10 Brilliant Moments of Movie Foreshadowing You May Have Missed

1. Shaun of the Dead: After Liz breaks up with Shaun, he drinks the pain away with his friend Ed. To cheer him up, Ed plans a day of drinking the next day, which includes “Bloody Mary first thing, bite at the King’s Head, couple at The Little Princess, stagger back here, back at the bar for shots.” This is actually the entire plot of the movie. The first zombie they encounter is wearing a name tag that says Mary, then a zombie bites the neck of Shaun’s stepfather, the king of the family. Shaun then saves a couple, Dave and Dianne, and his princess, Liz. Then they stumble their way through a zombie herd to get back Winchester, where they shoot at the living dead.

2. Psycho: After Marion Crane checks into Bates Motel, she overhears the owner, Norman Bates, get into an argument with his emotionally abusive mother. Still, Norman defends her when Marion suggests their relationship might be toxic. He explains that his mother is “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds.” This line foreshadows the twist when it’s revealed that Norman killed and taxidermied his mother.

3. The Avengers: When the heroes assemble on S.H.I.E.L.D’s helicarrier for the first time, Tony Stark makes a remark about one of the ship’s engineers playing the arcade game Galaga. The objective of the game is to defend Earth from invading aliens as they descend the planet, which is exactly what The Avengers have to do during the Battle of New York in the film’s climax.

4. The Empire Strikes Back: In the middle of the movie, Luke Skywalker goes to the planet Dagobah to meet Yoda to begin his Jedi training. During his journey, he duels with a vision of Darth Vader in the Dark Side Cave. Luke strikes Vader down with his lightsaber and finds his own face behind Vader’s helmet and mask. This hints at the fact that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, which he learns at the end of the movie.

5. The Shawshank Redemption: When Andy Dufresne arrives at Shawshank at the beginning of the movie, Warden Norton gives all of the incoming inmates a copy of the Bible and tells them that “Salvation lies within.” Eventually, Andy escapes from prison by digging through a concrete wall for 20 years with a small rock hammer that he has kept hidden inside the Book of Exodus. When the warden discovers the hollowed-out Bible in his personal safe, he finds an inscription from Andy: “Dear Warden, You were right. Salvation lay within.”

6. Back to the Future: The opening credits sequence features dozens of ticking clocks in Doc Brown’s lab. One of them features actor Harold Lloyd from the silent film Safety Last! hanging from the minute hand. The clock foreshadows Doc Brown hanging from the Hill Valley clock tower trying to harness a bolt of lightning to send Marty back to the 1980’s.

7. Jurassic Park: When Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, Dr. Ian Malcom, John Hammond and lawyer Donald Gennaro arrive to Isla Nubar for the first time, their helicopter slowly descends through a valley onto a launch pad on a lagoon. The descent is turbulent, so everyone buckles up. Dr. Grant finds that he has two female end buckles, but ties the straps together and manages to make it work. While the scene is meant to be funny, it actually foreshadows that all the dinosaurs on the island are female, but manage to make it work and reproduce.

8. Total Recall: One of the biggest hints of whether or not Doug Quaid’s adventure on Mars was real or merely a memory implanted in his brain comes at the beginning of the film when he visits Recall and one of the engineers tells him that he will experience “blue skies on Mars.” At the end of the movie, the Red Planet is terraformed and there is now a blue sky on Mars.

9. Reservoir Dogs: When the police show up in the middle of the diamond heist, it’s clear that one of the criminals is an informant. During the breakfast scene, when Joe leaves the table to pay the bill, everyone contrivbutes a dollar for the waitress’ tip- except for Mr. Pink who refuses to tip based on principle. When Joe comes back to the table, he asks who didn’t contribute, and Mr. Orange does not hesitate to rat out Mr. Pink, foreshadowing that he is in fact the informant. Also, when Nice Guy Eddie rushes to the hideout after the failed heist, there’s an orange balloon following his car, nodding to the fact that Mr. Orange is after him.

10. Fight Club: About 2/3 of the way through the movie, it is revealed the Tyler Durden is the alter ego of the Narrator, and they are, in fact, the same character. There are a number of visual cues that foreshadow this twist, but the very clever moment is when the Narrator beats himself in an attempt to blackmail his boss. The Narrator says, “For some reason I thought of my first fight… with Tyler.”