10 Horror Movie Openings That Hook You From the First Scene

We harp on opening scenes around here because they're important, but they're especially important if you're making a horror film.

Horror movies live or die in those first few minutes (just like, probably, one of your hapless characters).

The opening is where you set the tone, establish what your movie actually is (such as its subgenre), and introduce us to your premise or monster. Usually, in horror, we get an early kill or character death, and sometimes these moments are extremely shocking. You want to jolt the audience and get them to lean forward.

Here are some of the most unforgettable opening sequences in horror, where the ghosts and ghouls make a heck of an entrance.

Ghost Ship

Ghost Ship (2002) Blu-Ray - Opening Scene www.youtube.com

It's an easy one to start with because, even if you don't like the rest of the movie, you probably still remember this film's opening scene.

The sequence takes place aboard an ocean liner in 1962, where elegant passengers dance on the ship's deck. A young girl sits alone until the captain kindly offers to dance with her. It's almost dreamy, which makes what happens next so effective.

A thin wire snaps across the deck and slices nearly everyone in half. The movie gives you a few horrible seconds where the characters realize what's happened before they collapse into pieces. The captain's head splits as he stares at the sole survivor—that little girl, too short to fall victim.

The rest of the movie doesn't quite live up to the shock of the opening, unfortunately, but it's a great example of how horror can get creative.

Star Julianna Margulies called the movie "The Shining meets Dead Calm."

Scream

- YouTube youtu.be

The best way to terrify an audience is to destroy their sense of safety. In 1996, killing off one of the film's biggest stars in the first 13 minutes sent a warning that any character could die at any time.

Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker is home alone when she receives a phone call from someone asking about scary movies. According to Far Out Magazine, Barrymore requested to play Casey, wanting to remove the audience's comfort zone.

By the time Casey's parents arrive home, the film has established that traditional horror movie rules don't apply here.

Writer Kevin Williamson told ComicBook.com he originally wrote the opening sequence as a one-act play before expanding it into a full screenplay.

"It was just a young character on the phone talking to us, but could it be a killer outside? That morphed into the opening scene to Scream. For a long time, I didn’t have a career. I didn’t know anybody. And I thought, 'Well, maybe I can just shoot that as a short film.' But when I decided to expand upon it and make it a screenplay, I thought that was like, 'Oh, wow! This is going to turn into a movie. This is just how you do it.'"

Midsommar

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Midsommar opens with a shocking tragedy that establishes protagonist Dani's grief. The sequence depicts the results of the murder-suicide of Dani's sister and parents, revealed through eerie tracking shots and the flashing red lights of emergency vehicles. The audience comes along with paramedics as they discover the grisly remains.

Ari Aster certainly knows how to set the scene.

Aster told Variety in 2019, "I was sort of going through a breakup at the time and piecing through the ruins of a failed relationship. I'd wanted to write [a breakup movie] before, but I could never find an angle that felt interesting and didn't feel like a mopey, kitchen sink drama. But then I was approached by a Swedish production company that read Hereditary, and they said that they wanted me to write a folk horror film set in Sweden."

The film acted as a kind of catharsis for him, and gave us a truly creepy opening scene.

Sinister

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Sinister opens without context, dropping the viewers into Super 8 footage depicting a family of four standing beneath a tree with hoods over their heads and nooses around their necks. There's no music, just an eerie click and drone.

According to Slate, the Super 8 films just look real, with their tracking lines and audio drops creating an authenticity that's hard to shake.

"The tree in the back, obviously, we had stunt people hanging in the tree to do that gag," production designer David Brisbin told Slashfilm. "We designed very carefully to make sure that when the kids were getting hung, that there was foliage in front of them a little bit, so that it wasn't too intense and showing the children. But there was a problem on the first day that we were shooting, where the stunt really didn't go as safely and as well as it should have."

They were missing a stunt coordinator, and the actors were almost injured. But thankfully, they accomplished the stunt safely.

Remember the importance of stunt safety on your own projects.

Jaws

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Steven Spielberg instilled fear in an entire generation with his opening scene. In it, a young woman named Chrissie goes for a late-night swim. Her companion is too drunk to join her.

We never see the shark. Spielberg shows the creature's power through Chrissie's violent movements as she's dragged through the water. According to Mental Floss, actress Susan Backlinie spent three days filming the sequence, attached to cables that crew members pulled back and forth along the shoreline to create those jerks.

Backlinie said in The Making of Jaws (via Far Out Magazine), "The first jerk-down, Steven [Spielberg] did. He had a cable that came to the front of my stomach and went to an anchor that was lying at the bottom of the ocean ... and then he just sat, and when he wanted that pulled, he just would pull."

Halloween

- YouTube youtu.be

John Carpenter's famous opening is shot in first-person POV. We follow someone walking through a house on Halloween night in 1963. The camera moves smoothly through rooms, picks up a knife, grabs a mask, and then climbs the stairs to murder a teenage girl.

Then the audience learns that 6-year-old Michael holds the bloody knife.

According to HalloweenMovies.com, Carpenter shot this opening scene last, with the entire crew working together to redecorate the house for the elaborate tracking shot. Crew members had to move lights as the long shot was filmed.

Producer Debra Hill's hands doubled for young Michael's (via Looper).

"We couldn't afford another kid to hold the knife later that night, so that's my hand holding the knife that stabs Michael Myers' sister."

It Follows

- YouTube www.youtube.com

In David Robert Mitchell's film, a young woman named Annie runs from her suburban house in high heels, circles the block, and returns home—all captured in long, unbroken takes that keep the audience constantly scanning for threats we cannot see.

According to Scriptophobic, horror audiences have come to expect that longer takes mean something bad is about to happen. So It Follows doesn't cut away for a long time, until the character ends up on a beach to await her fate. And it's a violent one, which the morning light reveals.

Mitchell based the story on recurring dreams he had in his youth about being followed, he told Digital Spy.

"I didn't use those images for the film, but the basic idea and the feeling I used. From what I understand, it's an anxiety dream. Whatever I was going through at that time, my parents divorced when I was around that age, so I imagine it was something to do with that."

Starting with what scares you is a great way to mine for horror ideas.

A Quiet Place

- YouTube youtu.be

A Quiet Place opens on Day 89 of whatever happened, dropping us into a post-apocalyptic world where a family scavenges supplies in complete silence. The film shows you the rules through action.

The opening establishes that you can't make a sound, and anyone who does can be killed. The film uses slow pacing to drag out the inevitable, building unbearable tension through visual storytelling.

Producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller told Yahoo! Entertainment that the film's original script incorporated the opening as a flashback.

Form said: "There was more dialogue in the original screenplay [by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck]."

The decision to open with the scene in real-time was made after Krasinski boarded the project.

Fresh

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Fresh technically doesn't just have a cold open. It has a cold first act. And we're counting it, okay?

The movie plays as a pretty straightforward and charming romantic comedy for over 30 minutes, following Noa as she meets the seemingly perfect Steve at a grocery store. They flirt. They date. They fall for each other. And then, 33 minutes in, when Steve has finally lured Noa to his remote home and hatched his plot, the title card finally appears.

Here, Fresh reveals itself as the weird, uncomfortable horror story it truly is.

Sebastian Stan said he sent director Mimi Cave an audition video featuring himself dancing with a knife in hand, posting the video on Instagram and writing, "It seemed we had similar ideas and she had a very specific point of view. The dance sequences were a big concern for her, and just in case she had any doubts that I could do it, I recorded myself in this video."

The shock of the moment always draws laughs and throws the audience off guard.

The Ring

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Gore Verbinski's The Ring opens with two teenage girls. Katie and Becca sit in a bedroom discussing an urban legend about a tape that kills you seven days after you watch it. They laugh it off. Then Katie admits she watched it a week ago.

When Katie dies, we don't see what happens to her.

Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli intentionally tried to eliminate shadows cast by actors in many scenes to subtly alter the viewer's perception and heighten ambiguity.

Verbinski told SciFi.com, "[Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli] and I discussed the removal of shadows to try to keep the characters feeling like they're floating a little bit, in space. I find films like The Tenant, where there's a kind of nauseousness you get in the process of the movie, and a lot of that comes from the composition. In this case, we really emphasized lighting and the oppressive nature of the softer light, overcast skies, and rain. It's not a movie that evolves into the light, it's a movie that ends where it begins."