Recently I was watching again a movie on TCM title Westward the Women. For it’s time it was fairly gritty. It’s a drama about a wagon train of women traveling to California to marry. Before they start the guy who organizes the journey tells them “By the time this is over one in three of you will be dead.”
One woman is a widow with a young son, he looks to be about ten. The kid dies when a gun misfires. That surprised me the first time I saw it.
This reminded me of how in movies with an elelment of danger the kid or kids almost always survive, often when an adult sacrifices themself to save them. But I do remember in the remake of The Blob how a kid is eaten by the blob. And in The Mist a guy shoots his own young son, to save him from what he thinks will be a worse death at the fangs(or whatever) of the mysterious monsters.
I know there are others, but I’m having a hard time remembering them.
In the Mia Sorvino 1990s-icky genre horror flick Mimic, there was a group of kids who I thought were there to fill the standard “Baker Street Irregulars” trope, but got eaten by bugs.
Multiple kids die in IT, including in the very first scene. Of course, pretty much all the significant characters in that film are kids, and it’s Stephen King, so…
In the original Frankenstein movie, Frankie accidentally kills a little girl.
In The World According to Garp, his son dies when an enraged Garp (Robin Williams) violently rams the car in which his wife is fellating her lover. Very Sad, but it does lead to a great line when Roberta Muldoon (John Lithgow in an Oscar-nominated performance) says of Garp’s wife’s lover,
I mean, I had mine removed surgically under general anesthesia. But to have it bitten off in a Buick!
In the Star Wars prequel Revenge of the Sith, Anakin’s heel turn into becoming Darth Vader is punctuated when, in the course of leading an assault by clone troopers on the Jedi Temple, he walks into the Jedi Council chamber, where a group of “younglings” (pre-teen Jedi trainees) has taken refuge, and he ignites his lightsaber. The scene cuts at that point, but it’s clearly meant to show that Anakin killed all of the kids.
How did he die? I remember a scene from a western where a young boy got tangled in the reins of his horse or maybe it was a buggy accident and his body was dragged through the dust and brush and he was dead. Made an impact on me as a little kid.
I’ve never been able to figure which movie it happened in.
In The Cowboys, one of the boys fell off a horse in the middle of the herd and is trampled to death. I saw the movie as a kid and imagined how gory it would have been.
In Bless the Beasts and Children, Cotton gets fatally shot while he’s freeing the bison. I was about the character’s age when I first saw it and thought it was the epitome of tragedy.
