In fiction, being regressed to childhood or earlier is often treated as a temporary but positive thing: regardless of whether the nature of the regression is physical or purely mental, it can be a light-hearted means of humiliating arrogant characters, teaching immature characters to appreciate adulthood, or even giving villains a second chance at innocence. Even dangers like the risk of a Death by De-aging are treated as funny, exciting, or at the very least dramatic.
On occasion, however, the Baby Morph Episode isn't treated as light-hearted or enthralling. It's not even treated as an occasion for angst over being trapped in the wrong body or unable to grow up.
Here, being regressed is horrifying.
In this trope, physical regression can leave the afflicted character vulnerable to all kinds of previously innocuous threats that won't hesitate to kill them at a moment's notice, deprived of their former independence, at risk of losing their adult intelligence and identity, or if the regression continues to its logical conclusion, trapped in a body too young to move or communicate... assuming they don't end up facing a nightmarish Death by De-aging. Even the transformation may look absolutely hideous.
In variants where Mental Time Travel is involved with this, expect the character to find themselves reliving the worst moments in their entire life, as helpless as they were on the day they happened but now burdened with awareness of just how bad things really are.
In the case of the purely psychological regression, it's usually a Mind Rape that leaves the character gradually stripped of their identity, perhaps all the way to an infantile blank slate. Even worse, some characters who've undergone this process may even become an active threat, with the mentally regressed becoming Psychopathic Manchild-types who are too infantile to recognize that things like murder and torture are wrong.
And in a few cases, the regression isn't physical or mental at all, but perceptual: others perceive the affected individuals as children and treat them accordingly, leaving the luckless characters open to all kinds of repression and abuse despite their best efforts.
Regardless of the regression, additional horror may be drawn from the way the affected characters treated by adults: some will simply refuse to believe that the regressed character was older, leaving them faced with disbelief and apathy at every turn; others will be smotheringly protective of them, blocking their attempts to look for a cure, all "for their own good," of course; and an especially reprehensible few will attempt to profit from the situation, leaving the regressed character open to exploitation, abuse, violence, or even worse.
And if the characters are really unlucky, they might not just have to deal with obstructive adults: there might be some otherworldly presence that's actually inducing all this regression, often taking the form of another child or some kind of monstrous parental figure. Either way, the characters are left struggling to deal with all the aforementioned horrors plus a terrifying supernatural and physical threat they're not currently equipped to deal with.
Interestingly enough, this is a trope that isn't necessarily restricted to adult audiences: after all, children who are old enough to have gained a certain degree of independence from their parents naturally fear losing it, and even books and TV shows for younger audiences play up the horror of losing everything by being young again — even their lives.
Instances of this often overlap with Parent-Induced Extended Childhood, Merlin Sickness, Death by De-aging, Back to the Womb, Bemoaning the New Body, and the Nightmarish Nursery.
May also overlap with Not Growing Up Sucks, but only in the event that the lack of aging is played for personal horror rather than angst.
Examples:
- Digimon Adventure: In "No Questions, Please", Koushiro and Tentomon become trapped by Vadermon, who steals Koushiro's curious personality and tricks the now-incurious Koushiro into giving up his crest and further dulling his mind through useless "exercises". When Tentomon attempts to intervene, Vadermon shoots him, and with Koushiro too distracted to help him, Tentomon gradually regresses to his infant form, barely even retaining the ability to plead for help.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: Alessi's Stand, Sethan, is a Living Shadow that causes anyone who falls under it to immediately be rapidly de-aged. Alessi uses this ability to effectively De-power his enemies before he brutally and sadistically attacks them, and the concept is overall Played for Horror when he turns Polnareff into a small child barely capable of defending himself and turns an innocent woman into a fetus that rapidly starts to die from a lack of moisture.
- Junji Ito: In "Layers of Fear," sisters Reimi and Narumi discover that they bear a curse that causes their bodies to be made of layers of their previous selves, like nesting dolls. Their mother wishes Reimi could go back to when she was a cute baby, and tears off her layers until she sees Reimi's toddler face. Reimi is left as a grotesque, skeletally thin, adult-sized woman with a toddler's face and toddler's mind, unable to say anything but "Mama...carry me..."
- My Hero Academia: In the "Final War" arc, All For One triggers a copy of Eri's Rewind Quirk, which reverses the body state of the target and in his case, reverts him to his prime self, but he knows that he's Living on Borrowed Time since it's burning through the accumulated years from Life Force and has to finish his goals before he de-ages completely. By the end, not only has he completely failed, he's reverted to a demonic baby that's unceremoniously finished off by Katsuki Bakugo following a last-ditch Spearlike Bone attack that Bakugo just blocks and crushes with his teeth, exhausting the remaining time before All For One reverts to an egg cell that vanishes from existence.
- Big Finish Doctor Who: In the second chapter of "The Holy Terror," Childeric reveals that he has successfully transformed his son into a god through unethical experimentation; he then allows the Child to show off his powers on Lady Livilla. After reading her mind and taking note of her infantile greed, vanity, and ambition, the Child decides to show everyone who she really is by forcibly regressing her to infancy, during which Livilla can be heard screaming in pain and fear in an increasingly youthful voice, the Child's Ominous Music Box Tune theme turns louder and more grating by the second, and even the Doctor can only look on in horror. As soon as this sequence is complete, the Child then begins to play with baby Livilla as if she were a doll, resulting in increasingly panicked wails that are eventually cut off by a Sickening "Crunch!", followed by the Child sulking at being left with a broken toy — indicating that he just murdered her.
- Absolute Superman: Ra's al Ghul deals with one of the Omega Men trying to kill him by dunking the would-be assassin in a Lazarus Pit until the Omega Man is de-aged into a helpless baby. The man is shown screaming throughout the process, with the scene cutting back to him later as an infant lying in a pile of adult-sized clothes and only somewhat cognizant of his surroundings. Ra's then takes the baby to the balcony on his skyscraper lair and drops him over the railing, firmly establishing himself as a terrifying and utterly remorseless villain.
- Runaways (Rainbow Rowell): In the "Best Friends Forever" arc, Molly's new "friend" Abby is revealed to be an adult woman trapped in a preteen body, the result of an ill-conceived spell by the Enchantress to "protect" her from the horrors of growing up. She attempts to manipulate Molly into accepting a similar curse so that they can be together forever, but the enchanted cupcake that she uses for this scheme gets snagged by Julie Power instead, causing her to revert to a preteen. Julie naturally freaks out over this, forcing the Runaways to steal an antidote from Abby. As it happens, Abby only had a single dose of the antidote and is thus stuck as a preteen forever.
- The Witching Hour: In "The Girl Who Grew Younger", wealthy heiress Sara has just been forced to dump her poor boyfriend in exchange for a million-dollar inheritance on her 21st birthday, only for the cake to produce a plume of magical green smoke when she blows out the candles. The next morning, she has regressed to sixteen years old, and to the horror of her controlling aunt and uncle, continues getting younger and less aware over the next few days until she's become an infant. By the time a doctor arrives to help, Sara's regressed to nothingness. And then the horror of the situation is promptly subverted when it turns out that the whole thing was a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Sara used the million-dollar inheritance to hire lookalikes of her at different ages, successfully tricking her guardians into believing that she was regressing out of existence — while the real Sara fled the country alongside her boyfriend.
- Zenith: In Phase IV, Dr Michael Peyne ends up as the last surviving human being in existence after the Lloigor take over the universe, cursed with a slowly accelerating case of Merlin Sickness so he has enough time to appreciate the victory of his out-of-control creations before he dies. As such, the later chapters of this Phase amp up the horror elements by featuring Peyne being slowly destroyed by both his physical and mental regression, losing all his stamina, hiding inside his house as adult confidence fails him, forgetting his old life, and gradually losing his intelligence, to the point that his Apocalyptic Log is reduced to almost incomprehensible scrawls. In the end, he's left as an infant cradled in the arms of a Humanoid Abomination, who gleefully notes there's nothing left of his mind, before throwing baby Peyne into the air and watching him regress into nothingness.
- The Nightmare House has an example where the character is not physically or mentally regressed but rather treated as younger. In Lisa's nightmare, she's sent back to daycare and put in Goo Goo Getup. Then, an evil teddy bear says she must remain in her playpen, and when Lisa protests, he spanks her, leaving her distressed and calling out for her mother Rita.
- Barbarian: The Mother is a deeply deformed Tragic Monster created by generations of incestuous rape at the hands of her father, Frank. When Tess and AJ stumble into her lair, she forces them to be her "babies" (which is also how she addresses them), forcing AJ to breastfeed from her.
- V/H/S/Halloween: The segment "Coochie Coochie Coo" is centered on an Urban Legend about "The Mommy", who kidnaps misbehaving teenagers on Halloween night and makes them into her children. The main characters, Lacie and Kaleigh, find this out the hard way when they're lured into the Mommy's house, only to find themselves trapped in a constantly shifting Nightmarish Nursery haunted by her previous victims, all of whom have been forced to drink her milk and mentally regressed into overgrown infants with childishly distorted faces. Lacie and Kaleigh are left fleeing blindly across the maze with the Mommy in hot pursuit, hurting them when they refuse to submit... and when all else fails, she can lull them to sleep with a Super-Effective Lullaby. The segment ends with Lacie being captured and converted, while Kaleigh accepts her fate and snuggles up to the Mommy.
- The Cuckoo Clock of Doom: The action kicks off with Michael tampering with his father's new cuckoo clock in an attempt to get his bratty sister Tara in trouble, only for the Artifact of Doom to send him backwards through time whenever he goes to sleep. In the process, he grows progressively younger and younger, endures some of the worst moments of his life along the way, and is obstructed at every turn by adults who refuse to help him — either with Tara's abuse or with his regression. He ends up as a baby, completely helpless, and at the very real risk of being rewound out of existence if he can't get back to the clock in time. He manages to reset the clock and go back to the morning of his 12th birthday...but discovers that he accidentally erased Tara from existence in the process. Since his life is way better without her, he doesn't feel particularly sorry about it.
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: One of the many disturbing or dangerous artifacts in the Department of Mysteries is a giant bell jar containing a tiny egg that floats upwards, hatches into a hummingbird, sinks back down, and transforms back into an egg. During Harry and friends' fight with the Death Eaters, a Death Eater trips and falls with his head sinking into the bell jar, then pulls it out, leaving him with a baby's head on top of a grown man's body, wailing and flailing his giant fists about in all directions. His appearance is described as "grotesque" and "utterly bizarre."
- J. G. Ballard's surreal horror short story "Mr F Is Mr F" features main character Charles Freeman finding himself slowly growing younger. Over the course of the next few days, his wife Elizabeth treats him more and more like her son, repressing and infantilizing him to the point of ignoring his increasingly frantic efforts to explain that he's not a child, forcing him into progressively smaller clothes, imprisoning him in the house, cutting off his attempts to escape or summon help, and moving him into a nursery. Left completely helpless in the face of his wife-turned-mother, Charles is reduced to an infant, loses his mind, and is absorbed into Elizabeth's womb — where he rapidly ceases to exist...allowing Elizabeth to shack up with another man.
- The Knight in Screaming Armor: One of the plotlines features you and your cousins toying around with a magical clock and putting it into reverse. As a result, all three of you begin to regress in both mind and body: though the results initially appear light-hearted, with the increasingly immature Abby and Kip making fun of how silly they look, the atmosphere takes a sharp swing back into horror as they begin losing their ability to stand upright and start to panic. What follows is a frantic race to reset the clock before Death by De-aging sets in, with Abby and Kip having mentally regressed to the point of total helplessness, while you struggle to reach the clock despite your rapidly-weakening muscles. Thankfully, you manage to reset the clock before it's too late... but while your cousins are restored to normal, you are left as a baby. It's left uncertain if you're doomed to regress to death, if you'll have to age back the normal way, or if you're going to be trapped in the form of an infant forever, but either way, the story ends with you wailing at how unfair this is.
- Living Dead Girl: Ray's treatment of "Alice" is a non-supernatural variant. Ray kidnapped Alice when she was ten, and now that five years have passed, he's obsessed with "keeping" her young by any means possible to satisfy his pedophiliac urges. He starves her so she can only ever be 100 pounds. He forces her to wear children's clothes, switching over to the "boy's" section when the girls' dresses no longer fit her. When she got her first period, he tied her up and thought about killing her, but he found medication that stopped her periods altogether.
- Rewind (Terry England): Seventeen adults are regressed to nine years of age by aliens with no explanation and no hope of hiding the results from the world. Quite apart from the fear and uncertainty of having their entire adult lives ripped away from them, the Rewound Children immediately find their rights stripped from them as well, either on the grounds of no longer being adults or no longer being perceived as human, leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation and abuse by almost everyone: the government, the media, religious lunatics, even their own families — some of whom disown the Rewound on religious grounds. The abuse they suffer goes to some truly horrifying extremes, with the Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of one Rewound selling him to an interested buyer, and a tabloid printing nude medical photos of the Rewound. More than once, the Rewound are left helpless in the face of physical violence, with one becoming a Human Sacrifice and two being torn apart by an angry mob, and main character Aaron only survives thanks to the efforts of his caretakers.
- Hinted at in Something Wicked This Way Comes: a magic carousel can age people backwards or forwards depending on how it's turning when they ride it. An old lady named Ms. Foley wishes to be restored to young adulthood when she was beautiful. Later, Will Holloway finds her— regressed to an eight-year-old child, helpless, terrified, and unable to convince anyone who she was.
- Wayward Children: Katherine Lundy made a bargain as a teenager to start aging backwards in an attempt to be able to see her siblings while staying in the magical world she lived in. Unfortunately for her, her bargain was a bad one that resulted in her being permanently exiled back to Earth and by the events of Every Heart a Doorway she's physically about 12 while mentally an adult, with no way to reverse her condition. Her lack of size and strength means that she has no means of defending herself from the killer at the school, resulting in her murder.
- Doctor Who: In "The Bells of Saint John", after the evil plan is foiled, the Great Intelligence orders Miss Kizlet to reset the memories of all their employees. When Miss Kizlet herself gets reset, she mentally reverts to a scared little girl, wondering where her parents are, indicating she had been under the Great Intelligence's control since childhood. For good measure, the scene in which this is discovered is easily the quietest and most disturbing of all the employee reversion scenes.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): Downplayed in season 2; Claudia, already a case of Not Growing Up Sucks, joins an all-vampire theatre troupe in the hope that being among others of her kind means she'll finally be treated like an adult. Instead, the director, Armand, forces her to play a toddler and dress up like a child... and when Claudia complains, Armand crosses the line into outright abuse by forcing her to wear the getup even when she's not performing. The constant forced performances as a toddler, coupled with her frustration that her father Louis refuses to step in and intervene because he's in love with Armand, causes her already-questionable sanity to deteriorate further and inspires her to make increasingly erratic choices — including murdering a drunk passerby in the street for singing at her while she's in costume.
- The Prisoner (1967): In "Once Upon a Time", as a last-ditch effort to get information from Number Six, the Village uses some sci-fi brainwashing to mentally regress him to just two years old. After he's left non-verbally puttering around a recreation of a playground, his interrogator Number Two guides him to mentally re-age over the course of several hours. Regaining his mental faculties is no respite, however, as this procedure's endgame is to age Number Six into senility and death.
- In "The Thaw" from Star Trek: Voyager, a group of people, including a couple members of the USS Voyager crew, are trapped in a simulation that has been taken over by a clown that is a personification of fear. The Clown senses that Ensign Harry Kim is afraid of being The Baby of the Bunch and briefly turns him into an actual baby.
- Stage 5 of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the End of Time features the track "Synapse Retrogenesis", an abstract representation of the theory that people with dementia mentally regress as the condition worsens. It starts out relatively peaceful, but an unpleasant static appears around the 8-minute mark, and it gets worse from there.
- Gypsy: Downplayed; Rose not "allowing" her teenage daughters and the boys in their kiddy vaudeville act to be over 10 years old for the sake of the act, to the point that Louise has had ten candles on her birthday cake for many years in a row, is played for laughs at first. The tragedy of it soon becomes apparent, however, as Louise sadly sings, "I wonder how old I am?" while June, held back from an opportunity to go to school and be a real actress because Rose doesn't want to lose her "baby", vents to Louise how much she hates pretending to be a little kid all the time. The 2008 Broadway production particularly highlighted this by contrasting June's mature natural voice with the fake baby voice she does for the act.
- Fallout 3: The mission to Vault 112 reveals that the residents have spent the last two centuries trapped in a virtual reality simulator and tortured by Overseer Stanislaus Braun, who can use his admin-level privileges over the simulation to alter his victims in any way he pleases. You find this out the hard way upon entering the virtual Stepford Suburbia in search of James — only to end up being immediately regressed to ten years old and stripped of all your weapons, skills, and adult stats. What follows is a surreally disturbing quest in which you're forced to play nice with Braun until you can either appease him or try to find another way out. For good measure, any attempts to warn the other residents that they're trapped in a simulation will result in the brainwashed adults either ignoring you or laughing at you for your childish imagination.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: While Link spends most of the game's second half as an adult armed to the teeth with a variety of items and weapons, he must return to his child form and enter the bottom of the well in Kakariko Village in order to unlock the Shadow Temple. Said well hides one of the most disturbing areas in the game, a Hellhole Prison crawling with ReDeads and the Dead Hand, a bloody Humanoid Abomination that can render Link basically helpless by grabbing him with Nightmare Hands that sprout up from the floor.
- Little Nightmares: In this
live-action trailer, an adult man plays the game itself, only to find the real world changing to reflect the environments of the Maw and even manifesting one of the Chefs, forcing him to hide so he can continue playing on the Nintendo Switch in bed. Eventually, he dozes off... and wakes up to find that he's become a child. Terrified, vulnerable, and disoriented, the regressed gamer picks up the Switch... and then something reaches out of the screen to grab him. The kid screams in helpless terror — before we cut to the advertising slogan and the game title.
- Neverending Nightmares: In "Childish Things," Thomas wakes up to find that he's now a child, and even weaker and frailer than he was as an adult. Consequently, in this nightmare and the connecting "Wayward Dreamer" finale, the horror is amplified even further than usual. Not only is young Thomas being constantly subjected to scenes and visuals based on his childhood traumas, but he's pitted against a slowly-advancing army of his little sister's dolls, and unlike most of the other enemies in the game, they can't be tricked, hidden from, or dispelled — only fled from... and they will disembowel him if they catch up. Consequently, of all the ending levels of the game, while "Destroyed Dreams" and "The Final Descent" are focused on dread, self-destruction, and tragedy, "Wayward Dreamer" is pure childhood horror.
- Epithet Erased: The bounty hunter Zora has the ability to fast forward and reverse the time of any object she wishes, including people — particularly one unfortunate Banzai Blaster she de-ages into a helpless baby and then leaves for dead in the middle of the woods.
- Misfits in Toyland: In life, Mel was a Spoiled Brat, always causing and getting into trouble. As such, Krampus turned her into a baby doll. Now trying her damnedest to resist toy fugue and unable to speak (she broke the pullstring for her voice box), she is fully dependent on Dolly's care against her will.
- Metamor Keep: Age regression is one of the three possible forms the curse of Metamor Keep might take, and most writers depict it as worse than the Gender Bender or theriomorph versions. In the unofficial sequel Metamor City, where the curse is partially controllable, age regression is extremely rare.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-597
is a giant blob of lactating breasts that produces an infantilizing effect on any mammalian lifeform in close proximity, inspiring them to drink from it: anyone succumbing to the urge will undergo a complete mental regression as they continue to drink, eventually losing all brain function within an hour and being reduced to mindlessly suckling for the rest of their lives. Anyone who resists the urge to drink, like the janitorial staff left hosing down the previous victims, experiences a gradual mental degeneration involving immaturity, mood swings, loss of intelligence, and insanity, often ending in oedipal rape/murder, suicide, or just a frantic attempt to drink from 597.
- SCP-6618
contains a hostile entity known only as "Papa", who abducts people going about their day-to-day lives via unknown means and forcefully disciplines them using horrific and often downright depraved methods. The article focuses on his treatment of one young man in particular, a college student named James Vane, who undergoes a very gradual mental regression as showcased through a series of poorly-made home videos, until by nine recordings in, he's been fully reduced to the mindset of an infant. The story ends with the reveal that several hundreds of people were abducted in this manner, and that almost all of them are dead, with Vane, one of the only survivors, having suffered nightmarish bodily contortions and only able to scream "PAPA!" over and over again.
- SCP-597
- Adventure Time: In “Frost and Fire”, after watching a fight between his girlfriend Flame Princess and the Ice King, Finn experiences a strangely erotic dream in which FP sets his crotch on fire (which he seems to enjoy a lot) and the Cosmic Owl appears (which means the dream is a premonition of sorts) and says something inaudible. In an attempt to relive the dream, Finn manipulates FP into fighting the Ice King again and again. In the final fight, FP unleashes heat do intense that Finn passes out, and Finn has the dream again… only this time, FP’s flame reduces Finn to an infant, who can only babble helplessly as the Cosmic Owl tells him “You blew it,” letting know he’s ruined his relationship with FP through his childish manipulation tactics.
- Batman: Caped Crusader: Therapist Harleen Quinzel is eventually revealed to lead a double life as Harley Quinn, a supervillain who kidnaps misanthropic billionaires and tortures them until they are broken mentally and develop new identities that she gives them — one of which is an overgrown, spoiled baby.
- Dungeons & Dragons (1983): In the season 1 episode "Quest of the Skeleton Warrior", the heroes find themselves in the Lost Tower where they are confronted by their worst fears. Since Bobby's fear is being completely helpless, the tower turns him back into a baby, leaving him defenseless against the monsters in the tower.
- Miraculous Ladybug: Downplayed in "Daddycop". Unable to deal with the fact that his "little girl" is the most hated girl at school for reasons that are mostly her fault, Roger is transformed into Daddycop, with the power to force everyone he blasts to see his daughter Sabrina the way he does — as an innocent child. While Sabrina herself is not physically affected, she is understandably horrified at having hordes of Parisians cooing over her. Underscoring the horror, the part of Daddycop that is still Roger can be seen pantomiming rocking a nonexistent baby in his arms, oblivious to the chaos that his alter ego is causing or Sabrina's pleas for him to stop.
- Steven Universe: In "Steven's Birthday", Steven shapeshifts himself to look older when he realises he hasn't physically aged in 6 years and worries that Connie won't want to be his friend if she's growing up faster than he is, only for the strain of keeping up this form to cause him to turn into a baby. The fact that he keeps on crying until Connie assures him she'll still be friends with him no matter how long he takes to age and the fact that he remembered what she said after turning back into his usual self reveal that he was still his mental age while stuck as a baby.
- The theory of retrogenesis posits that people with dementia mentally regress as the condition worsens. They gradually lose their independence as they forget the skills they learned in reverse order, from knowing how to cook in the early stages to simple self-care in the final stages.
