The Most Surprising Scene From All 9 Quentin Tarantino Movies

This is going to sound like stating the obvious, but Quentin Tarantino is well-known (or maybe infamous, at this point) for his stylized and reference-heavy dialogue, scenes of intense violence, and a certain willingness to shock and provoke while not wading into truly unapproachable (or like, exploitation-level) territory. He’s made nine films, counting one two-volume epic as a single movie, and each of them contains at least one shocking sequence.

Those particularly surprising scenes, one selected from every movie, are below. They're not ranked, and instead are in order of release. Also, it’s hard to talk about these moments without spoiling things, for hopefully obvious reasons. And, in any event, even the newest movie here is close to seven years old, at the time of writing, so getting a bit into spoilers feels okay here.

9 'Reservoir Dogs' (1992)

The "Stuck in the Middle with You" Scene

With Reservoir Dogs, one of the most surprising things is what you don’t actually see: put simply, the heist itself. It’s a heist-less heist movie. It’s more concerned with the aftermath of that heist, and various suspicions among the criminals who survived it, with some time also spent on flashbacks before the heist that work to reshape how you might've otherwise viewed the scenes that take place afterward.

The characters here are also generally pretty terrible people, with the worst of the bunch, Mr. Blonde, being at the center of the film’s most horrific sequence. It will forever change how you hear “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel, and actually, it’s a little like the whole “not showing the heist thing,” since it has a shocking act of violence that occurs just off-screen. But the impact of it’s still felt, and not showing it arguably makes the whole thing more disturbing.

8 'Pulp Fiction' (1994)

Butch Shooting Vincent

There are an overwhelming number of surprising scenes to choose from, in Pulp Fiction. It’s not quite literally a film made up of nothing but shocking moments, but it almost feels close. Not being able to put “Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face,” the needle to the heart sequence, or the way the story between Butch and Marsellus Wallace ultimately wraps up here feels hard. Consider them honorable mentions, maybe.

Back to Butch, before the mortifying scene with Marsellus, he also shoots – pretty much out of nowhere – Vincent Vega, who’d kind of been the closest thing to a main character in the whole movie. But then Pulp Fiction is told out of order, and so Vincent still shows up in the last half-hour or so of the movie and has a pretty prominent role there, so he’s still sort of the main character. It’s a bold thing for a film to just do, but Pulp Fiction makes it work.

7 'Jackie Brown' (1997)

Louis Shooting Melanie

Bit of repetition here, since the most surprising scene in Jackie Brown is similar to the most surprising scene in Pulp Fiction, but that’s okay. This is a more subdued crime film than Tarantino’s first two, and the violence here is quite understated, as a result, and with a lack of bloodshed that itself is quite shocking in comparison to the bloodier and more visceral Tarantino films.

Anyway, the scene in question has an ongoing argument of sorts that ends in public with one character shooting the other out of frustration, and with absolutely no warning if you're watching the movie for the first time. It’s in line with who these characters are, though, and it works to up the stakes in the overall film (which, for what it’s worth, is one of Tarantino’s better ones, even if it’s not as immediately appealing or attention-grabbing as some of his other films).

6 'Kill Bill' (2003-2004)

The Bride Getting Buried Alive

Of all the Quentin Tarantino movies, Kill Bill might well be the most straightforward, even if it’s the longest of the bunch (counting both volumes as one movie) and could well arguably be the wildest on a stylistic front. Tarantino views it as one movie, and doing so complicates things here a little bit, because the most surprising moment of Kill Bill’s first volume is the cliffhanger ending/reveal, and that’s taken out for The Whole Bloody Affair.

So, you're left with the sequence that has the Bride being buried alive, which is the closest she comes to dying, even though it might not seem, on the surface, as dangerous as the fights she got into. So, if you want to split the movies into two, then imagine the ending for Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is in this place, and then the whole buried alive sequence stands as the most surprising scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 2.

5 'Death Proof' (2007)

Mass Murder by Car Crash

The best part of Death Proof is the big car chase that concludes the whole thing, but the most surprising part of Death Proof is the way its first half comes to a close. It’s distinctly split into two halves, with one group of women being targeted by a stuntman/serial killer in the first half, and then another in the second.

The second group of women manages to thwart him, but the first group all perish in a grisly car accident he causes, managing to survive because he’s in a purportedly death-proof vehicle. That big crash scene in Death Proof is designed to alarm you in maybe the same way the shower scene in Psycho does, shaking up who the movie’s even about before pivoting to something else that’s quite different (but not entirely so) in the second half.

4 'Inglourious Basterds' (2009)

Rewriting History in a Cinema

It’s not subtle to have everything get shaken up historically in a cinema, when Inglourious Basterds itself is a piece of cinema that shakes up history, but Tarantino commits fully and makes it work, lack of subtlety and all. The movie takes place during World War II, and things build toward an event that Adolf Hitler and various other Nazi officials are said to be attending, so you'd be forgiven for thinking the plan will fail, since the war did not end in real life because of a successful assassination inside a cinema.

But then things more or less go to plan. Not exactly to plan, seeing as very few people survive, but Hitler is indeed killed. It’s a cathartic and bold rewriting of history, and if you need your World War II movies to be at least a little historically accurate, you might be annoyed. For everyone else, though, it ends up being one of the best and most surprising things about Inglourious Basterds.

3 'Django Unchained' (2012)

The Handshake Scene

Django Unchained really does peak a good half-hour or so before it actually wraps up. Everything builds to that big shootout, which takes place right after the two most significant characters in the film not named Django are killed within seconds of each other, with things exploding emotionally and then also in a more literal way, since the shootout is spectacular and blood-soaked, doing for gunfights what the extended climax of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 did for swordfights.

That almost-handshake that ends up being fatal is the most surprising moment of the movie, though. Taking that hand in hand (ha) with the shootout, it makes everything that comes afterward feel disappointing. Django Unchained is like a great 130-ish minute long movie that’s unfortunately stretched out to well over 2.5 hours, but where it peaks is still peak.

2 'The Hateful Eight' (2015)

Major Marquis Warren's Story

While it’s not as claustrophobic as a scene where someone’s buried alive in a coffin, The Hateful Eight does admittedly sustain feelings of claustrophobia for a whole lot longer. A whole movie, basically, in fact. It’s about eight people who end up trapped in a cabin during a blizzard, and they're all various shades of rotten, Reservoir Dogs-style, which leads to a whole lot of tension and, eventually, some all-out violence.

Samuel L. Jackson gets one hell of a monologue right before everything turns bloody, though, and where his character’s story ends up going proves arguably more surprising than any of the graphic violence that comes later. Jackson and Tarantino commit wholeheartedly to how twisted the whole thing is, and it’s impressive that such a scene stands out when there are so many other parts of The Hateful Eight that prove so gruesome and also rather controversial.

1 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' (2019)

Fighting Back Against the Manson Family

Well, admittedly, Tarantino returns to the well he went to in Inglourious Basterds, with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, since this one also includes with a cathartic rewriting of history. Maybe it’s still shocking because you wouldn’t expect him to do it twice, but he does anyway, and it does work at giving the whole 1960s a fairytale ending befitting the movie’s title.

In reality, the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate and several other people in a horrific attack in one of those acts of violence that kind of defined the 1960s, in the end (see also the several high-profile assassinations that happened in America the same decade). But in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the members of the Manson Family (quite a few of them played by then up-and-coming actors) ultimately encounter the fictional Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth instead, and all end up dying in grisly/darkly funny ways instead.