Last Updated on July 26, 2021
AITH news guru Mike Catalano shot me the idea for this week’s top 10, and props to him for coming up with a humdinger. ‘Cause what’s more fun than the opening scene of a movie?
Horror for the most part is built to have immediate impact, so you don’t have pages and pages to introduce people and explain their backstory. Most often you have paper thin characters with an audience expectation that they get naked, get dead, or both in a short period of time.
And some movies handle that responsibility better than others. So check out my list of the best opening scenes, and make sure to spit bullets on your favs below!
I’ve rarely seen a better horror movie than THE DESCENT, and it’s opening sets the tone for the whole movie. We start with the adventure of a white water rafting trip, but also present are the unspoken tensions that run throughout the piece. And then we get hit with a brutal and unexpected bit of violence that telegraphs what we have to look forward to for the rest of the flick. Good, good stuff.
A beautiful woman getting naked and swimming at Crystal Lake before she gets sliced and diced more or less sums up what the entire F13 series is about. And then comes the intro to what Freddy’s been up to in a manner that effectively gives us the skinny on how these two franchises are going to merge. No fan is going to be anything but happy after this opening.
Everybody’s got fears about their plane going down, and FD does a great job of playing on that archetypal dread by essentially making one character seem crazy, piss all his friends off, and then flips it by showing us that he was right. The plane explosion is great, and we’ll learn soon enough how that fortuitous premonition will play out in a not so fortunate way for the “survivors”.
IMO this is a remake that had much potential, but had too many problems in the last block to be great. Doesn’t matter at the start though, because we don’t know exactly what’s going on beyond a strong sense that this is one f*cked up video. In a matter of moments we’ve got one dead teen and another institutionalized. That’s a powerful kickoff.
No doubt one of the reasons for the NOES remake is that Freddy became more of a jokester than a scary fiend as the series went on. Despite that, the intro stalk of Tina that sets up the dream/reality blend for viewers and shows just how dangerous those dreams can be is a great example of how little knowledge and the right atmosphere can be as scary as all the gore and set pieces in the world.
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