20 Famous Intertextuality Examples in Movies, Decoded

Intertextuality is what happens when one film borrows from another text: a line, a costume, a plot, a whole world. The 20 intertextuality examples in movies below are ranked from the lightest touch to the deepest. Number 20 is a single glowing prop. Number 1 is a film rebuilt from a 2,700-year-old poem.

20) Pulp Fiction (1994) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Pulp Fiction’s glowing briefcase is the classic case of intertextuality the audience found on its own.

The case glows gold and we never see inside. In Kiss Me Deadly, Mike Hammer chases a box called “the great whatsit”, and it glows too. Critics see the same box in the glowing car trunk of Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984).

Nobody on Pulp Fiction has claimed the link. Co-writer Roger Avary told Roger Ebert: “Originally the briefcase contained diamonds. But that just seemed too boring and predictable.”

19) Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Game of Death (1978)

Kill Bill borrows Bruce Lee’s most famous costume and puts it on the Bride.

The yellow suit with the black stripe down the side is Lee’s from Game of Death. The Bride even takes on a room full of opponents in it, the way Lee fought his way up a pagoda. Thurman said it took “a lot of brilliant costume work (to) recreate the look of Bruce Lee while covering my belly!”

The costume is not the film’s only debt. Meiko Kaji’s song “The Flower of Carnage” comes from Lady Snowblood (1973), another revenge film about a woman with a sword.

18) Toy Story 2 (1999) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Toy Story 2 quotes the most famous twist in Star Wars and plays it for laughs.

Zurg, voiced by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, corners the second Buzz, Utility Belt Buzz, on the roof of the elevator. “You killed my father!” says Buzz. “No, Buzz. I am your father,” says Zurg. Buzz howls “Noooo!” like Luke.

The joke only works because the audience knows the original. Vader’s line is tragedy in 1980. In a toy’s mouth it is slapstick. The words stay the same, and the meaning flips.

17) The Matrix (1999) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

The Matrix quotes Lewis Carroll out loud, again and again.

It starts on Neo’s monitor: “Follow the white rabbit.” Minutes later a woman at his door has a white rabbit tattoo on her shoulder. Then Morpheus spells it out: “I imagine that right now you’re feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole?” The red pill means “you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

In an official online chat in 1999, the Wachowskis said of Alice: “Big fan! It is a brilliant book. Many of the themes we tried to echo in The Matrix.” Cypher adds a second storybook: “Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.”

16) Get Out (2017) and The Stepford Wives (1975)

Get Out takes The Stepford Wives’ perfect suburb and asks who it is perfect for.

A city outsider arrives in a place where everyone smiles too much, and the servants seem wrong in a way nobody mentions. That is Stepford. Peele named his influences at a Hollywood Reporter roundtable in 2017: “The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby. Both [based on novels by] Ira Levin.”

He went further in his annotated screenplay. Chris is a photographer because the idea began as a tribute to Joanna, the photographer Katharine Ross plays in The Stepford Wives. Get Out won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

15) The Untouchables (1987) and Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The Untouchables restages the most famous sequence in silent cinema in a Chicago train station.

A mother drags a pram up the station steps as the clock nears midnight. The shooting starts, and in slow motion the pram rolls down the stairs, just as a pram rolls down the Odessa Steps in 1925. Andy Garcia’s Stone slides in and stops it with his foot, gun still aimed.

The scene wasn’t in David Mamet’s script. It replaced a train sequence the production could not afford. So a budget problem gave us one of the best-known homages of the 1980s.

14) Stranger Things (2016) and the Films of Spielberg, King and Carpenter

Stranger Things is intertextuality as a whole style, built from 1980s films and novels.

The only TV series on this list earns its place. While developing the show, the Duffers cut Carpenter music over shots from E.T. and other Spielberg films. Asked which King book mattered most, Ross Duffer said: “It’s probably It for both of us. It’s the big one.”

The single nods are mostly fan readings. Eleven hidden in Mike’s basement looks a lot like E.T. hidden in Elliott’s closet. The poster for The Thing on Mike’s wall is really there. For the town behind Hawkins, see where Stranger Things was filmed.

13) La La Land (2016) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

La La Land is a love letter to the musicals Damien Chazelle grew up on.

“A big thing for me as a teen would be the French New Wave musicals,” Chazelle said. “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort.” He has said he has seen Umbrellas more than 200 times. Of An American in Paris he said: “That’s a movie that we just pillaged.”

Mia and Sebastian watch Rebel Without a Cause (1955), then drive to Griffith Observatory, where that film stages its planetarium scenes. Critics read the bittersweet ending as a nod to Umbrellas. That comparison is theirs, not Chazelle’s.

12) Inglourious Basterds (2009) and The Inglorious Bastards (1978)

Inglourious Basterds borrows a title and a genre, then throws away the plot.

Tarantino took the title of Castellari’s Italian war film and the “men on a mission” shape of The Dirty Dozen. The story is new. It is not a remake.

He paid the debt on screen. Castellari has a cameo at the premiere, and Bo Svenson, the star of the 1978 film, plays an American colonel in the film within the film. As for the spelling, Tarantino said at Cannes: “I’m never going to explain that.” Our list of allusion examples in movies covers more titles that point at other films.

11) Far From Heaven (2002) and All That Heaven Allows (1955)

Far From Heaven recreates Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas so closely that it is pastiche.

In Sirk’s film, a wealthy widow falls for her gardener and the town turns on her, because of class. Haynes keeps the suburb, the gardener and the autumn leaves. Then he adds what a 1950s studio could not show: Raymond is Black, and Cathy’s husband is gay.

“It was all from the language of the most beautiful examples of those kind of films we could find,” Haynes told Sight & Sound, “and most of them were Sirk films.” The film earned four Oscar nominations, including one for Julianne Moore.

10) Scream (1996) and the Slasher Film

Scream is genre intertextuality: its characters know they are in a horror movie.

The film opens with Casey answering horror trivia on the phone to save a life. Later, at Stu’s party, Randy lays out the rules for surviving a horror movie while Halloween plays on the TV. Williamson has said: “Halloween is my favorite of all time.”

Craven adds his own joke. He plays Fred the janitor, in Freddy Krueger’s striped sweater and hat. Scream works as a slasher and as a lecture on slashers at the same time.

9) Shrek (2001) and the Disney Fairy Tale

Shrek parodies Disney’s fairy tales from its first page.

The film opens on a storybook, the way Disney films did for decades. Then Shrek tears out a page and uses it as toilet paper. Farquaad questions a Magic Mirror straight out of Snow White, which presents the princesses like a dating show.

Duloc, with its turnstiles and singing welcome dolls, reads as a theme-park joke. None of it lands unless you grew up on the originals. Some of those references were aimed at Disney, as our answer to is Shrek Disney explains.

8) Young Frankenstein (1974) and Frankenstein (1931)

Young Frankenstein parodies the Universal horror films with the original machines.

Kenneth Strickfaden built the crackling lab equipment for the 1931 Frankenstein. He had kept it in his garage, and Brooks put it back to work next to new pieces Strickfaden made for this film. Inspector Kemp parodies the one-armed inspector from Son of Frankenstein.

Brooks insisted on black and white. “The comedy won’t work if it’s in color,” he told Columbia. “It’ll be silly.” Columbia said no, so the film went to 20th Century Fox.

7) Spaceballs (1987) and Star Wars (1977)

Spaceballs is parody you can’t follow without the source.

George Lucas read the script and gave his blessing on one condition: no toys. Brooks explained that “if I made toys of my Spaceballs characters they would look a lot like Star Wars action figures.” So the film sells its own merchandise inside the story, from Yogurt’s flamethrower to Spaceballs toilet paper.

The father twist gets its own version. Dark Helmet tells Lone Starr: “I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.” Compare it with number 18. Toy Story 2 quotes the line. Spaceballs mangles it.

6) Star Wars (1977) and The Hidden Fortress (1958)

Star Wars borrows its point of view from an Akira Kurosawa samurai film.

The Hidden Fortress follows two squabbling peasants through a war they barely understand. Star Wars opens the same way, with R2-D2 and C-3PO. Lucas told Criterion: “The one thing I was really intrigued by was the fact that the story was told from the two lowest characters.”

He also shut down a popular theory. Both films have a princess crossing enemy lines, and Lucas called that “more of a coincidence than anything else.” Borrowing a structure is not the same as copying a story. For the hero’s side of Star Wars, see our archetype examples in movies.

5) The Lion King (1994) and Hamlet

The Lion King tells Hamlet with lions: a murdered king, a usurping brother and a ghost in the sky.

Scar kills his brother and takes the throne, like Claudius. Mufasa returns as a ghost in the clouds, like Hamlet’s father, and tells his son to remember. Minkoff has said the Hamlet idea came up mid-development, when “someone in the room announced that Hamlet was similar in its themes and relationships.” Screenwriter Irene Mecchi has joked that the project was “Bamblet,” part Bambi, part Hamlet.

Fans of Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion have long pointed to similarities too. Minkoff said he was not familiar with the series.

4) Play It Again, Sam (1972) and Casablanca (1942)

Play It Again, Sam is a whole film built around another film.

Allan (Woody Allen) is a film critic who can’t get over his divorce. The film opens on him watching the end of Casablanca. The ghost of Humphrey Bogart, played by Jerry Lacy, gives him advice on women. At the end Allan gives up the woman he loves at an airport, and recites Rick’s farewell speech to do it. The scenes were shot at San Francisco International Airport.

The title is its own joke. Nobody in Casablanca says “Play it again, Sam.” Ilsa says “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.'” The misquote was already famous long before Allen borrowed it.

3) 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and The Taming of the Shrew

10 Things I Hate About You moves Shakespeare’s comedy to a Seattle high school and refuses its ending.

The play’s Katherine becomes Kat Stratford and Petruchio becomes Patrick Verona. Bianca keeps her name, Cameron plays Lucentio and the school is called Padua. Mandella, Kat’s friend, is so devoted to Shakespeare she keeps his portrait in her locker.

The writers changed one thing on purpose. “Someone suggested The Taming of the Shrew,” Kirsten Smith said. “In our version, of course, the shrew wouldn’t be tamed.” Padua High was the real Stadium High School in Tacoma, one of the stops in where 10 Things I Hate About You was filmed.

2) Apocalypse Now (1979) and Heart of Darkness (1899)

Apocalypse Now moves Joseph Conrad’s river journey from the Congo to Vietnam.

In Conrad, Marlow travels upriver to find Kurtz, an ivory trader who has set himself up as a god. In Coppola, Captain Willard travels upriver to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. The film is not a direct adaptation, and Coppola said Kurtz was also loosely based on a real Special Forces colonel.

The layers keep going. Kurtz reads T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” aloud, and that poem opens with a line from Heart of Darkness, the announcement that “Mistah Kurtz” is dead. So the film quotes a poem that quotes the book the film is based on. It shared the Palme d’Or in 1979.

1) O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and the Odyssey

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the deepest borrowing on this list: Homer’s Odyssey retold in 1930s Mississippi, under a title taken from another film.

Everett Ulysses McGill (George Clooney) escapes a chain gang and heads home to his wife, Penny. Odysseus heads home to Penelope. On the way Everett meets a Cyclops, a one-eyed Bible salesman played by John Goodman, and three Sirens singing in a river. A blind prophet on a railway handcar tells his fortune at the start.

The title comes from Sullivan’s Travels, where a Hollywood director dreams of making a serious film called O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coens made it, almost sixty years later. Just don’t ask them about Homer. “Between the cast and us,” Ethan Coen said, “Tim Nelson is the only one who’s actually read the Odyssey.”

What is Intertextuality in Movies?

Intertextuality in movies is the link between a film and another text it borrows from, quotes or answers. The critic Julia Kristeva coined the word in the 1960s. For films, a “text” can be another film, a novel, a play, a poem or a whole genre.

The 20 intertextuality examples in movies above cover the main types:

Type	What it borrows	Examples on this page
Allusion	A name, a title or a prop	Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds
Quotation	Dialogue, word for word	Toy Story 2, The Matrix
Homage	A costume, a shot or a sequence	Kill Bill, The Untouchables, La La Land
Pastiche	A whole style	Stranger Things, Far From Heaven
Parody	A source, to laugh at it	Shrek, Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs
Genre	A genre’s rules	Scream, Get Out
Structure	A plot shape or point of view	Star Wars, The Lion King
Adaptation	A story, moved to a new form	10 Things I Hate About You, Apocalypse Now, O Brother

For each type explained with its own example, read our guide to the types of intertextuality in film. For more film terms, see the glossary of filmmaking terms.

FAQs About Intertextuality in Movies

The Final Cut on Intertextuality in Movies

Every film on this list is in conversation with another text. Some whisper, like a glowing case. Some shout, like a Bogart ghost giving dating advice.

The best intertextuality examples in movies change the meaning of what they borrow. Vader’s line gets funny. Sirk’s suburb gets honest. Homer ends up on a chain gang.

Pick any film you love and ask what it’s answering. The answer is usually on this list or one click away, in our foreshadowing examples in movies.