Adult Fear/Film

Examples of this trope in films:

Film — Animation[]

The Secret of Kells' third act. Because the young protagonist Brendan has once disobeyed his uncle's (the abbot of Kells) strict curfews, he locks him and another monk who helped Brendan in the scriptorium, i.e. to keep them out of reach of the invading northmen. In the ensuing slaughter, the abbot has a very sudden and positive character change when he is horrified to see all his schemes and preventive measures against an invasion going up in smoke. He himself is wounded repeatedly and badly, and passes out. The scriptorium is set on fire. Unbeknownst to him, Brendan and the other monk managed to escape beforehand. They, in return, see the abbot lying in the snow and leave him for dead. Now, just to clarify, Brendan believes the abbot, the only parent and relative he had ever known, is dead, while the abbot thinks that Brendan, his only surviving relative whose own life he risked to save him as a baby, has burned to death because he himself had locked him there in the first place. The movie ends very much with a very dark Bittersweet Ending as this misunderstanding is cleared up decades later. But still, the fears of an adult authority to fail in really really trying to protect his community and his nephew's life are fully and conveniently exploited in this film.
The Lion King has this exchange between Mufasa and Simba after Mufasa's Papa Wolf moment with the hyenas:

Mufasa: Simba, being brave doesn't mean you go looking for trouble.

Simba: But you're not scared of anything.

Mufasa: I was today. I thought I might lose you.

Despicable Me: seeing your children, whether adopted or not, being kidnapped. It's also just as bad to see them returning back to the orphanage after bonding with them.
Tangled: the baby Rapunzel was kidnapped from her parents' room where she should have been the safest. And she's routinely emotionally abused by the woman she was raised to think of as her mother, to the point at which setting foot outside of the tower once makes her briefly angst about how she's a terrible daughter.
- The scene where Gothel returns to the tower and finds that Rapunzel is missing is eerily similar to how any parent would freak out if their child disappeared without their knowledge and they don't know where their kid was, even though we knew that Gothel is the Big Bad.
- This is sadly not only a fear for adults, but "Mother Knows Best" is horrifically dark for an otherwise fairly cheerful, encouraging movie, if you consider that Gothel doesn't use magic to keep Rapunzel locked up. She preys on her innocence, affection and vulnerability, like a real-life abusive parent.

Abi Sutherland: Plenty of Disney films have wicked stepmothers; they’re quite ordinary villains in the genre. They do things like banish the heroine to the kitchen or send her out into the forest to be murdered. There may be rags and neglect involved. But Tangled’s Mother Gothel is much worse than that. She uses love like a poisoned apple or a witch’s curse, as a tool to achieve her own ends. And she’s clearly written by someone who knows, bone deep, how that works.

Pinocchio where young boys were turned into donkeys, shipped off and forced into labor, the parents not knowing what happened to their sons and even if they did find them, they wouldn't have recognized their own kid, seeing how they are now stuck as donkeys.
- And a subtler example from the same includes the moment when Gepetto puts on his coat to go out in the pouring rain to look for Pinocchio who never returned home from school. Hearing the agony in his voice as he paces around his kitchen is enough to make parents whose children like to play hide-and-go-seek in department store racks flashback a little.

Gepetto: What could have happened to him? Where could he be at this hour? I better go out again and look for him...

In The Little Mermaid, King Triton had to deal with the aftermath of his youngest daughter Ariel running away after having a huge and violent argument with her. His words "What have I done?" certainly brings the trope home.
Mulan's parents found out their daughter ran away to join the army. Imagine not being able to save your child from the horrors of war and possible gruesome death, since any attempt would reveal her gender and sentence her to execution.
- Not to mention that the reason why Mulan ran away in the first place was save her father's life; he was too infirm to go to war and survive. Their fear would have been compounded with the most extreme guilt imaginable.
The Incredibles: The scene where Elastigirl realizes that the missiles are going to hit the plane and she frantically yells into the radio "Abort! Abort! There are children aboard!" Then she runs back into the back of the plane last minute, fully prepared to die with her kids, like any mother would.
- Not to mention Mr. Incredible, who is lead to believe both his wife and children were actually killed during that same scene, not realizing they got out safely. His horrified expression, and the revenge he almost takes, say it all.
- Having children in danger is actually such a powerful trigger, that Mirage's own horror at Syndrome's actions is the first hint that she may be a villain, but still isn't as evil as her boss. Later, she has a Heel Face Turn.
- A deleted scene from the original version of the movie also would fit. Syndrome (a minor villain and not the Big Bad) breaks into the Incredibles' home at the beginning and freezes them with a freeze ray. In the middle of taunting them, he hears young Violet crying down the hall. He proceeds to drag the two with him as he goes after their daughter.
- Near the end of the movie, when Elastigirl and Mr. Incredible hear the babysitter's voicemail thanking them for calling a replacement sitter for Jack-Jack, Elastigirl frantically exclaims that she never called a replacement. It's a short moment, but no less terrifying for the parents in the audience.
- Lets just wrap this up and say the entire freakin' movie was full to the brim with Adult Fear.
Similar with the above Tangled example, in Hercules, Zeus and Hera awake from their room to find that their infant son was kidnapped. When they did find him, he was mortal and couldn't return to Olympus with them. So they could only watch as their son is raised by another couple — though Alcmene and Amphitrion were Good Parents (if they weren't, Zeus would have just killed them), thus Herc ended up being Happily Adopted.
Lilo and Stitch: The threat of Lilo being taken away from her older sister and caretaker Nani's side by social services casts a long shadow over the entire film. The moment when it actually happens is utterly horrific
- And not long after, she watches a giant alien kidnapping Lilo. When she asks the other aliens to help her get Lilo back, they're forced to tell her that there's pretty much no way that can happen. (Fortunately, Stitch convinces them otherwise)
Astro Boy (2009). Toby's death, leads to manic-depressive behavior by his father.
An American Tail is full of this, particularly after Fievel sneaks onto the deck of a ship in a raging storm and his father watches helplessly as he's washed overboard.
In the The Secret of NIMH, it's scary enough for the single mother Mrs. Brisby having to deal with her terminally ill son, but during the climax when her children are stuck in their cement block house and it's sinking into the mud the fear is amped up ten-fold.
The kidnapping of the puppies in One Hundred and One Dalmatians was this for Pongo and Perdita, as well as their human masters Roger and Anita, who react as if their own children had been taken.
In Beauty and the Beast, Maurice has to watch as Belle arranges to be kept prisoner in his stead, all while he cries for her to just escape and leave him to his fate. He spends the rest of the movie trying to rescue her.
- And once Belle and Maurice are reunited? Belle faces the fear of having her father taken away from her, as Gaston blackmails her into either becoming his puppet-wife or getting him thrown in the local asylum. She takes a third option and proves her father is telling the truth... but they're imprisoned and the townspeople go Storming the Castle.
Tarzan plays on the same parental fear of losing a child as many of the other Disney movies listed here. A little before they find baby Tarzan, Kala and Kerchak lose track of their infant gorilla son in the jungle while the deadly Sabor is on the prowl. Unlike other Disney movies, the parents and child are never reunited since Sabor kills and eats the baby gorilla.
- With the added "bonus" of knowing Sabor was also able to get into the house Tarzan's parents made and kill them, then stuck around, probably intending to go after the child while he was alone. And even if Sabor had left, if Kala had not adopted him, Tarzan would almost certainly have starved to death in his crib.
How to Train Your Dragon has Stoick believing his son was dead after the fight with the Green Death. And this was due to Stoick's own misguided actions that led to the above event. His "I did this" was downright heartbreaking.
- The sequel gets even worse because Hiccup fails to listen to Stoick's warning about that Drago Bludvist cannot be reasoned with and Hiccup goes off to find Drago himself and the horrors Stoick fears of what will happen if his son finds Drago. In the end Hiccup's failure to listen to Stoick ends up with Stoick taking a plasma shot that was meant for Hiccup from a mind controlled Toothless at the cost of Stoick's life
- Then you've got Drago Bludvist's unknown parents who we never get to see and have been dead long before the second movie's plot. From what we can make out from Drago's words about living in fear it can be assumed his village suffered attacks from dragons like what was once happening to Berk only they were presumingly far more brutal. This alone would make Drago's parents have to live with the daily constant fear of their son being killed by dragons so they presumingly did everything they could to keep him safe and protect him. Then there's also the fear of nobody being there to look after Drago should they end up getting killed. The latter fear ends up coming true as Drago's parents are killed by dragons, Drago survives but with a now ripped off arm and the whole village was burned with no other survivors leaving Drago all on his own. Drago then sadly grows up without any source of possible positive guidence from others into the man we know in the movie. If the afterlife is a thing in this movie's universe then Drago's parents also have to sadly watch their son grow up into a madman something they probably didn't want him to become and there's nothing they can do about it.
Imagine you were babysitting your niece and nephew for the evening, with your son there as well, and accidentally fall asleep. When you wake up you find a darkened house, with all three kids gone. When the parents return, you all go down to the beach to search, and find one of the skates used by the kids with no sign of them... This is the parental fear scenario presented in Help! I'm a Fish.
In Finding Nemo, Marlin's happy future together with his beloved wife is all torn apart one day, when he can't protect them from a barracuda. Only Nemo survives, with a disability, just in case Marlin was going to be anything less than terribly protective. Terrified that Nemo will be hurt, Marlin almost smothers his son, which drives Nemo to rebel, telling his dad "I hate you" and then swimming out into open water—where a giant, horrible thing beyond comprehension takes Nemo away as Marlin watches.
The original Ice Age film is certainly more serious than the sequels. Manny's Troubled Backstory Flashback reveals that his family were killed by human hunters with him unable to protect them. The tigers attacked the human settlement in the beginning with the sole purpose of kidnapping and eating a baby. The baby's father tries to protect his family and fails and is seen throughout the movie desperately trying to find them.
In Toy Story 3, Andy growing up and dumping his toys at the day care centre is totally different from your children growing up and dumping you at a care home. So don't think about that.

Film — Live Action[]

Eraserhead: If giving birth to a creature so horrible that no sentient being would want to touch it with a 10-foot pole isn't every soon-to-be parent's worst nightmare, then the fact that it makes your spouse leave you and force you to raise it by yourself certainly is. Loathing one's own baby to the point that stabbing it through the lung (if you can even define it as a 'lung') with scissors becomes a viable option is something no adult wishes to experience. Oh, and the fact that just about everything else in this movie is filled to the brim with the regular kinds of fears doesn't exactly help.
Batman Returns: The Penguin is made on this. His masterplan consists of taking Gotham's children into the sewers and killing them. He gleefully gloats about it, claiming that it's the parents' fault for having left them unprotected at home in order to attend to Max Schrek's ball.
The Dark Knight: Two-Face and the Joker were frightening enough on their own, but the climax...
Your close ally has gone insane because of your mistake, blaming you for the death of the woman he loved, and now he's taken your family hostage and is deciding their fate with a coin flip. You desperately try to appeal to whatever sanity he has left, but he's too far gone at this point to care- he just wants you to feel his pain..
The Omen III: Damien Thorn, when he found out about the birth of the Christ child, resorted to Kill'Em All.
- And it's not just him acting alone but an entire congregation of his followers. A priest drowns a baby at baptism. A nurse murders the infants under her care. Even a couple of children deliberately throw a ball so that it pushes a stroller into the path of traffic.
M: Mrs. Beckmann's increasingly desperate cries as she calls for her daughter, who was kidnapped and murdered while walking home from school, is enough to strike terror into the heart of any parent. And that's just how the film starts.
A Clockwork Orange: The "Singing in the Rain" scene is designed to send chills down the spine of any adult. The themes of absolute evil and of a manipulative government attempting to rob people of free will and using the cover of mental health to silence dissidents are pretty chilling on a more subtle level as well, and were surely even more so during the Cold War era in which the film (and novel) were made.
Taken features this as a driving point in the plot, where two teenaged girls are kidnapped and sold into an underground prostitution ring. Unfortunately for the criminals, the father of one of these girls is an ex-CIA Papa Wolf, who has a very special set of skills. Though he manages to rescue only one of them, his daughter. Her best friend dies.
The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas: Bruno's poor mother seems to experience all sorts of terrible fears parents might have. Living next to a concentration camp and knowing there is nothing she can do to stop the horrors going on in there, seeing her eldest daughter being brainwashed into a hate spewing little monster by Those Wacky Nazis, and finding out that her son snuck into the camp and was killed in the gas chamber.
Law Abiding Citizen. Having your home being invaded is bad, and crippling you is worse, but the ultimate nightmare is when he rapes and murders your wife and daughter in front of you. Then, a killer gets off with a light sentence just to make sure that the justice department can get the other guy.
Inception. Imagine being forced to flee your country, leaving your very young children behind, possibly forever. There's also the horrific situation of watching your spouse succumb to mental illness and suicide.
Sophies Choice. Having to choose which of your children to send to an inevitable death.
An American Crime is basically the worst fear of every parent who has had to leave their child with another person, especially if that person is just an acquaintance. It really doesn't help that the story really happened.
Changeling is all about a woman leaving for work, coming home to find that her child is gone, and then receiving no help at all from the authorities about it. And then comes Act 2, and we find out that there's been a serial killer kidnapping children, and that Christine's son isn't the first cover-up the police have done. Also, her son is never found.
The premise for El Orfanato (The Orphanage) went along the lines of "You remember Peter Pan and Never Never Land? How it was such fun for the kids? Now think of how their parents had to feel in that situation!"
In The Ring, the protagonist is fairly collected at first in the face of imminent death. It's the imminent death of her son that panics her, and ultimately drives her to desperate measures. This theme is inverted in the Japanese sequel Rasen: Andou has already lost his son, and he ends up making an extreme moral compromise because Sadako can bring him back.
Similarly to the Firefly example below, the Minority Report gives us the three precogs, who spend all of their time being heavily sedated and floating in a pool, getting endless future visions of murders. And then we find out that the precogs were all just the children of drug addicts, taken from their families. Oh, and there used to be more, but all but those three died. And then we find out that when one of the mothers kicked her drug habit and demanded her daughter back, she was murdered because the precog system couldn't work without her. The entire plot is driven by Agatha's desire for her mother's death to be avenged.
The Untouchables opens up with a couple of Al Capone's bootleggers trying to persuade a guy to sell their booze at his store. He refuses because it's terrible booze. They seem to accept his answer and "accidentally" drop a bag when they leave the store. A little girl who was in the store at the time picks it up and tries to return it to them. Said bag is a bomb which promptly explodes. Later in the movie, the mother of the dead girl visits Elliot Ness and reassures him that he is doing the right thing in opposing people like her daughter's killers.
For all the city-destruction and visible skeletons in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the scariest bit comes when Laserbeak transforms into a pink, kid-sized version of Bumblebee to trick a little girl into letting him in so that he can kill her father. Up to that point, Laserbeak had been an extremely efficient killer, able to hide as a number of innocuous objects, but that's pure psychological torture, and if he let the girl live, imagine her guilt...
The Duchess: Your husband can take your children away from you, and there's nothing you can do about it because you're a woman and he has law on his side. The same fear is brought about by Iron Jawed Angels.
- Also Dear Zachary. Your children could be taken away from you and given to their abuser by the court, which finds it OK because she's their mother.
- Also, in Seduction in a Small Town: some Manipulative Bitch can perfectly convince others that both you and your husband are horrible child abusers and not only have your kids taken away, but send you guys to jail for that. Twice.
Paranormal Activity 2: An invisible supernatural force is trying to kidnap your one-year-old son because one of your ancestors made a pact with a demon. An in the end, it succeeds.
The Shining: A supernatural force exploits your previous vices and drives you to murder your beloved wife and son. This is scary enough, but it goes deeper: to what extent would this have happened anyway? The supernatural forces may have given it a kick-start, but the darkness was already present. The fear becomes the more realistic fear of being unable to overcome one's own secret darkness.
X Men First Class: The Holocaust. The death of a parent, and the medicalized torture of an innocent child. All within the first 20 minutes. A bit of a foregone conclusion, but Charles and Erik's "beach divorce", even though it's only a metaphorical divorce, (metaphorical) children having to decide which parent they're siding with in said metaphorical divorce, having a loved one be permanently disabled because of something you did, the fear that no one will love you as you really are...
Where The Heart Is has Ashley Judd as a single mom who comes early home from work and finds her current boyfriend molesting two of her children.
The Blob: In the 1988 remake, the cheerleader Meg Penny learns from her parents that her brother Kevin and his friend are missing while the town is under quarantine, thinking they snuck out to see a slasher movie. What makes this terrifying was the fact that Meg's little brother is now in danger of being eaten by the titular monster now getting bigger by eating anyone that gets too close. She arrives to find the theatre is in a state of panic with Kevin and his friend desperately trying to use the emergency exit and while she does save them, they wind up having to evade the Blob in the sewer. The Blob follows them down there and Kevin's friend then gets pulled underwater. Meg tries to save him only to later see him rise up from the water half-eaten; imagine dying by drowning and being eaten alive at the same time. What makes this all the more horrifying was the fact Kevin's friend has an older brother that let them both into the movie and we saw his mother hoping he was going to come home safe. At least Meg and her brother survived...
- Just imagine the guilt the kid's older brother is going to feel for the rest of his life knowing that his little brother would still be alive if he hadn't helped him sneak into the movie.
Eye for An Eye: This 1996 drama starts with Karen Mc Cann talking with her home alone teenage daughter over the phone when the slime bucket Robert Doob breaks into the house and all Karen can do is listen as Doob (non-graphically) rapes her daughter before killing her. Oh yeah, and a minor technicality prevents him from being prosecuted.
The Monster Squad has one utterly chilling scene for adults, when Sean's father sees Dracula and realizes the supernatural things his son has been so scared of all day are real. And then Dracula tells him "I will have your son" before turning into a bat and leaving.
The very premise of A Nightmare on Elm Street is a nightmare to any parent—the possibility of your own child being horribly assaulted and murdered by a psychopath in a manner that you have absolutely no way of protecting them from. And worse, this psychopath is supposed to be dead, because you and other parents took the law into your own hands after his string of child murders went unpunished due to a technicality.
- Wes Craven's New Nightmare may even have more adult fear to it than the other entries, as a major focus is Heather trying to protect her son Dylan, who is significantly younger than Freddy's usual teenage victims.
In Hook not only does Captain Hook kidnap Peter's children and threaten to do the same to his descendants, he tries to brainwash them into loving him instead. It almost works with Jack (who was already distressed), but utterly fails with Maggie.
- It's not much better when he kills a 15-year-old boy, Rufio, in front of Peter and all of the new Lost Boys.
Kill Bill: The scene in which the Bride fights Vernita Green and Vernita's little daughter Nikki steps in perfectly shows the terror that a mother can feel when she realizes that not only her Dark and Troubled Past has caught up with her, but that her child is about to be utterly traumatised.
- And that's before we learn that the Bride almost has second thoughts in regards to the end of her revenge when she sees that Bill, for his horrifying actions, has taken good care of their child, BB. Even more so when we see that she learns about it when she sneaks into Bill's home to kill him... and the first person who comes into her sight is BB, who does it with a happy smile.
The Lord of the Rings: The beginning of Return of the King has Smeagol kill Deagol over The Ring. Well what if the friend you trusted most easily turned on you over one little trinket?
Star Wars: Anakin falls to the Dark Side because of the fear of losing Padme after already witnessing his mother die
The French film L'Argent de Poche gives us a comedic, though not tasteless example when the mother of the infant Grégory leaves him alone in the apartment on one of the higher floor with the windows open while she searches for her wallet. Grégory inevitably ends up hanging from the sill above a crowd of terrified onlookers before falling and landing in a hedge, unharmed. Suffice to say, the mother, upon seeing her child in the hedge, promptly passes out. As this film is more or less a social commentary about the world children inhabit that adults often fail to see, the Adult Fear is played completely straight.
The Pursuit of Happyness depicts a father trying really, really hard to provide for his kid, and failing. There's no zombie apocalypse, no external mustache-twirling villain, just the inexorable facts of the matter and a string of bad luck. He ends up with his son in a subway-station closet, hiding from the elements and hoping they'll be able to stay there overnight. If you've ever been responsible for providing for another human being, this is terrifying.
Megan Is Missing manage to turn the fear many parents of teens with an internet connection have about sexual predators online Up to Eleven.
Bubba Ho-Tep: growing old and weak and finding yourself left to die in a care home, with your children "too busy" to come and see you.
Orphan: having your children in danger, your spouse turn against you, and being thought insane when in reality you are the only one who knows what is really happening. Then the terror of having it be even worse than you already thought.
Discussed in [Film/Parenthood Parenthood]. Kevin suffers severe anxiety issues as a gradeschooler, in part, because he "was first" and his parents frantically over-protected him as a child.
The film Utoya, 22 Juli shows exactly what your children can suffer if they are caught in a shooting. In particular it shows that no matter how clever and levelheaded they are, they can still die, and in a horrible way.

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