I watched a trailer this morning that reminded me that I’ve watched a few movies with the premise that a character’s missing and presumed child was instead [fill in blank here].
So for fun, can we list some movies, shows, and/or books that have that basic theme: missing children aren’t actually dead, they’re, um, something else. Genre doesn’t really matter, though it seems more likely a plot in scifi and horror.
Spoiler boxes, please, if you want to explain what they are other than dead.
Here are a couple to start with.
The Forgotten
The kids aren’t dead, they’ve been kidnapped by aliens who are testing the adults to see how much trauma they can handle before they convince themselves that the kids are dead rather than missing
The Tall Man
The kids aren’t dead, they’ve been kidnapped by a couple who has been giving them to other families because they think their real parents are unfit
I stopped watching The X-Files several seasons before it actually ended, but a while back it occurred to me to wonder if they ever explained what really happened to Mulder’s sister. He’d believed for years that he’d witnessed her being abducted by aliens, but there was plenty of room to doubt whether this was really true. She might have been kidnapped and murdered by a serial killer, handed over to the government for secret experiments, etc.
I checked Wikipedia and found out that the mystery had been resolved, in a surprisingly stupid manner. [spoiler]Samantha Mulder had basically been handed over to the aliens by the Cigarette Smoking Man for use in alien experiments, although that’s not the dumb part.
The aliens finished with her and brought her back, and she was taken away by the government for secret experiments. She managed to escape and wound up in a mental hospital, where she remained until supernatural beings called “Walk-Ins” *like the closet) took pity on her and turned her into magical starlight.
Seriously.[/spoiler]Since I didn’t see the episode(s) in question then for all I know they managed to tell this idiotic-sounding story in a satisfying manner, but I kind of doubt it.
Peter Pan?
Jumanji.
Subverted in
The Others
The kids aren’t sick they’re dead
I don’t think I need to spoiler this because it isn’t a mystery on the show. In The Strain, the missing kids (that no one is looking for because they were blind orphans–yep the show lays it on thick) are now Vampire Spider Monsters.
SW:TOR: … kidnapped and brainwashed into becoming a psycho killer in a rebellion (not THE Rebellion, a rebellion).
Serenity: actually, see above.
Sinister and Sinister 2
The missing children from each murdered family end up (after having murdered said family) as undead slaves of an ancient Babylonian demon who’s also slowly devouring their souls and using them to recruit more children.
The Deep End of the Ocean.
That was one of the worst books I ever finished. I figured out all the plot twists 50 pages before they happened. :rolleyes:
Huh. I wonder if the OP has hit upon a trope that doesn’t have its own TV Tropes page yet. At least not one that I could find (correct me if there is one). I suppose Peter Pan should be the trope namer.
I guess the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin kinda-sorta fits. The rat-catching piper lures away the children as he had done with the rats. The way I’ve heard it explained, he’s meant to be symbolic of death, in a time of high child mortality.
How about The City of Lost Children? I haven’t seen it in yonks, so I don’t remember if anyone presumes that the children are dead, but in any case, they are actually
being kidnapped by a mad scientist, who wants to steal their dreams.
Maybe this kind of shades into some zombie-type stories, too. Les Revenants comes to mind, where people, notably a teenage girl, are
[spoiler]well, OK, dead. But they get better. At least for a while.
I suppose it’s not the same thing, but the aforementioned teen returning to her family has a lot of the “we wish our kid wasn’t actually dead” motive about it.[/spoiler]
The Last Starfighter
Kid goes off with aliens to fight a war. Leaves a gross synthetic replacement on Earth. Synthetic replacement is discovered to not be the real guy, and hijinks ensue.
*Flight of the Navigator *
A 12 year-old boy disappears for 8 years and then returns without having aged. He was abducted by aliens.
Peter Pan and all of it’s spin offs with the “Lost Boys.”
Also, Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman. He kept getting lost and being presumed dead.
I wish that had been the crux of the show. Have Mulder find his sister still young (somehow) and alive and let them walk off into the sunset.
Don’t want to cancel the show? Give Scully half a season struggling to come to grips with a Mulder-less universe, and bring Mulder back cause now that he’s “won” he finds his life hollow.
Eh, that one’s bit complicated, since in the end…
It turns out the game takes place entirely in the mind of the player. Presumably, anybody who looked in on Alan would just think he was really engrossed in the game.
Not the premise, but a major plot point in 12 Monkeys was the kid they thought fell down a well but was actually hiding out in a nearby barn the whole time. It’s how the guy from the future proves to the woman from the present (1996) that he’s from the future. That, and a fresh WWI bullet wound in his leg.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Not dead, just runaways.
The Borribles
The kids aren’t dead, they’ve run away and become Borribles, pointy-eared adventurers and scavengers who remain ageless unless they’re caught and their ears are cropped. Sort of grungy, cynical urban Lost Boys.
Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Forgot about that one. Not dead, just shrunk.