Invasion of the Baby Snatchers

We want...your children. We will take your children. —The 456, Torchwood

Losing a child is many people's biggest nightmare. Creators play into this fear by creating characters that steal children for a living. Almost always one of the lowest forms of filth imaginable.

For a specific variation that involves abduction by fairy beings, see Changeling Tale. See also Alien Abduction, Eats Babies, Childless Dystopia.

Examples of Invasion of the Baby Snatchers include:

Anime and Manga

• Rosine from Berserk, who carried off kids (usually after murdering their parents) to be turned into her creepy little pseudo-Elves in a twisted version of the Changeling Fantasy.

Comic Books

• The appropriately named Kryb, from Green Lantern.
• Free Country from "The Children's Crusade" arc that ran through the Vertigo Comics annuals in 1993-94.
• At the end of Batman: No Man's Land, Joker does this. Interestingly, he doesn't harm a single one, but he does murder Commissioner Gordon's wife, who found him and tried to stop him. Which was probably his goal all along, to make Gordon snap and kill him.
• Nanny and Orphan-Maker from X-Factor. Nanny steals mutant children from their parents to raise them herself.

Film

• Mr Baek from Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Also a serial child murderer; he kidnaps children for the purpose of videotaping their murders.
• The Penguin in Batman Returns, after his plan to get elected mayor of Gotham City goes to hell, steals everyone's first-born sons, intending to take them into the sewer and "toss them into a deep dark watery grave" as revenge on the Gothamites. When he captures Max Shreck (Penguin allows him to take his son's place in a brief moment of basic compassion), who manipulated and betrayed him, he changes this plan slightly — he intends to make Shreck watch as the kids sink into a deep puddle of his industrial byproducts before then making him join them. Fortunately for the kids, Batman is able to stop this evil plan before it gets too far.
• There's a B-grade horror movie called The Guardian that uses this trope.
• Monsters, Inc. has this as the Evil Plan.
• The Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
• The City of Lost Children has a mad scientist who steals children for their dreams.
• Subverted with Labyrinth in that while Jareth steals baby Toby, Sarah was the one to summon the goblins to take him away in the first place. Jareth says that he only did that because she wanted him to.
• In Ghostbusters 2, Dana's baby is the target of a supernatural kidnapper.

Folklore

• The Pied Piper of Hamelin, if you try to rip him off.
• The idea of fairies replacing healthy babies with (often sickly) "changelings" (either their own offspring or an enchanted piece of wood made to look like a baby) comes from traditional folklore; see Changeling Tale for examples.

Literature

• The Other Mother from Coraline.
• The giants from The BFG steal children and eat them.
• The Hadals, a distinct human race living Beneath the Earth in Jeff Long's novels The Descent and Deeper respond to an attempted genocide perpetrated by the surface-world humans by kidnapping dozens of children from the United States during Halloween both as retribution, and in order to replenish their fallen numbers. Adoption into the Hadal society involves extended ritual mutilation and rapes, and the conditions in their caves cause severe cancerous physical deformations, most notably growth of horns, with the added possibility of brain damage.
  • On the plus side, they are extremedly long lived, have a healing factor, and have a number of strange Hadal powers, so it's notthat bad
• Lords and Ladies, being based on The Fair Folk legends, references the folklore version of this — elves are known to have a habit of stealing children, and while they aren't seen to do it in the book itself, the mere possibility is so infuriating to the usually laid-back Nanny Ogg that she actually (if half-jokingly) suggests Cold-Blooded Torture. Later, in The Wee Free Men, their child-stealing ways get actual page time.
• The climax of the first Warrior Cats book involves ShadowClan stealing kits from ThunderClan.
• A background mention in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf describes how Gollum's presence is felt as he makes his way across Middle-Earth — as a shadow in the night that climbs into nests to find eggs, burrows into dens to find the young, slips through windows to find cradles.

Live Action TV

• The 456 from Torchwood: Children of Earth are this on a global scale, with the sickening twist that they require human co-conspirators (and have some very effective means of coercing human cooperation). In the 1960s, they offered humankind a cure for a pandemic that would have killed millions, in exchange for 12 children. They return in the events of Children of Earth, this time not offering help, but an ultimatum: 10% of all Earth's children, or humanity's extinction. The most disturbing part of all this? They use the children as living drug dispensers. Not the prescription kind...the recreational kind. The 456 are space junkies and they're holding the Earth at gunpoint for a fix.
• An episode of Supernatural had this with a rather frightening twist; the children were replaced by changelings, exact replicas of the real thing, but they sucked blood from their mothers and killed their fathers. The real children were kept in cages.
• Odd-Bob the clown from The Sarah Jane Adventures episode "Day Of The Clown", who says he was the original Pied Piper of Hamelin.
• The Others on Lost took the children of people that landed on the island. Another plot thread that sadly went nowhere.
• Subverted in Monty Python's Flying Circus: the Baby Bandits actally steal adults and are just dressed like babies.

Tabletop Games

• Half the point of Kobolds Ate My Baby (the other points being the kobolds dying horribly).

Video Games

• A quest in World of Warcraft has you save children that were stolen by the Arrakoa. The players also get their turn at this trope for a quest that requires you to kidnap baby Wolvar so that the Tuskarr can preserve their species... Usually after you kill their mothers in front of them... Yeah.
• Father-Mother from Zeno Clash.
• Kamek and his Toady minions from the ~Yoshi's Island~ series; first they attacked the delivery stork in the first game (and Yoshi and such), then stole every child in the nearby town in the DS sequel while looking for the 'Star Children'.
• Dwarf Fortress has goblin snatchers.
  • Strangely, it's emerged that children who get kidnapped by goblins are perfectly happy, and are raised as though the goblins' own.
• Dragon Quest IV opens with the soldier Ragnar investigating why several children have vanished from a nearby village. Learning why is what prompts him to set off in search of The Chosen One.
• Dragon Quest VII: the kingdom of Coastal has been cursed so that any newborns will eventually change into monsters, rampage through the streets every night, then wander off and vanish. When they first arrive, the heroes witness this firsthand, along with the complete breakdown of the unfortunate mother. While they have witnessed many atrocities in their time-traveling quest to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, they all quickly declare this situation to be the worst they've ever seen, and vow vengence on the Complete Monster responsible.

Web Comics

• In Tales of the Questor, Princeling Dolan's army stealthily abducts not only babies but all children under a certain age from a resistant duchy.

Western Animation

• A humorous (or disturbing) version happens on Invader Zim, which features an alien species whose adult forms happen to resemble human babies. Due to an unfortunate mix-up, their mothership accidentally beams up a collection of newborns instead of the landing party scouting the planet, forcing the aliens to take the babies' place for seven years. (No, they don't age, but the parents don't notice.)