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Offing The Offspring / Live-Action Films

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  • Alien: Resurrection. Ripley considers the Newborn (a murderous abomination) to be her "son", as well as the other Alien ("I'm the creature's mother"). She ends up killing both of them.
  • Assassin's Creed (2016): Joseph Lynch's plan in 1986 was to kill Cal and Mary at the same time (because both of them carried Aguilar's Genetic Memory) but he backed out at the last second and instead ordered young Cal to run away.
  • In Austin Powers (the first one at least), Dr. Evil reveals that he is actually trying to kill his son Scott, for undisclosed reasons (apparently, he's not evil enough). He reveals this in family therapy nonetheless.
    Scott Evil: I just think, like, he hates me. I really think he wants to kill me.
    Therapist: He doesn't really want to kill you. Sometimes we just say that.
    Dr. Evil: No, actually, the boy is quite astute. I really am trying to kill him, but so far unsuccessfully. He's quite wily, like his old man.
  • Before the Devil Knows You're Dead strengthens the suspense of the third act through the question of whether or not the father will kill his two sons. The youngest escapes with the father assuming him to be a helpless accomplice, but the father murders the oldest.
  • The Believers: The villains are an evil cult consisting largely of upper-class yuppies who have sacrificed their children in dark rituals in exchange for fame and success. They want to recruit the hero to have him do the same thing to his own son.
  • Blue Bayou: Antonio was an unwanted pregnancy, and his mother tried to drown him as a baby. She couldn't go through with it and gave him up for adoption instead.
  • Broken Blossoms: After catching Lucy at Chen's house, Battling gets so angry that he whips Lucy to death. She ends up dying of her injuries shortly after the beating.
  • Clash of the Titans features Queen Cassiopeia being forced to sacrifice her virgin daughter Andromeda to the Kraken, due to having slighted the goddess Thetis in her own temple.
  • In Cult of Chucky, one of the inmates at the asylum is a woman named Madeline who was committed for smothering her infant son.
  • Curse of the Golden Flower: Says one editor: "If there's something out there that has a higher rank in the fratricide, patricide, and incest scale... I don't want to know."
  • Dark Angel: The Ascent: Veronica's demon father tries to kill her for defying him, justifying it to his wife by stating they can always have more children.
  • Djinn: It turns out Salama killed her son after realizing he was part djinn.
  • Aaron's final realisation in The Dry is Mal Deacon drowned his daughter Ellie in the river to prevent her leaving him, and possibly revealing that he had been sexually and physically abusing her for years.
  • The Eagle (2011): The Seal Prince kills his son because the boy lets Esca and Marcus get away instead of waking him.
  • The Eraserhead baby is killed for one of the first two reasons. It's hard to say which.
  • Happens in The Good Son, to the audience's sorrow. The "good" son Henry kills his younger brother by drowning him, builds a crossbow with which he shoots at a cat and hits a dog, drops a homemade scarecrow onto the street from an overpass causing a lot of car crashes, throws his sister onto thin ice during a skating trip (she gets away), and pushes his mother off a cliff. And while the mother is holding the two children, the "good" son and his cousin Mark, to prevent them from falling to their deaths, she only has the strength to pull one of them up. She drops her evil son in order to help Mark. More horrific, the "good" son is played by that kid in Home Alone.
  • Lilly in The Grifters, after saving her son Roy's life, likes to remind him "I gave you life twice." But when she gets into an argument with him over money, she smashes a glass in his face and a shard slashes his throat, and he exsanguinates and dies. She cries, but takes the money and runs anyhow.
  • In The Guilty, Iben kills her infant son during a psychotic episode. When she realizes what she has done, she's horrified.
  • Hercules (2014):
    • Hercules believes he killed his own children after being drugged but it turns out that someone else did.
    • Cotys orders his daughter beheaded after she's outlived her usefulness and defied him by revealing his plot. Hercules saves her, though.
  • Here Again: Ann's accidentally infecting Hailey and the resulting Enfant Terrible makes it necessary, though she does try to do it gently and painlessly.
  • Hobo with a Shotgun: Abby threatens to kill Drake's son Ivan unless Drake releases Hobo. Ivan tells Drake that he's now the only son Drake has left, but Drake, having preferred his other son, Slick, pulls out his pistol, tells Ivan he never saw much potential in him and simply shoots him dead himself.
  • Hold the Dark: Medora Slone says that a wolf carried her son away. When wolf expert Russell Core tracks down the local pack, he sees them eating one of their own cubs, which he says wolves will sometimes do to better prepare the pack for hardship. It's later revealed that Medora killed her own son, possibly to spare him the hardship of his birth by incest.
  • By the end of the 2003 Hulk, David Banner wants to kill his son Bruce so he can absorb Bruce's Hulk powers back into himself to stabilize his mutated body, arguing that he gave him life in the first place and should give it back.
  • The Huntsman: Winter's War: Freya's lover kills their child, though why is not apparent. He's revealed to have been framed near the end.
  • Indian: Senapathy the Vigilante Man protagonist of this Tamil film kills his own son Chandrabose. Senapathy has been on a spree, putting down multiple corrupt officials. When he finds out that his son, who is working as a vehicle roadworthiness inspector for the DMV, took a bribe to certify a bus with its brakes falling apart and leaking hydraulic fluid; which in turn crashed and killed 50 children, Senapathy does not hesitate to put down his son too.
  • The Initiation: To save Kelly's life, her mother shoots Terry, her other daughter.
  • In It's Alive, new father Frank not only joins but leads the vigilante mob hunting his newborn baby, which is a mutated, murderous monster. Subverted when Frank finally confronts the sobbing infant... and his paternal instincts kick in.
  • Indirect relations in James and the Giant Peach: Spiker and Sponge try to kill their nephew when he stands up against them in front of a large crowd of people and some police officers.
  • The Killing Kind: On realising that Terry is beyond help and that he will undoubtedly kill again, Thelma gives him a glass of chocolate milk laced with poison and then holds him in her lap as he dies.
  • Mama: A failed attempt in the first few scenes. A drunken man, psychologically unstable and unable to cope with severe financial loss, goes on a spree. Fleeing, he takes his two daughters out on an icy highway and drives at reckless speeds. He inevitably crashes, taking shelter with his children in a small cabin. His daughters look out the window. He holds a pistol. He raises the gun barrel to the back of their heads... but something doesn't like that at all.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Ego callously murders any of his children who did not inherit his powers, as he considers them worthless.
    • Avengers: Infinity War: In order to obtain the Soul Stone, Thanos must sacrifice the person he loves the most. Gamora, his adopted daughter, doesn't believe he cares about anyone other than himself. Thanos tells her that's not true and, with a heavy heart, tosses Gamora off a cliff to her death and receives the Soul Stone.
  • Mom and Dad: An unknown phenomenon causes parents to carry out this trope en masse.
  • During the blood-soaked finale of Monster Party, Roxanne Dawson shoots her son Elliot in the head in an attempt to prevent him from murdering Casper and Alexis, and shoves his body into the swimming pool. Elliot turns out to be Not Quite Dead and emerges from the water only to be finished off by his sister Alexis.
  • In Murder by Proxy, Alicia Brunner attempts to manipulate Casey into killing her daughter Phyllis; planning to then either hand him over to the police or shoot him 'self-defence'.
  • The 2009 Hong Kong thriller film, Night and Fog, which is Very Loosely Based on a True Story, ends with Sam Lee, a mentally-disturbed man struggling with a broken marriage, eventually killing his wife and both his daughters, before being Driven to Suicide.
  • Noah: What Noah plans to do to his newborn grandchildren if they were girls. Thankfully, he averts this once he sees them.
  • This is half the entire premise behind the horror film The Omen (1976), since the kid in question is the ultimate Bad Seed, The Antichrist, and has to be killed. He survives.
  • At the end of The Others (2001), it's finally revealed that Grace and her two children have been dead the whole time. When she received news that her husband was killed fighting in World War II, she snapped and murdered her children, then killed herself. The titular "others" are living people who have moved into the family's home, which the three of them are unknowingly haunting.
  • Paranormal Activity 3: Katie's and Kristi's grandmother, Lois, lets the demon kill her daughter, Julie, after she refuses to get pregnant again.
  • In The Quick and the Dead, the Kid, whose entire character arc was about trying to please his father Herod, is heartlessly gunned down when the two of them duel.
  • The Rapture: Sharon murders her daughter to hasten her entry to heaven.
  • The Reaping: In the town of Haven, there is a cult that follows a whole religion based on killing every child born after a couple's firstborn. They then hang their bodies up in mass graves.
  • In The Ring, either the father (Japanese) or the adoptive mother (American remake) kills the child because of the terrible and dangerous power she has. It's especially poignant in the latter version, in which the Morgans couldn't conceive on their own and desperately wanted to love Samara, but she drove them mad with uncontrollable psychic visions.
  • Shaolin Mantis delivers a two-fer; firstly with Master Tien, realizing his daughter and granddaughter had fallen for the hero Wei Fung, killing both of them in a rage, and towards the end of the film Wei Fung realizing his entire mission was a scam... after seeing poison in a cup of tea his father had given him.
  • In The Shout, Crossley admits to murdering the children he had with his Aboriginal wife: claiming that this a cultural norm and acceptable within the tribe, so long that it is done with a few weeks of birth.
  • In Shutter Island, it turns out that the protagonist's troubled wife killed their children, and he was so traumatized by this that he invented a whole new delusional reality to deal with it.
  • One of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense became a ghost this way. Her mother was poisoning her so that she (the mother) could get the attention and sympathy it produced.
  • Sorceress: Traigon planned to sacrifice his own firstborn to gain magical power, though his wife had other ideas. She gave birth to twins, and prevented his plan by concealing which was born first. He later captures them years after they were put in hiding, and tries to again.
  • Star Wars:
  • There's a schlocky 90s period film titled Sword of Many Lovers, with a scene in a magistrate's court where a beggar-woman rips open her son's guts to prove he's innocent of stealing and eating a goose. It was all Played for Laughs. Somehow.
  • Tales of an Ancient Empire: Oda at the beginning almost killed his child with the vampire Xia, because he didn't want it growing up into a dhampyr. After cutting it out of her womb, however, he couldn't kill the baby. Instead, he gave her to a palace as a servant girl.
  • The Terrorist: Malli, though pregnant, doesn't stop her suicide mission, and thus takes her unborn baby away to death with her (although whether or not she actually detonates her explosive belt is not clear).
  • Thelma: Thelma’s dad and mom, especially her dad, are morose over making the difficult decision to euthanize their daughter (they fail). Her dad also had previously considered shooting Thelma as a child when she inadvertently killed her little brother, but refrained at the time.
  • In the Transformers series, Sentinel Prime was a Parental Substitute to Megatron and Optimus and ended up trying to kill Megatron throughout the war. In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, he spent most of the movie trying to do this to Optimus.
  • Trick 'r Treat: The victims of the titular massacre in "The School Bus Massacre Revisited" were eight disabled children; the bus driver was paid by their parents to kill them.
  • In The Usual Suspects, Verbal tells the "only story he believes" about Kayzer Soze: upon coming home and finding his wife and daughters violated by killers from a crime syndicate, he kills all but one of the bad guys and then kills his own family. He lets the last bad guy go to tell the others he's coming for them.
  • The "wicked parent" example appears in Wake of Death, where the Archer family's adopted daughter, Kim, was hunted by her biological father, Sun Quan. As it turns out Kim is a bastard child born of Sun Quan's mistress, and he's trying to have her executed for knowing too much about his Human Trafficking operations.
  • Walk Hard: Dewey Cox's father tries to kill him after stewing for decades over Dewey accidentally cutting his brother in half with a machete and repeatedly telling him "the wrong kid died!" This culminates in Dewey's father accidentally cutting HIMSELF in half, causing him to forgive Dewey after discovering just how easy it is to cut someone in half with a machete by accident.
  • Colonel McCullough in War for the Planet of the Apes was forced to give a Mercy Kill to his son after he was infected by the Simian Flu.
  • Wolves:
    • Connor's desire to kill Cayden doesn't change when he finds out he's his son. Denial may be involved, however, if he and Lucinda really were in love.
    • The one thing both John's and Connor's accounts of Cayden's conception have in common is that Lucinda's parents threatened to kill her when they found out she was pregnant with Connor's child. This resulted in Cayden's adoption and Lucinda's suicide.
  • X-Men Film Series:
    • X-Men: The Last Stand: Mystique vehemently tells the FBI interrogator that her parents tried to murder her.
    • X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Thomas Logan nearly shoots his son James Howlett when the kid is charging at him with newly sprouted bone claws, but Elizabeth Howlett manages to grab the hunting rifle before Thomas could do so.
    • The Wolverine: Shingen planned to kill his daughter so that he would inherit his father's company.

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