10 Movies That Influenced Audiences In Awful Ways

Russian Roulette has existed for a long time, although the name has only existed for the past 78 years. Originally the game was played by the desperate; those who have racked up gambling debts they're unlikely to pay off in any other way would go all-in (literally) on the game, and the survivor's debt would be cleared. Those running the games would pull in a fortune from bets placed on each pull of the trigger, easily making up for the debts of those who lost their lives.

It was the perfect scene for The Deer Hunter, in which captured soldiers are forced to play against one another. It's hardly surprising that the scene is considered one of the most tense committed to film, as there was actually a live round in the gun to help the actors hold onto the tension and fear throughout filming.

And, while Russian Roulette had been around for decades when the film was released, The Deer Hunter brought it to the masses. Suddenly this wasn't just the realm of the broken fighting their way out of their desperation in smoky rooms somewhere in the bad part of town. This was something teenagers were playing in college dorm rooms. This was a game that children played at slumber parties. Russian Roulette had become mainstream.

In the three years following the film's release, fifteen people in the United States alone who could be proven to have watched the film died playing Russian Roulette. The youngest of these was John Phillip Triste. On June 16 1980, Triste was shot in the head by a friend with a .38 caliber revolver while they were "playing Deer Hunter".

A far cry from those desperate men who'd dug a hole so deep they'd lost sight of any future for themselves, Triste was just 8 years old.