In Aquaman: The Cast of the Angler, the Angler kidnaps Katie King and forces her to watch as he and his goons fight Aquaman.
The Banana Splits Movie: Fleegle forces Thadd into a wooden box and locks him inside, while he makes his fiancé Poppy witness him getting brutally sawed in half and then presents his gruesome remains to her. This causes Poppy to lose her sanity by the end of the film.
Berlin Syndrome: Clare gets the attention of a man who comes to the door and asks him for help. He doesn't know English though, and Andi comes back the same time. She's forced to watch in horror while Andi kills him with a crowbar.
Bird Box: Deranged survivors feel compelled to do this to others. Gary speaks of them physically forcing people's eyes open, and indeed, this is what he does to Cheryl at the window.
Blood Harvest: After stringing Scott up by his ankles, Gary lays Jill on the floor and prepares to rape her, even turning Scott to make sure he has a good view. He's scared into stopping by police sirens.
BloodRayne: Rayne, as a girl, could only watch from her hiding place as Kagan murdered her mother.
Casino: Nicky Santoro’s gang, on orders from his bosses, make him watch as they bludgeon his brother, Dominick, to within an inch of his life with aluminum bats before turning them on him and burying them both alive.
Cat's Eye: In "Quitters, Inc.", after smoking once, Dick is forced to watch Cindy in the electric cage.
The Condemned (2007): Paco was crippled and chained up, being unable to get away from hearing or seeing his wife Rosa being raped by McStarley, then murdered.
The Joker makes Harvey Dent listen to Rachel's last words as part of his Evil Plan to break him.
One of the Joker's own multiple choice pasts involves him as a child watching helplessly as his father stabbed his mother, then used the same knife to give the future Joker his Glasgow Grin.
In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane gives the imprisoned Bruce Wayne a satellite connection so he can watch as Bane rips Gotham apart. Bruce smashes the screen before escaping.
The killer does this to his first victim in Die Watching, setting a TV monitor next to the chair she is tied to so that she can watch him kill her.
In the Double Dragon (1994) movie, not only does Koga Shuko kill Satori Imada, the Lee brothers' guardian, by blowing up her place, but he also uses his Dragon Medallion, the one that grants power over the soul, to take her over just before things go boom, just to make her watch. It manages to be by far the cruelest thing Shuko does in the movie.
In Even Lambs Have Teeth, Katie and Sloan tie Jed's mother to a chair and force her to watch as they pretend to hang him. Then, just when she thinks he is safe, they shoot him on the head.
In The Final, the outcasts chain their victims to the floor and set up a torture chair in the front of the room, torturing and mutilating them one by one as their friends watch.
In For a Few Dollars More, El Indio, the Big Bad, in one of his first Kick the Dog moments of the movie, forces a guy who took money to place him behind bars to watch as the family that he started with that money (his wife and his little boy) are taken outside and shot to death, while also making him listen to the pocket watch that Indio always carries.
Forced Vengeance. Chuck Norris' character leaves his girlfriend Claire with his friend Leroy for protection. Unfortunately The Brute storms the building with his gangsters and breaks Leroy's back, leaving him paralyzed so he can watch helplessly as Claire is raped and killed.
The Friday the 13th remake has Jason using a Bear Trap to snare Richie and make him watch as Amanda, who he's hung over the campfire in her sleeping bag, is roasted alive, one of the most sadistic things that Jason has done to date.
Invoked in The Green Hornet. "He took my favorite toy, and he ripped the head off. Right in front of me."
A rare instance of a hero subjecting a villain to this happens in The Green Mile. Percy Wetmore, a sadistic asshole to the core, puts a dry sponge on Delacroix's head before his execution by electric chair, resulting in a truly horrifying sequence when the switch is thrown and Delacroix is burned alive. When Percy sees just how horrific it is to watch someone burn to death he has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and turns away. Paul Edgecombe, thoroughly pissed off at Percy, grabs him and forces him to watch the results of his act of cruelty.
In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Azog takes great delight in holding up Thorin's nephew Fíli and impaling him while Thorin and his companions are too far away to act.
His son Bolg noticeably pauses right before he kills Kíli in front of Tauriel, giving her just enough time to realize what he was about to do.
Hotel Rwanda: A heartbreaking example is discussed by a Red Cross worker who tells how she was forced to watch Hutu soldiers butcher Tutsi children, even one who begged her, "Please don't let them kill me. I promise I won't be Tutsi anymore."
In Hot Spur, the 11-year-old Carlo was forced to watch while O'Hare and two of his men raped his 17-year-old sister.
The Hunger Games: It's required by law that everyone in the Districts watch the Hunger Games in some capacity. It hammers home the message that the Capitol is sending: we can abduct your children and force them to fight to the death in a sensationalist bloodsport and there is nothing you can do about it.
It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Winnie can only watch helplessly in both timelines as her best friend, mother and aunt are murdered. She does manage to bring the latter two back however by resetting the timeline.
In Lady Ninja Kaede, Kaede is forced to watch as her sister Koharu is raped.
Law Abiding Citizen: Clyde removes the eyelids of the man who killed his wife and daughter and puts a giant mirror above the operating table he's been strapped to, forcing him to watch as he is tortured and dismembered.
Louis, the Child King: Louis is forced to watch the bodies of the men who died fighting against the Fronde for him to make a point about the sacrifices needed to secure royal power and order.
The Avengers (2012): Loki threatens to have Clint, who's under Loki's control, ambiguously rape, torture, and finally kill Natasha, and then release him from the mind control to allow him to see what he did before killing him. A bit of variation, however, as it's Natasha who he is threatening.
Both Loki and Gamora are forced to watch their siblings being tortured in front of them. Both cave in to Thanos's demands.
When Thor is captured by Thanos and the Black Order, he is Bound and Gagged and can only watch helplessly as Loki and Heimdall are murdered by Thanos in front of him.
The Big Bad's thing in Opera is forcing the main character to watch him brutally kill people. He does this by placing needles under her eyes, making her unable to blink.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: After Bootstrap Bill betrays him by helping Will escape the Flying Dutchman, Davy Jones makes him watch as he summons the Kraken to destroy the ship that Will is currently on. Though Bootstrap is initially unaware of it, Will gets out alive.
In the Polish film Przedmiescie, a husband walks in on his wife having sex with another woman. When he loses his temper, the lesbian lover floors him with judo, then straps him to a chair and forces him to watch her perform analingus on his wife.
The Quick and the Dead. As a child, Lady was forced to watch Herod hang her father, who asks the Big Bad not to let her watch. Instead, Herod says he'll let her father go if she's able to Shoot the Rope. Unused to the heavy revolver, she accidentally puts a bullet in her father's head.
Red Eye: Inverted. When Rippner faces Lisa in their final confrontation, Rippner tells Lisa that he is going to make her father watch what he's going to do to her (instead of the hero/heroine watching a loved one get harmed). Whatever he was planning on doing, it is averted in the end.
Requiem (2021): Evelyn is held back from intervening by her father and can only watch as her lover Mary is burned alive for supposedly enchanting her into them being together.
RoboCop 2: Hob turns away as Cain mercilessly butchers a traitor to his cause. Cain, proving just how evil he is, forces the maybe-15-years-old-tops Hob to watch anyway.
In Salt, the heroine is forced to watch her husband getting drowned by Russian mobsters. The scene is particularly cruel as she is actually being asked if she wants to save her husband but doing so would have blown her cover.
Done, quite notoriously, to Tony in Scarface. After being captured in a drug deal gone bad, Tony is forced to watch as Angel is messily dismembered with a chainsaw. He's rescued just before facing the same fate.
Mal does this to the Operative in Serenity — torture in this case being watching a heartbroken Alliance researcher tell and show off the atrocity on Miranda — the Alliance's greatest crime — right before the speaker is attacked, raped, and ultimately eaten by Reavers. The feed goes on. It also tortures him in a different way. It destroys his entire view that the Alliance is truly making the universe a better place, which is the reason he was doing horrible things for them.
In Marv's short of Sin City, his friend and parole officer Lucille was kidnapped by the cannibal Kevin, who then cut off and ate her hand. When Marv finds her, the poor woman breaks down and cries "he made me watch!"
In Snatch., in retribution for refusing to throw a match, Mickey is forced to watch his mother's caravan burn down while she's asleep inside.
In Soldier, the Super-Soldier squad is forced to watch a pack of dogs attacking a wild boar as children during their training.
Spaceballs parodies this; the bad guys' plan to have the King give the air-shield combination is to force him to watch them give his daughter back ... her old nose!
Spawn (1997): After Clown's plan is foiled in the climax, he prepares to rape Wanda in front of a beaten Spawn and forces him to watch. Cogliostro intervenes to prevent this, prompting Clown to retreat to Hell.
This happens in Spectre when Blofeld forces Madeleine to watch Mr. White commit suicide. When Bond tells Blofeld to shut off the video, one of the SPECTRE thugs hit him in the leg. Bond convinces Madeleine not to watch before the thug knocks him out. Blofeld later forces Madeleine to watch Bond being tortured.
Wendy Teller's first scene Special Forces have her being forced to remain where she is, watching General Rafendek's army having two hundred Moldivian refugees massacred in their Death March while capturing the entire scene on camera. Later on, the heroes have to stay behind their cover and remain silent while Rafendek had their new ally, a local schoolteacher named Saira, executed for educating lower-class citizens, and another scene where Rafendek's soldiers captures two of the heroes - protagonist Don Harding and their team's Friendly Sniper, Jess - alive, and then making Harding watch while he had Jess executed.
Princess Leia was forced to watch the destruction of Alderaan in A New Hope.
It's the core of the Emperor's plan in Return of the Jedi: park Luke in front of a window with a view of the slaughter of the Alliance fleet, and indulge in some good old-fashioned Evil Gloating until he's ready to cross the Moral Event Horizon.
It happens again in The Rise of Skywalker, where Palpatine shows Rey the resistance fleet getting curb-stomped, and tells her that she can stop it if she'll just take the Sith throne.
A rather chilling example in Strange Days: a rapist blindfolds his victim, then hooks her up to the memory-recording device he's using at that moment... forcing her to experience her own rape and subsequent murder as though she were in his body. So not only is it happening to her, she's forced to get off on it the way he is.
Bryan Mills threatens to invoke this in Taken when confronting a corrupt French agent about the whereabouts of his kidnapped daughter. After the agent attempts to intimidate him into dropping the case, Bryan shoots the agent's wife in the arm, assures him that he only winged her, and orders him to help, or "the last thing you'll see before I make your children orphans is the bullet I put between her eyes." The agent complies.
In the sequel, the tables are turned and it's Bryan who is told that he'll have to watch his ex-wife die when her throat is partially slit and she's suspended upside down to bleed out.
In Ten Dead Men, Hart's men hold Ryan down and force him to watch as his girlfriend Amy is shot and killed: close enough that her blood splatters over Ryan's face.
This backfires in Tenet when Sator sends his goons to rough up the Protagonist because he might be having an affair with his abused wife Kat. She tries to leave the scene, but the driver refuses to do so, so she can watch what happens. What Kat actually sees is the Protagonist kicking ass and walking off unharmed, convincing her to seek his help. Played straight later on when Sator forces the Protagonist to watch him shoot Kat with an inverted bullet.
In Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, after Sonja is tried and found guilty of high treason mainly due to her being impregnated by her lover, the werewolf Lucian, with a child who would be half vampire, half werewolf, her punishment consisted of having her chained to a pillar and Lucian chained to the floor face-to-face, where she was forced to watch Lucian get whipped. Then, it all gets worse when Lucian was then forced to watch her get burned to death by exposure to the sun.
In Warcraft (2016), when Medivh's shield accidentally separates Lothar and Callan, trapping the latter with an orc warband, Lothar can do nothing but watch as his son's entire unit is slaughtered and Callan himself is impaled by Blackhand. The orc even looks up to check if Lothar's watching.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Judge Doom does an offhand version of this when he has Eddie Valiant, Roger Rabbit, and Jessica Rabbit held captive, providing the quote for the main page.
In The Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch of the West has Dorothy and her friends cornered at the climax of the movie, she gloats, "The last to go will see the first three go before her. And her mangy little dog, too!"
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