Ret-Gone/Film

Examples of Ret-Gone in Film include:

It's a Wonderful Life, and all the other stories inspired by it.
The movie The Forgotten: Telly holds on to memories of her young son who died in a plane crash, and goes through therapy to help her cope. Only shortly after the story begins, her therapist tells her that her son never existed, but was made up by her after a miscarriage. Telly frantically tries to prove that she's not crazy, but every single person who ought to know her son has forgotten him, and every scrap of evidence is missing or destroyed. Turns out aliens took her son, along with several other children, and tried to see how much it would take for the parents to forget them. Everybody else who clued in, including several non-parents who knew the children, gets randomly flung into the sky and disappears. Telly is not; instead, the alien wipes her memory since the birth of her son. Upon realizing that she (obviously) has memories from before that birth, i.e. her pregnancy, the alien is hurled into the sky.
It's implied that this happens in the Back to The Future movies when history is changed. The first features a photograph which gradually loses photographees.
- Word of God confirms it actually happened to adult!Biff in the second movie after he gave Grey's Almanac to his past self and told him how to use it.
In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy's most recent victims are erased from existence and from most people's collective memories, apparently a side effect of his growing power.
The Butterfly Effect: The director's cut ending has Evan Ret-Gone himself by going back in time and committing suicide by strangulation in the womb.
- Along with the implication that he may have had several brothers and/or sisters who chose the same fate for themselves ultimately.
The indie sci-fi film Ghosts of Hamilton Street has this happening to an everyday man. The people in his life are vanishing in reverse chronological order—first his recent acquaintances, then co-workers and finally his oldest friends—and he's the only one who notices the difference.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Sutter Cane deletes all memory of Linda Styles once she has completed her role in his plot.
In the French film La moustache, a man decides to shave off his mustache of many years, only to be disappointed when no one notices. The thing is, when he points it out, everyone - including his wife - is adamant that he's never had any facial hair. His quest to find the truth - whether he's crazy or at the centre of a conspiracy - endangers his marriage.
At the end of Donnie Darko, Donnie travels back in time to eliminate the tangent universe by dying. His very existence is forgotten by several main characters he's met since, though all of them remember him in their dreams.
Happens in Meet the Robinsons when Lewis wipes Doris from existence by vowing to never invent her.
In the film vs. of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the spell to make one beautiful (which in the book is implied to be a Be Careful What You Wish For) takes an even more sinister turn. Lucy wishes to look like Susan and finds that she is Susan—in a timeline where Lucy never existed. Among other consequences, she and her brothers never went to Narnia. Luckily, Aslan intervenes.
The German film Reconstruction does this with the protagonist. After certain point in the narrative, he is erased not only from the memory of his friends and family, but also is left with no home (the house where he lived doesn't properly exist). Obviously, the story becomes highly symbolical after that happens, with the possibility of some, most or all events in his story not being real. One of the most radical possible scenarios is that he doesn't even exist, and is merely a character in a story being written by the husband of the woman he loves. The movie plays with the idea of love itself being an ilusion.
Invoked in the Terminator movies, with SkyNet attempting to do this to John Connor, then the rebels attempting to do this to SkyNet. It doesn't actually happen, though, ever. Even Terminator 2 subverts it in the next movie.
In the Apocalypse film series movie Tribulation, Eileen Canboro (Margot Kidder) is mysteriously erased from Calvin Canboro's picture of his siblings, though Tom Canboro clearly remembers her. Of course, Eileen is only erased because she was Caught Up in the Rapture and Calvin has accepted the Mark of the Beast, causing him to forget her existence.
- Earlier in the movie, Tom Canboro finds out that a fellow police officer who he knows is a Christian is not listed in the police department's records after the Rapture.
The entire premise of Forget Me Not. Whenever the ghost kills one of the protagonist's friends, they not only die but also get completely erased from reality, so none of their other friends or family remember them (also they become retro-killing ghosts themselves). By the end of the movie, the protagonist's family has her committed because of her constant rantings about witnessing the horrible deaths of those closest to her — people that, as far as the family knows, have never existed.
A version of this is in the movie Flight Plan. The main character is made to think she's the only one who remembers her daughter's existence, but it's actually an elaborate set-up.
Done in The Net, where hackers erase a woman from reality. With hacking.

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