Scales: Mermaids are Real (or sometimes ''Scales: A Mermaid's Tale) is a 2017 movie about a young girl, called Siren, who realizes that she's a mermaid.
Tropes:
- Bloodless Carnage: Adam gets impaled with a harpoon at one point.
- Body Horror: The intermediate forms of Siren's tail growing are quite grotesque. There's also a shot of Adam's wrist shattering.
- Dragon-in-Chief: The leader of the hunters just wants to heal people. His second in command, on the other hand, seems to be in it primarily because he takes sadistic pleasure in tormenting and killing mermaids. While the head hunter decides to change sides after his son is cured, he continues to threaten them and Siren kills them.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: The sadistic mermaid hunter gets all the water pulled out of him by Siren until there's nothing left. He definitely deserved it, but the fact that it was the kid protagonist who killed him makes it rather shocking.
- Freudian Excuse: The head hunter wants to harvest mermaid blood to heal his son's disease. Once they realize this, the mermaids heal him willingly.
- Making a Splash: Siren has the ability to control water, as do the other mermaids in the movie.
- Missing Mom: Siren's birth mother is said to be dead. However, she's actually a mermaid and has stayed in the water to protect her daughter.
- One-Gender Race: There aren't any male mermaids in the movie.
- The Power of Blood: A select few mermaids are able to heal people and cure diseases with their blood.
- Sirens Are Mermaids: Literally, as Siren is an actual mermaid. They also have magical songs, similar to sirens.
- Van Helsing Hate Crimes: The hunters are seeking out mermaids to kill and harvest for their blood, despite knowing full well that mermaids are sapient beings no different from any other person.
- Would Hurt a Child: A given, since they're hunting Siren. To take it farther, one of them drags an unturned mermaid away and gloats to her terrified mother about how he'll have to take "twice as much blood", and later tries to kill her simply because he can.
