25 Films That Intentionally Spoil Other Films

Jan de Bont’s American disaster movie Twister returned with a Lee Isaac Chung-directed sequel in 2024 (Twisters), some 28 years after the original had changed the landscape of rural Oklahoma forever. This gave us cause to return to the first film, and boy, were we surprised at what we found.

Twisters follows a group of storm chasers - led by meteorologist Jo (Helen Hunt), and including her reluctant and estranged husband, TV weatherman Bill (Bill Paxton) - whose efforts to try and deploy a new-fangled tornado research device during twister season in Oklahoma wind them up in a spot of bother. But none of this is surprising.

What is shocking is the way the film spoils Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), for apparently no reason. During a scene set at a drive-in, we get a full blast of The Shining, including the scene when Jack (Nicholson) has already gone crazy and is hunting down his family with an axe. Far from a random choice, however, this was exactly what de Bont wanted in order to pay homage to Kubrick - a fan of De Bont’s bus thriller Speed (1994) - and contacted him directly for permission to use The Shining in this way.