10 People Who Copied Movies In Disturbing Ways

4. The Deer Hunter's Russian Roulette Scenes Led To A Double Suicide

The Deer Hunter Robert De Niro
Universal Pictures

The Russian roulette scenes in 1978's The Deer Hunter are easily the most famous moments in the movie, with Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken acting their goddamn hearts out, leading the film to a Best Picture win at the Academy Awards.

Unfortunately however, the film's legacy hasn't been entirely positive. A couple of years after its release, it was reported that over two-dozen people had died while mimicking the Russian roulette scenes peppered throughout the story, prompting calls for these moments to be edited out of the film's TV re-runs.

One of the most widely-reported incidents that led to these censorship calls involved two men in their late-20s, who shot themselves in the head while sat at their kitchen table. The men - who had recently watched The Deer Hunter - used partially-loaded revolvers to play their deadly game, and while they both survived the first trigger-pull, they weren't so lucky on the second.

A week previously, a psychiatrist had actually warned the station that aired the film that it might inspire copycats, to which the station responded, "We elected to run the movie based on its merits as a motion picture".

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!