9. The Shining (1980) The Phantom Carriage (1921)
Unlike George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick was tight-lipped about suggestions that an iconic scene from one of his movies might have been a rip-off. Yet its hard not to believe that the scene in The Shining involving Jack Nicolson and that axe owes more than a little debt to a 1921 silent horror film from Sweden, the title of which translates as, The Phantom Carriage. Comparing stills against each other demonstrates quite clearly how similar the staging of the door-hacking scene is in both; and the subject matter of each is eerily similar too, with both films featuring a drunken husband trying to smash through a door in order to reach and kill their terrified nuclear families. Its notable that in Stephen Kings original novel, Jack Torrance never used an axe; a croquet mallet was his weapon of choice. It was Kubrick who chose the woodcutters tool for his star, perhaps with the intention all along of recreating this disturbing moment from the silent era. We shouldnt read too much into Kubricks failure to publically acknowledge this influence, however. Kubrick rarely commented about anything to do with his work, preferring to let the movies themselves do the talking. That said, he did reveal a second influence on the scene, possibly because it is not so overt. D.W. Griffiths Broken Blossoms from 1919 featured a brilliantly hysterical turn from lead actress Lillian Gish, when she locks herself inside a claustrophobic closet in order to escape another drunken father hell-bent on filicide. The expressions of terror created by Gish in the scene were so powerful, even Griffith himself struggled to watch while directing her; which is why the sequence was used by Kubrick to help inspire Shelley Duvall to reach, and even surpass, the same level of psychotic hysteria in his own film.