The ice cream truck scene in ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ (key part at 3:30) was really shocking when I first saw it, all the more so because the kid in question was well known for appearing in family-friendly Disney movies before this. They killed off a Disney princess, those bastards! (well, not really a princess, but close enough)
Even the most violent Hollywood action movies usually give kids a pass. If a kid does die, it’s usually not actually shown. You might see a child’s shoe lying next to a burning wreck or something of that nature. What I have discovered is that the violent Asian movies I’ve seen often do not do that. They’ll off a kid almost as easily as an adult. I watched one this past Monday that actually had a good story line along with all the gore, but every single character in the movie was killed. The one remaining person committed suicide as the police were closing in on her to arrest her. Two kids died hard in that movie.
In Member of the Wedding 10 year old (?) tag-along John Henry dies of some kind of fever. Don’t really know why. Maybe just to make the audience feel bad?
In Robot Monster a little girl is strangled by a robot in a gorilla suit. Her brother says at her funeral, “I should have played house with her more often.”
We all know Willy Wonka actually murdered those four kids, right?
That chocolate factory had a number of very serious OSHA and health code violations.
Little Miss Colorized Pink Coat in, “Schindler’s List.”
I am not sure how to think of spoilers in this thread – I can spoiler box them, but of course you won’t know what movie I’m thinking of without opening the spoiler box, so that seems self-defeating.
Whatever, I’ll put two of them where the kids’ deaths are surprises/important to the plot in spoiler boxes:
In Bruges - a prayerful, sad boy is shot in the head by a clumsy hitman.
Hereditary - a surprise beheading via car window and telephone pole
You can write the movie title and then spoiler the description of who gets killed. (The new software lets you do spoiler tags in the middle of a paragraph.)
Like this
Title - [spoiler] that one kid in that one scene dies [\spoiler]
Or you could do the opposite, spoiler the movie name or character name but describe the death.
~Max
Rabbit, Run (1970): Janice accidentally drowns her baby.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
What Dreams May Come
ETA: Technically, Joy Luck Club…but that was a baby, not much of a character.
Lots of horror movies have dead children in them
Dawn of the Dead - a little girl, a baby
Mama - a little girl
Trick ‘r Treat - pre-teen boy, kids on a bus
Dream House - can’t say who without spoiling this movie
Nothing Left to Fear - pre-teen boy, teenage girl
The Witch - baby & 2 young children deaths are implied, teenage boy
Dark Touch - toddler
Pan’s Labyrinth - pre-teen girl
The Killing of a Sacred Deer - can’t say who without spoiling this movie
The Devil’s Backbone - boy
The Happening - boy
The Book of Henry - can’t say who without spoiling this movie
The Woman in Black - multiple children
The Woman in Black II - multiple children
30 Days of Night - little girl (vampire)
A Quite Place - little boy
Krampus - multiple children
Interview With a Vampire - little boys (human), little girl (vampire)
Sleepy Hollow - little boy
And of course there are tons of horror movies where teenagers die. All three of the new Fear Street movies, for example, the last of which had several younger kids die also.
In the moody, underexposed Daimajin Strikes Again (1966)—also known “The Return of Majin” in english, somewhat confusingly, as it’s the third installment of a trilogy, all released in the same year, and was never dubbed, but the SECOND installment WAS dubbed in English, and officially called “Return of Majin”—a small band of small children strike out on their own across the wilderness in order to save their village.
One of them dies crossing a river. And just one—structurally (or formulaically), in these kinds of movies, you’d usually see the band of adventurers get whittled down slowly over the course of the film.
But no. Just one. Sheer bad luck. No malevolence, it’s just that the universe doesn’t care. Nothing to do but try and go on.
The Daimajin movies generally have this morose, somber undercurrent, all around. But the interesting part?
They’re monster movies. Daimajin is basically a giant samurai golem. Made by Daiei, producers of “Gamera.” Akira Ifukube, of Godzilla fame, did the score—which, as anyone familiar with the man’s work knows, makes him the perfect choice for scoring this kind of story.
Robot Monster. The robot-monster kills a little girl. The cast ain’t that big.
The Other (1972) Cousin Russell is impaled on a
hidden pitchfork, the baby is drowned in a barrel of wine, and of course the evil twin falls down the well, which starts the whole sequence of events.