As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
The original novels
- Tarzan's father's death via being brutally murdered by Kerchak.
The Disney film
Monkeys see, Jane is screwed.
Tarzan is easily one of the most intense films in the Disney canon, filled to the brim with graphic animal violence, blood, and characters graphically dying onscreen and offscreen.
- Sabor. She actually grins at one point, making her all the creepier. Cats Are Mean to the extreme.
- Kerchak and Kala had to hear their son being eaten alive. Doubles as a massive Tear Jerker. There's also the fact that Kerchak probably actually saw their child being eaten and tried to shield Kala from seeing it, though she most likely did due to the horror on her face.
- Lord and Lady Greystoke's short visit to Africa. They had just survived a shipwreck, managed between the two of them to build an elaborate treehouse while sheltering and caring for a newborn, and likely had only just finished building said house when Sabor found them. To clarify, the treehouse was incredibly sophisticated, so with only two adults (one who also has to care for an infant) working on it, it would have taken at least a few months to build. Tarzan wasn't even old enough to walk when Kala found him, so it couldn't have been more than 3-4 months since the shipwreck. So Tarzan's parents probably only enjoyed their new home in finished form for a couple of weeks before Sabor arrived. To make things worse, since leopards are largely arboreal, it's possible that all the activity of building the treehouse is what attracted Sabor's attention in the first place.
- While the film doesn't show her doing the deed, in a rather chilling alternate opening
(illustrated only by storyboards) on the DVD and Blu-ray, we actually do get to see Sabor attack and kill Tarzan's father, though only through flashes illuminated by lightning strikes. The scene ends with Sabor dragging his body offscreen to feed.- Even worse, Tarzan's father is sadly looking at a photo of his wife before he figures out that Sabor is approaching, all but stating that Sabor already got her and he's the only thing standing between this vicious predator and his infant son.
- What we do get to see in the finished product is Sabor's pawprints, painted in the blood of Tarzan's parents, overlaid with her snarls. If you pay close enough attention, you can see his parents' corpses in the background—and Kala sees them too. If you're listening, you can hear the echoes of gunshots as Kala steps over the shells, telling you exactly what happened here.
- Neither of Tarzan's parents' corpses have hands, implying that Sabor ate them.
- The music that plays when Kala first enters the treehouse is also rather unsettling.
- While the film doesn't show her doing the deed, in a rather chilling alternate opening
- Sabor attacking Kala. Related to that, the Mood Whiplash moment when as Kala hugs the baby Tarzan, the tip of Sabor's tail drops down from the rafters behind her and Kala's eyes widen in horror as she sniffs the air, catches the leopard's scent and realises she has been watching her from above the whole time...
- During Sabor and Tarzan's final battle, the look of pure hatred she gives Tarzan when he manages to cut her with his spear, combined with an unnerving hiss.
- The look on Kala's face as she watches Tarzan and Sabor fight to the death.
- The baboons that attack Jane. Don't be fooled by their little baby, these baboons have the face of death itself with those grinning set of fangs and demonic eyes. And there are many of them ready to maul you for upsetting their kid. Fortunately, if you get on their good side like Tarzan did, they can also be useful allies to fight off evil poachers.
- When Kerchak gives his enraged roar, you'll jump in your seat—especially when you see him arguing with Kala about her taking in the infant Tarzan (which terrifies the poor thing and causes him to cry), and when he attacks the humans for playing with the gorilla babies.
- The disturbingly short journey from Egomaniac Hunter to murderous lunatic for Clayton. Sure, he claims to have wanted to sell Tarzan's gorilla family into captivity, but the second he's offered actual resistance, he gleefully devolves into the same devious killer he's been chomping at the bit to embrace the whole movie. The money is just an excuse; what Clayton really wants is to kill, likening him to Sabor from the first half of the movie. And just like Sabor, Clayton is undone by his own mad bloodlust.Clayton: (smugly) Go ahead, shoot me! Be a man.
- During "Strangers Like Me", Clayton demands to know where the gorillas are while holding up a picture of an angry male. His face is almost the spitting image of the male as he shouts. In the final fight with Tarzan, he rips his hand free with his teeth and the way he slashes at Tarzan with his machete is a perfect Call-Back to Tarzan's battle with Sabor. He degenerates into a savage beast like the ones he's been hunting, which is his downfall, and it's not exactly family-friendly to watch.
- Clayton's death. In a frenzied attempt to attack Tarzan with his machete, he gets himself tangled up in jungle vines, not noticing until too late that one is coiling around his neck as he frantically slashes away at them. Eventually, he cuts away the last one holding him up, causing him to plummet a huge distance from the tree the two were standing on—but with one vine still ensnared around his neck. Clayton lets out a blood-curdling scream while desperately trying to disentangle himself, his eyes bulging out madly as he falls. It then suddenly cuts to the vine stretching taut with a loud and wet snap, Tarzan and Clayton's machete dropping to the ground, and then lightning briefly illuminating the tree behind Tarzan to reveal the gruesome shadow of Clayton's dangling corpse. There's a very good reason that this scene provides the picture for the Animated Films page of Family-Unfriendly Death: Clayton literally ended up hanging himself.
- In a moment of cruel poetry, it's exactly the punishment he'd have gotten back in the civilized world as well. He tried to murder two fellow members of the British upper class, three if you count Tarzan as Lord Greystoke, which the British would have seen as unforgivable. He was hanged as the criminal he was.
- And just because Disney thought kids wanted to see this scene a few dozen more times, a watered-down version of this death was featured on the Legend of Tarzan episode, “Tarzan and the Gauntlet of Vengeance”. Observe!
- The initial idea for his death, which can be seen here, also counts. In a climactic knife-fight with Tarzan aboard a riverboat, a fire starts and quickly spreads around the vessel. Tarzan considers killing Clayton for a moment, but instead pins him by his shirt (the knife inches from the hunter's head) to a nearby oil drum, and flees. There's only a brief moment before it catches the oil leaking from the barrel Clayton was trapped by: resulting in a fiery explosion that engulfs the whole ship.
- To make matters even worse, Tarzan can clearly see what's going to happen, and tries to warn Clayton. Clayton isn't listening and there's nothing Tarzan can do but watch.
- A good number of the Game Over sequences in the video game are rather chilling, especially the ones where Tarzan is still a kid. A compilation is right here.
- When Tarzan accidentally causes an elephant stampede while trying to get a hair. It's dangerous enough for Tantor, who is tiny compared to the adults, but even worse for Tarzan, who keeps getting shoved underwater and narrowly misses being trampled more than once, almost drowning in the confusion. Terk, Flynt, and Mungo, seeing the chaos from the water's edge, are convinced that he's been killed. And then they have to run for their lives when the stampede comes their way.
