28 Classic Movie Scenes Involving Stairs

13. "They're Here For Me!" - Gremlins (1984)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK30R1gsgGk The demise of Mrs Deagle might be more horrific, if it wasn€™t so glaringly obvious that she is a total witch. As the bitter old wench sees to her bastard cats, she mutters at the singing coming from outside €“ €œcarolers!€ It is all a cheeky set up for the glorious pay off of old Deagle doing 0 to 60 on a malfunctioning chair lift, and then hurtling out of her upstairs window to meet her end. The stairs are a central part of the scene, ultimately bookending it and alluding to the metaphor of a €˜gremlin in the machine€™. Mrs Deagle relies on her chair to get up and down the stairs, but after one of the Gremlins has mucked about with the electronics, her reliance on it becomes the source of her death. It is a scene littered with irony. She loves spiteful cats, but hates sweet spirited (at least upon initial impression) carol singers. She goes to throw water on the carolers before seeing that they are (what she presumes to be) demons; and we all know what happens when a Gremlin gets wet. She starts the scene calmly on her chair, and ends it screaming on her chair. She even knocks the picture of her dead husband on the way up - a reminder that she is quite literally on her own stairway to Heaven, or hell.

12. Ho Ho Ho - Die Hard (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM68LkoPR2k&feature=youtube_gdata_player Die Hard is a film synonymous with awesome deaths. The first film in the franchise has some absolute corkers, including: brain explosions, chain hanging and watch strap freefalls. But the first person John McClane ever kills in his onscreen career is potentially the most matter-of-fact. It is only in the wake of this death, that John does something iconic: Christmas hat + sweater message x Alan Rickman delivery = genius. I am, of course, referring to the death of henchman Tony (Andreas Wisniewski) aka Karl€™s brother. The scene starts as a cat and mouse nail biter, with McClane leading Tony around a construction site via the medium of power tools. A fight finally breaks out, and culminates in John and Tony taking a tumble down some stairs. We never actually see anything notable, but the cracking noise is an intimation that Tony€™s neck is now jelly. The stairs were not necessarily a key way to kill Tony off, but prove a fairly original way of easing John McClane into action hero mode. The death of Tony seems incidental rather than planned on John€™s part, and although he hardly starts vomiting after taking a life, it still shows John as a gradual killing machine instead of a preprogrammed stone cold killer. This kind of fumbling success is all part of what makes John McClane such an accessible action man.

11. Chainsaw Chase - American Psycho (2000)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1uUru2ikEs Before he was flipping out between takes, Christian Bale was paid to flip out during takes. His career breakthrough as Patrick Bateman in the controversial American Psycho, required Bale to get in on a scene that make brilliant and horrifying use of a staircase. The scene involves a butt naked, chainsaw wielding Bale running through a corridor, then waiting patiently before dropping his chainsaw down the galley of a stairwell onto his fleeing victim; buzz, splat, game over. There is a definite air of Hitchcock and DePalma about the stairwell, and its maze-like appearance adds to the surreal terror of the scene. There are some definite issues with the logistics of how Bateman manages to time his drop so well, and how from a bird€™s eye position the chainsaw somehow ends up in Christie€™s (Cara Seymour) side. But then again €“ SPOILER ALERT €“ Patrick Bateman is dreaming it all up anyways, so I guess logic is out the window. Having never had the patience to read the entirety of Brett Easton Ellis€™ source novel, I have no way of knowing if this sequence is in the book or not. But either way, Mary Harron€™s direction of the scene is clever stuff, with the most terrifying moment being a change of perspective shot as we see Bateman from above then pan to Christie€™s staircase descent. It is one of those rare moments in horror, when one gets to realize the severe implications of situation briefly before it all goes ass-up€ or in this case, blade down.