves the little boy for last (though it might be just because the kid happened to be inside at the time, and only came out after the others were killed). Also while the others were sniped from a distance, Frank goes right up to the boy, and smiles as he pulls out his gun.
• In Looper, Old Joe shoots a child in the face (albeit offscreen).
• Lord of War: The film opens with a child soldier being shot in the face by a 7.62mm round, which the camera has followed from its manufacture up to that moment.
• The Losers has a scene early on where the titular spec ops group discovers children being herded into a drug lord's compound to be used as mules. This is the compound they've been tasked with destroying, so they try to defy this by rescuing the children. After the rescue and the destruction of the compound, the children are loaded onto the extraction helicopter, but the Losers themselves stay behind because there's no more room on board. The helicopter is then blown out of the sky by a fighter plane, playing this straight.

M-Z

• M, the plot of which revolves around a child murderer. This was a departure for Fritz Lang's films in general, which would often put children into dangerous situations but always save them.
• Machine Gun Preacher: A child whose village was destroyed chases his dog through the brush only to step on a land mine.
• Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome: A bunch of abandoned children in a desert outpost. What could possibly happen? Swallowed up by sand, for one.
• Meadowland is about a couple coping with the mysterious disappearance of their young son from a gas station. In the end, they Finally Found the Body.
• Mercenaries from Hong Kong has a depressing example with one of the mercenaries' Delicate and Sickly little daughter getting abducted by the villainess, and shot after a standoff gone wrong, just to establish how Anyone Can Die in the movie.
• Monsters: After the main characters survive a monster ambush, they come across other travelers who were killed by the creatures. One is a small girl lying on the road. Kaulder solemnly grabs a coat and covers the girls body.
• The Mountie: During a raid, Grayling accidentally shot and killed a young girl. It is this event that leads to him being Reassigned to Antarctica.
• The Negotiation: Exploited. Tae-gu specifically takes several children hostage because he knows that their deaths would reflect much worse on Korean law enforcement than those of adults.
• A Night to Remember:
  • There was a moment towards the end where a little boy is seen looking for his mother. An elderly waiter tries to comfort him, but it is only a few minutes later that the ship finally sinks into the ocean, and its implied that both either drown or freeze to death.
  • There was also a later scene where two of the Irish steerage passengers show up at an overturned longboat with a child. One of the officers looks under the child's hood, realizes it is dead and sets it adrift.
• Nope: Not even children are safe from the aerial abomination. Jupe's three sons get eaten by the alien along with him, his wife, and everyone else sitting in the stands including the children from the family sitting in the front row. Two of them are dragged through the sand before being yanked upwards. Fortunately for the audience, we don't get to witness any of their deaths. Unfortunately for the audience, we get to hear it.
• In Omen III: The Final Conflict, new ambassador Damien Thorn orders all newborns in the area killed in the hopes that the newly born Christ will be among those murdered; we're shown baby after baby being killed, with one actually being hit by a car after its carriage is knocked into traffic.
• Can anyone say Pan's Labyrinth? Not only does the heroine get shot at the end, the Pale Man's lair is decorated with paintings of him killing and eating babies.
• The Patriot (2000): Colonel William Tavington shoots Benjamin Martin's young son right in front of his own eyes.
• Pay It Forward: Everything's more fine and dandy with the world thanks to young Trevor, the main character, until he's stabbed to death by bullies.
• Pet Sematary (1989): The death of the protagonist's two-year-old son Gage leads him to a Despair Event Horizon which causes him to try and revive the boy by burying him in the titular cemetery, only for the boy to turn out to be Ax-Crazy and kill his mother and a neighbor before being killed by the protagonist himself. His elder daughter Ellie survives the movie, though.
  • The 2019 remake is not much better with this, instead having Ellie die, who replaces Gage's original role in this version. The end of the film has her and her parents - now all dead and resurrected from the cemetery - convince Gage (who was locked in the car earlier for his safety) to open the door, with the film implying that he'll be dead alongside them soon.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The first scene features a large group of accused pirates/accomplices being hanged—including a ten-year old boy, who has to stand on a barrel in order to be at noose height (which means a short drop, causing at least a few seconds of agony, at worst a lot more). If you didn't think Beckett had hit Moral Event Horizon before...
• In Planet Terror a mother hands her son a gun, instructing him to use it in case his father shows up. Being the curious little bugger that he is, the kid blasts his own face off in five seconds flat.
• Uwe Boll's film adaptation of Postal:
  • There is a particular shootout scene where the camera focuses on only the ridiculous number of children being shot. Later the replacement TV reporter, whilst gloating over her predecessor's death, is standing in essentially a massive pile of dead, at least a good 30 of them were under 15.
  • Plus one scene involving a baby stroller hit by a vehicle, sending the kid flying.
• Prom Night
  • Prom Night (1980) opens with a group of kids playing tag in an abandoned building. When a girl named Robin Hammond joins the fun, the kids attempt to scare her, and accidentally back her out of a window, where she falls to her death. This sets the plot in motion, as Robin's brother, who secretly witnessed the accident, decides to deliver payback to the kids years later at their senior prom.
  • Prom Night (2008): When Richard Fenton murdered Donna's family three years before, he also killed her little brother.
• A Quiet Place. The youngest member of the Abbot family is killed in the pre-title sequence, setting up the stakes of the movie (make a sound and alien monsters will kill you). It also drives some of the drama between the father and daughter, who blames herself for his death.
• In The Raid, one of the first people killed by the SWAT team in the apartment complex is a child, who tries to alert the mobsters to the police's presence.
• In one of the most disturbing scenes ever, in Rambo IV there's a sequence where Government soldiers attack a rebel village, and kill EVERYONE. Young kids are bayoneted, infants are beaten with blunt objects, and a baby is taken from its mother and thrown into a fire, and the remains are gunned down with heavy machine gun rounds. Which makes it all the better when Rambo manages to get a hold of the ones responsible.
• Rampant: When he turns into a zombie the soldier's first victim is his young child.
• Razorback opens with Jake's grandson being snatched away and eaten by the titular wild boar.
• The plot of The Reflecting Skin kicks off when a young boy is killed. Then his friends find an ossified fetus in an abandoned barn. And then one of those friends is killed as well.
• Road to Perdition has Connor Rooney, the primary villain, killing both Michael O'Sullivan's wife and his younger son. Connor thought that the boy in question was actually the older son, Michael, who had witnessed him and his father gunning down a rival, and did not believe Michael's assurance that his son was a man of honor.
• Room in Rome: Alba relates that her partner's son recently died in an accident, tearing up as she does. It's made clear Alba feels guilty about this, as she was watching him, and it drove a rift between them.
• Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage features a scene where a young boy is given a package to deliver, which is really a bomb. He dawdles en route, and it goes off, killing him and several other people on a bus. Hitchcock later said he regretted doing the scene this way, although it might have still been an example of this trope.
• The Sacrament: We see among the Jonestown-esque mass suicide a mother poisoning her own infant.
• Saw:
  • The first kid who died in the series was Jeff Denlon's son, Dylan. He died in an accident offscreen prior to Saw III.
  • Saw IV shows that Jigsaw and Jill lost their son Gideon to a miscarriage Jill suffered while her health clinic was being robbed.
  • Jigsaw has the death of Anna's newborn son. She killed it herself and framed her husband for it.
• Schindler's List:
  • The girl in the red coat at first is escorted out of the Krakow ghetto, but her dead body is later seen among a pile of other corpses. Though justified because of the subject matter.
  • There is also a scene where a truckload of children are taken away from their parents; it's implied that they are killed.
• One of the first scenes in Selma shows the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of 1963, a real-life tragedy and watershed moment of the Civil Rights movement which killed four young black girls. The scene shows the girls walking down the stairs before the explosion engulfs them.
• In Short Cuts, one of the subplots involves young Casey Finnigan being hit by a car and the resulting seemingly superficial injuries causing him to fall into a coma. After several days in hospital, his eyes open, to his parents' relief... but within seconds, he stops breathing, triggering a code blue. He dies off camera soon after.
• Occurs in the Shaw Brothers film The Silent Swordsman. When Master Wu's grandson accidentally spills the beans about the La Résistance hideouts to their enemies, Wu is forced to kill the boy to preserve the family's honour.
• Sinister. The main villain kills entire families in a variety of ways, each murder preserved on a Super 8 reel. They still cut away from the most graphic child-deaths, though, or only show them out-of-focus.
• Six Assassins opens with the villains raiding a village of their goods. When a farmer tries defending his homeland, the raiders kills him, his wife, and his young daughter.
• The Sixth Sense:
  • Among the dead people seen is a preteen girl poisoned to death by her stepmother.
  • Also at one point Cole encounters the ghost of a pre-teen boy who had showed his friend his father's gun and accidentally shot himself, and we see the wound in the back of his head.
• In Sleepy Hollow (1999), Lady Van Tassel has the Headless Horseman massacre the Killian family, including the young son because she overheard the young wife speaking of a certain "inheritance". Before the boy's time comes, he gets to see the severed head of his mother stare at him. Tim Burton has gone on record to state he disagrees with the Improbable Infant Survival trope.
• The Anvilicious 1970s western Soldier Blue. The finale features several young Native American children (along with everyone else in the village) brutally murdered by crazed U.S. Calvary soldiers. Children are graphically shot, stabbed and trampled by horses all while the soldiers cheer on their own actions.
• In the exploitation film SS Hell Camp, Nazi soldiers have no problem snatching babies out of their mothers' arms and tossing them in the air for target practice.
• Star Wars:
  • Edgy variant: In Revenge of the Sith, the newly-appointed Darth Vader steps into a room full of kindergarten-aged Jedi with his lightsaber. After the cutscene, there are no more Jedi. You do the math. The movie manages to Never Say "Die" around the issue to soften the potential impact, with such Unusual Euphemisms as "Younglings", (although the novel adaptation explains this is a catch-all term for young members of any species, so it incorporates children, pups, kittens, etc; also, the word is used in the same context in Episode II). The word kill certainly comes up anyway.
  • The aforementioned is not Anakin's first visit to this particular rodeo. Attack of the Clones depicts the padawan exacting a terrible vengeance upon the Tusken Raiders who killed his mother by butchering every last denizen of their village, including females and children. He admits this to love interest Padmé Amidala later, explicitly using the terms "killed" and "children".
  • Also in Revenge of the Sith when the Clone Troopers are executing Jedi under Order 66, a preteen Padawan named Zett Jukassa is shot to death by Clone Troopers defending senator Bail Organa.
  • While the destruction of Alderaan in A New Hope is only seen from the Death Star's bridge, Expanded Universe material would confirm that millions of children were on the planet at the time.
• In The Suicide Squad, when Amanda Waller is informing the Squad details of their mission in Corto Maltese, she mentions how the nation's ruling family, the Herreras, were executed in the aftermath of a successful military coup led by General Luna's forces. The presentation then cuts to a video of the family's corpses, including the children, sheathed by blindfolds and hung from nooses, much to Ratcatcher and Polka-Dot Man's discomfort. Later, when the Squad infiltrates Jotunheim, it is shown that children were among the thousands of guinea pigs the Thinker used for his experiments to harness Starro's powers. The sight of the underground laboratory teeming with the Starro infested disgusts Rick Flag enough to disobey Waller (who knew the U.S. government was complicit in the experiments and sent the Squad to eradicate all traces of the project to preserve America's image).
• In the Colombian movie The Strategy of the Snail, a kid is shot and killed about 10 minutes into the movie.
• The Sword of Swords: Right in the final battle, the protagonist has been blinded, and the main villain tricks him into killing several villagers he had befriended prior to the film, including a little girl he's especially close to.
• Tales of Halloween: A pirate trick-or-treater is lured in by an evil jack'o lantern with candy in its mouth, chomping on the boys arms and alerting the mom, who runs around the corner in time to see her sons bloody legs flailing from the creatures mouth.
• Them! began with a very young girl wandering the desert in a catatonic state. It was later discovered that she had been in a camper with her family, including a brother of about the same age. None of the others survived.
• Threads, a BBC docudrama about the effects of nuclear war, applies this trope several times:
  • Michael, the youngest of the Kemp siblings, is killed when the blast wave demolishes older brother Jimmy's aviary, burying him in the rubble.
  • Zigzagged with Jimmy and Michael's sister, Alison. She is sent to pick up supplies shortly before the attack begins and, unlike her brothers and Ruth Beckett (who would have become her sister-in-law) is not seen during the attack sequences. A girl who closely resembles her is later glimpsed among the inmates of a makeshift prison set up to contain looters, but it is not known if this is meant to be Alison or not.
  • In one scene, a shell-shocked woman is seen cradling her baby's charred body, apparently unable to grasp the fact that the child is dead.
  • It is also stated that many of the children who survived the war die off during the first winter because "their protective layers of flesh are thinner", making them more vulnerable to the effects of cold and radiation. The same thing happens to the elderly population.
  • Towards the end, Ruth's daughter, Jane, hooks up with two boys, one of whom is shot and killed shortly after.
  • Finally, the film ends with Jane, still a child herself, giving birth. The baby is stillborn and, judging by Jane's reaction when it is placed in her arms, grossly deformed.
• In Titanic (1953), ten year old Norman gives up his lifeboat seat in order to find his father on the Titanic. Norman had planned to swim back with his dad, however that proved impossible and the two end up dying together. To make it even more sad, his father had spent the entire film ignoring his son after learning that his wife had him through a one-night stand with another man.
• Titanic (1997):
  • The scene immediately after the sinking of the titular ship shows, among the frozen bodies floating in the ocean, a dead woman still cradling her frozen infant.
  • About three times you see a curly-headed Irish girl named Cora, who doesn't look much older than seven or eight-years-old. A deleted scene shows her and her parents, screaming and crying, trapped behind a third-class gate and being submerged by water. Cameron stated that he cut the scene because it was just too upsetting. She appears in the final scene of Rose reuniting with Jack and all the others who died on the ship, though, so her fate is still implicit.
  • This happens a couple more times: first, a woman comforts her two young children before their cabin is submerged; and second, a boy whom Jack and Rose tried to save earlier is swept away by a current along with his father.
  • Another woman caresses her son just before the ship breaks up, telling him that it'll be over soon. A few other children can be glimpsed in the background as well.
• Tower Block has two young children murdered by a Cold Sniper at the beginning of the film; their mother is Driven to Suicide as a result. Later, a young teenager is murdered by the same sniper. And the events of the film are set off by a 15 year old being kicked to death.
• Trainspotting has a drawn out, closeup shot of baby Dawn lying dead in her crib, having been neglected by her junkie mother and starving to death.
• The short horror film Treevenge sees multiple children fall victim to the killer Christmas trees. The most shocking is a gruesome case of Book Ends; one of the loggers deliberately stomps on a sapling during the opening, and one of the trees repeats the action with a human baby at the end.
• Trick 'r Treat has a bus of children drowning in a ravine in backstory. Those same children, now zombies, rise from the water and kill another group of kids who were playing a mean prank on the “weird girl.”
• The Trump Prophecy starts with Taylor finding the burned corpse of a child, this being the catalyst for his PTSD.
• In The Untouchables the mobster Frank Nitti leaves a package with a bomb inside in a shop to kill a target, a little girl notices this and tries to return it to him, only for it to explode, killing her and his intended target.
• Walled In starts with a young girl named Julie waking up to find herself trapped inside a hollow column and buried alive when the column quickly fills up with cement.
• In Warlock (1989), the titular villain strikes up a conversation with a young boy when he learns his family aren't church-goers. In the next scene, the heroes come across two constables and a grieving mother, staring at the boy's off-screen body and assuming coyotes must have skinned him.
  Redferne: There's only one reason he'd need the fat of an unbaptized male child.
  Kassandra: Why?
  Redferne: Flying potion.
• The Way Back (2010). Out of a group of eight gulag escapees, only half of them survive, and the sole young girl isn't one of them. She doesn't just die, either; she dies horribly of heatstroke and dehydration in the desert.
• The 2011 adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness uses this trope with Hannah, the little girl whose father shoots himself (in front of her, no less). Wilmarth really, really tries to save her (since she even reminded him of his own dead daughter), but after she bravely throws a gas cylinder from a biplane into a Mi-Go's face (?), another one simply picks her out of the cockpit and drops her spinning to her death screaming. This marks the point where Wilmarth decides to kill himself by crashing the plane into the Mi-Go portal... What? It's Lovecraft. You weren't expecting a happy ending.
• Willy's Wonderland: The animatronics kill many children and their families, most of whom were simply passersby to the town who were tricked into going to Willy's Wonderland for a party.
• When We Leave: Cem is killed when his uncle tries to shoot his mother (as part of an "honor killing"; she was seen as dishonoring her family for leaving her abusive husband and refusing to return or at least send the Cem back), who was carrying the boy in her arms.
• In The VVitch, the first death happens to be the actual infant of the family. Considering that everyone but Thomasin dies, this extends to her little brother Caleb. While the twins are seemingly abducted by the witch than killed on the spot, the worst can be assumed.
• X-Men: Apocalypse has Magneto's daughter Nina being killed when a cop accidentally fires an arrow in her back. Daddy doesn't take it well, using his powers on a locket to kill the whole squad.

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