Hamlet

The production has said it outright, and said it early: once the story was a prince, a murdered king and a usurping uncle, the team began calling it Hamlet with lions and used the play to work out what was missing. What is directly Shakespeare's: the uncle who kills his brother for the throne, the son who flees rather than acts, the father who returns to demand that he does, the court corrupted under the new king, and the return to reclaim it. What is not: the ending. Hamlet dies and Denmark falls to a foreign army; Simba lives and the land recovers, which is the change that makes it a children's film. The two comic attendants are usually credited to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by way of Stoppard.

Marley's ghost recalls the Ghost of Hamlet's father, who returns to warn the living. In Hamlet, the Ghost of Hamlet's father appears at night wearing chains (or armor, depending on the scene), reveals that he is suffering after death, and returns to urge Hamlet to set things right. In A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley also returns after death, burdened by the chains he forged through greed, to warn Scrooge to change his life before it is too late. The idea of a restless spirit returning with a moral warning was already common in folklore, but Shakespeare's ghost is one of the best-known literary precedents.

Bergman builds the film's first movement on Hamlet. The father, Oscar Ekdahl, runs a theatre and collapses while rehearsing the Ghost; the widow marries a severe bishop; the son, Alexander, sees his dead father's ghost and turns against the stepfather. MEDIUM: the play supplies the family situation and a thread of images, not the story, which goes its own way.

Star Trek VI takes its title from Hamlet's soliloquy, "the undiscovered country", which the film repurposes to mean the future after the Cold War rather than death. Its Klingon general Chang quotes Shakespeare throughout, and the dinner scene has the Klingons claim the plays read better "in the original Klingon". One film of six, hence LOW.

Seneca's tragedies were translated into English in 1581 and were the model the Elizabethan revenge play was built on, and Thyestes is the bloodiest of them: a ghost driven on stage to demand vengeance, a hero who deliberates at length before acting, and a revenge accomplished at a feast. Every one of those is in Hamlet. The ghost with a grievance, the soliloquy as the place where the action stalls, the corrupted court, and the massacre at the end are Senecan furniture, reaching Shakespeare through Kyd as well as directly from a text he had read at school. What Shakespeare adds is a revenger who doubts the ghost.