While some horror movies take their sweet time getting to the action and spend time setting up characters and showing off their creepy setting, others choose to dive in headfirst. Wasting no time in unleashing their frights, these horror films start by presenting their viewer with a sample of what they’re about to endure for the movie’s runtime, and this can act like a litmus test for whether or not you’re going to enjoy the experience.
Getting off to a fast start and wasting little time with exposition is a good way to simulate the panic the film’s characters are feeling when scary circumstances arise. If a woman’s just going about her day when a zombie attacks her, even though the audience isn’t in any danger, they still know just as little as the woman, so it’s easy to feel her panic as she gets eaten.
Blood On The Dancefloor Starts Off ‘Ghost Ship’
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
Cruise ships come with standard risks, like the occasional sinking or an outbreak of illness on board, but Ghost Ship gets off to a hot start with a problem you probably would never dream of.
The film starts with a dance floor full of people enjoying a romantic evening; there’s a great live band, the lighting is picturesque, and seemingly everything is right in the world. But that’s when an anonymous hand pulls a lever, and it all goes to hell.
A wire is pulled too tight, forcing another to snap, and as the whole apparatus comes crashing down, the wire whips across the entire dance floor. The wire quite literally slices through every single passenger, which is just about everybody on board. For a couple moments, everyone stands still out of shock, but then, all their bisected body parts start sliding off.
Entire torsos fall off their bodies like brisket sliding off the bone. Heads drop to their dance partners’ feet, people try grabbing their severed legs as they bleed out, and others try crawling away with their last seconds of life.
The only person on deck spared from the accidental slaughter is a young girl, who was too short for the wire to strike her. All she can do is scream as her dance partner – the ship’s captain – has the top half of his head fall clean off. Ghost Ship gets right into the action in the best way possible.
The rest of the film is about a crew attempting to salvage the cruise ship, which vanished after the wire massacre 40 years prior. They’re greeted by the various ghosts who haunt and kill them one by one, and while the film isn’t too memorable overall, the opening scene is hard to forget.
After all, who could forget watching a massive crowd of people all getting sliced in halves, thirds, or even quarters (depending on their height)?
A Car Crash From Hell Kicks Off ‘Final Destination 2’
Photo: New Line Cinema
Car accidents are scary, plain and simple. Beyond that, they can lead to a chain reaction, causing even more accidents among the surrounding vehicles. The beginning of Final Destination 2 has a crash with one such chain reaction that will make you hesitate before getting behind the wheel. It’s an intense, gore-filled, panic-inducing 30 seconds of pure adrenaline, with explosions, beheadings, and a whole lot of cars getting smashed to bits.
It all starts with a girl named Kimberly and her friends having fun on a Spring Break road trip. Right before they pull onto a freeway onramp, a homeless woman’s bag of cans breaks, and Kimberly and her friends chuckle at the woman’s misfortune. They then continue onto the freeway, where they spot a cop car.
After we get a glimpse of the other drivers surrounding them on the road, the police car passes the partiers and pulls behind a logging truck – and that’s when the chaos begins.
Suddenly, the strap securing the logs breaks, and one of them rolls off and collides with the cop car, breaking through the driver’s side of the windshield. This annihilates the officer’s top half in a violent splash of blood as the log re-emerges out the back window.
A motorcyclist narrowly avoids the spilled lumber, and after falling off his bike, he slides to a halt relatively unscathed. Then, his bike comes flying in and collides with him, crushing his body. Simultaneously, a car flips several times after swerving to avoid the mess, and after numerous flips, he also lands upright and appears to be fine – until he realizes he got thrown to the wrong side of the freeway. A truck smashes into him, crushing him and his car to smithereens.
Two more cars crash into the fallen logs, one exploding and killing its two passengers, the other flipping and seemingly crushing the driver. Kimberly and her friends are then flipped multiple times before landing on their car’s side, and they get a front-row view of the last of the horror.
A man who was just trying to appear suave for Kimberly and her friends a moment before is left screaming after his vehicle explodes when it hits the logging truck, and as he cries for help, another truck blows right through the mass of flames and plows directly into him. It then heads right for Kimberly and her friends. All they can do is scream as the truck speeds toward them in a blaze of fire, blood, and a whole lot of flying car parts.
But then, Kimberly wakes up and is still at the freeway entrance, where she spots the homeless lady with the cans once more and realizes the entire incident was a premonition of what’s to come.
She then delays entering the freeway, which in turn delays all the cars behind her, and the deadly accident is prevented. By doing so, though, she and her fellow drivers have cheated death, and because of this, they’re systematically killed in various strange accidents in the days following.
Bad Driving Brings The First Horrors Of ‘The Descent’
Photo: Pathé Distribution
The Descent opens with three women weaving down rapids, and it looks like any number of things could go wrong, but despite all the drops and bumps, they make it through unscathed. Crisis averted… for about 15 minutes.
While driving home with her husband and small child, Sarah asks why her partner seems withdrawn (spoiler: It’s because he’s sleeping with her best friend), and this surprise question makes her husband look her way for just a few moments too long. In a classic “scream at your TV” moment, the audience is forced to watch him drift into oncoming traffic, where they immediately collide with a work truck.
When they crash into the other vehicle, two metal rods that were poorly attached to the top of the work truck come flying towards them and break right through the windshield. While the child being impaled by one of these poles goes unseen, a shot of the back of the father’s headrest leaves little to the imagination. One of the poles goes clean through his head upon impact, no doubt resulting in instant death.
Sarah is left relatively unscathed but is now family-less. After she awakes in the hospital, she has a nightmarish episode in which hallway lights begin switching off as she runs away crying – is an understandable reaction to her ordeal.
One year later, Sarah and her friends go spelunking and discover murderous humanoids that live in an unmarked cave system, and while there are some pretty awful deaths amongst the group, perhaps the worst ones are still those of her husband and child.
Don Saves Himself And Leaves His Wife Behind In ’28 Weeks Later’
28 Weeks Later is also ranked #8 of 125 on The Top 100+ Zombie Movies Of All Time
Photo: 20th Century Fox
Everybody’s always so focused on being a hero in movies that it’s rare you get to see a character chicken out and act out of cowardice, so maybe that’s why the opening scene of 28 Weeks Later stands out the way it does.
The film opens after the “Rage Virus” outbreak shown in the first film, 28 Days Later, and it begins with a small group of survivors camped out in a farmhouse with boarded windows. Suddenly, a little boy comes banging on the door, and the protagonist’s wife, Alice, decides to let him in, despite her husband Don’s disapproval.
Don ends up being right, though, because moments after the child’s appearance, hordes of undead, flesh-eating zombies show up at the front door and start breaking in.
Panic ensues amongst the sheltered survivors, who start getting ripped to shreds while trying to fight off the dead, but Don and Alice manage to get upstairs just before the lower level is overrun. When Alice tries grabbing the boy from one of the bedrooms, she and the child get cornered with Don at the other end of the room. She shouts for Don to help them, but he just stares in cowardice for a brief moment, before he closes the door, saving himself and allowing the zombies to slaughter his wife and the boy.
He then jumps out a second-story window and takes off in a dead sprint with plenty of zombies on his tail. When he sees a man on a dock quickly preparing a small boat, Don dives into the vessel, and the man falls into the water while zombies rip him apart until he’s nothing but a pool of blood.
The undead try to swarm the boat as Don attempts to get it moving. After kicking off the final zombie, he’s escaped free, and all it took was sacrificing his wife, a child, and the poor guy who was prepping the boat.
Don certainly isn’t going to make you like him based on this opening, and while it’s hard to agree with his immoral decisions, it’s clear he’s doing anything he can to survive.
Ana Misses A News Alert In ‘Dawn of the Dead’
Photo: Universal Pictures
Pretty much every zombie movie contains a scene in which a news broadcaster hits the main characters with some exposition, like what potential weaknesses the zombies have, what cities have already been destroyed, etc. While this may be an easy, informative tactic, it’s far more entertaining to see characters discover the zombie issue organically out on the streets.
Zack Synder’s Dawn of the Dead presents an interesting (and realistic) angle to these zombie alert news casts – people don’t watch the news. Well, some people do, but maybe just as background noise while they’re not really paying attention.
Plenty of things can prevent you from watching your local news station, and in the movie, two characters just so happen to start making love in the shower right when a news alert flashes over the TV screen.
So, due to the couple’s lack of attention, when they wake up and find that the kid from next door is in their room, bloody and covered in gore, they aren’t prepared when she chomps down on the husband’s neck. And while the wife, Ana, knows to throw the child out of the room and close the door behind her, she definitely isn’t prepared for her husband to attack her just moments later.
In a frenzy, he jumps over the bed to maul her, but she manages to slide past him and dive into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Not only did she somehow avoid a deadly bite, but as she slips past his vicious lunge, she’s able to grab her car keys off the nightstand. This is a woman who knows what she’s doing!
She then climbs out the bathroom window, but before getting in her car, she sees the neighborhood has broken out in pure chaos, with fires ablaze everywhere and blood-soaked people running rampant. She’s held at gunpoint by a fearful neighbor in the street, but before he can shoot, he’s struck by a speeding ambulance.
She finally drives away in her car, but after stopping out of shock to witness the pure savagery of someone being eaten in a bus, a man tries pulling her out of her car to take her vehicle. She’s able to kick him in the chest and hit the gas, but then her car breaks through the safety rail and uncontrollably crashes into a tree.
If only her husband could have kept it in his pants for five more minutes, she wouldn’t be in this mess.
Pennywise Bites Off Georgie’s Arm In ‘It’
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
The first scene of 2017’s It is one of its most memorable, and it kicks off the story just about as brutally as possible. We meet two young brothers, Bill and Georgie, with Bill making a paper sailboat for his younger brother, who excitedly takes it out into the rain to “sail” in the full, rushing gutters of their neighborhood.
After this sweet exchange, Bill never sees his brother again – or at least, he never sees the real Georgie again.
Little Georgie tracks his paper ship down the street until it falls down a storm drain, and after he spends a moment wondering how to retrieve it, he sees what looks like a clown in the drain. The clown introduces himself as Pennywise, and even though the little boy is momentarily hesitant to talk to a stranger, he continues talking to the creepy clown for a bit too long.
When he finally gets the creeps and is about to leave, Pennywise reminds him of his paper boat. Telling Georgie to reach in and take it from him, the boy reaches his arm out, which the clown quickly grabs as he reveals rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth that bite Georgie’s arm clean off.
The young boy screams and tries to crawl away, but Pennywise isn’t done – he reaches out from the sewer and drags Georgie to his inevitable death.
The rest of the film follows Bill and his group of friends – the self-proclaimed Losers Club – investigating and ultimately trying to take down Pennywise, an evil entity that returns to their town and devours people every 27 years. The Losers have to fight against him while he uses their biggest fears to his advantage, and if they don’t stop him soon, there’s no telling how many people he’ll consume during the cycle.
Jigsaw Hides A Key Inside His Victim In ‘Saw II’
Photo: Lions Gate Films
Saw 2 wastes no time getting right into Jigsaw’s most recent games of torture, and like all his demented “games,” it looks like a painful death is all but certain. A man wakes up in the room with blood coming out of his right eye and a large metal contraption locked onto his neck. The device appears to be a metal mask lined with nails, and it’s clear the second it snaps shut on his head, he’s done for.
He finds a surgical mirror and scalpel next to him, as well as an old-school TV set in front of him, which soon plays a video of the masked Jigsaw, who explains the rules of the game. While the man was knocked out, Jigsaw surgically implanted a key beneath his right eye, and he now has 60 seconds to remove the key and unlock the mask – or else.
The minute-long timer begins ticking away, and the man is forced to grab the scalpel to retrieve the key, but he struggles to cut himself open. He keeps screaming for help and begging for mercy, but by now, he should know he”s wasting his breath. He keeps trying to use the scalpel, but each time, he can’t force himself to do it.
Eventually, out of frustration, he throws the tool to the side and falls to his knees. The timer runs out as he starts screaming, “No, no, no!” and just as it hits zero, the metal mask – as promised – slams closed on his face. He sways for a moment before falling on his side, and a pool of dark red blood quickly floods out of the eye holes of his death helmet.
It’s a great intro to the film, and if you hadn’t seen the first Saw, it quickly fills you in on the kind of movie you’re about to experience.
Jaws is also ranked #27 of 772 on The Most Rewatchable Movies
Photo: Universal Pictures
Jaws has one of the most iconic opening scene sever, and it’s the horror-film blueprint for getting right into the action. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic opens with a group of teenagers having a bonfire when two of them break away from the group to go skinny-dipping in the ocean.
As the girl, Chrissie, runs ahead of the guy, strips down, and jumps into the water, the dude drunkenly trips, then falls down a hill, separating them. Chrissie swims near a buoy as he lies down on the beach, taking a load off after his spill. But then, as she treads water waiting for him, she’s yanked underwater by an unseen force.
She quickly resurfaces but is aggressively pulled back down again, and after rising up again, she starts screaming in a panic. She’s then dragged around and whipped back and forth like a rag doll, all while maintaining the same blood-curdling scream. A cut to the beach reveals the boy has dozed off in a drunken haze while laying on the sand and hasn’t noticed Chrissie’s attack.
Chrissie manages to grab onto the buoy, but only temporarily. She’s quickly pulled away again, and as she screams out, “God, please help!” she’s dragged underwater for the final time. We don’t see her again until a few body parts wash up on shore the next day.
The rest of the film details the long and deadly process of catching the massive Great White Shark that killed her, as well as several other members of the Amity Island community.
A Cabin Vacation Goes Wrong In ‘Evil Dead Rise’
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
You know how, on any trip with a bunch of friends, there’s always one person who gets sick and becomes a total downer? The opening of Evil Dead Rise is like that, but instead of throwing up all over a shared bathroom, the person viciously murders everyone while spouting ancient evil texts. That’s relatable, right?
The film opens up with an homage to the iconic, fast-moving tracking shot through the woods that appears in the first Evil Dead films, but this time, it’s not an evil force – it’s just a drone that zooms in on the surprised face of a reading girl. The girl, now annoyed, retreats into the cabin to check on her sick friend, Jessica, as the drone pilot stays on the lake’s dock.
Inside, Jessica is speaking in an uncharacteristically deep voice and reciting the ancient Book of the Dead. She then falls off the bed, prompting her friend to rush to her side, and this is when things get nasty. The possessed Jessica rips her friend’s scalp clean off her head, leaving only a bloody mess of tissue on her skull. (It’s such a nasty effect, you know it made Sam Raimi proud.)
The scalped girl then runs out to the drone pilot to warn him, but as she does, Jessica follows, grabs the drone out of the air, and forces its fast-spinning blades into her own face before falling into the lake. The confused guy decides to jump into the lake to save her but is immediately pulled under the water, all while the scalped girl spectates, horrified, from the dock.
After just a moment, though, something is thrown from the water and lands on the dock. The scalped girl turns to see the drone pilot’s severed head. Jessica then levitates out of the water as the blood-red title card appears behind her.
While Evil Dead Rise may primarily take place in a New York City apartment building, it feels only right to have it begin in a wooded cabin with some vacationing young adults getting horrifically mauled. The lake-side killing is revealed to have taken place just 24 hours before the movie’s main events, and that’s when we’re introduced to the film’s main family.
‘The Boogeyman’ Isn’t Afraid To Kill Children
Photo: 20th Century Studios
An unwritten rule in filmmaking – horror or not – is that you don’t kill kids. Plain and simple. Children’s bodies can be found lifeless in certain circumstances, like in Trainspotting, but that’s all mainstream films usually try to get away with.
The Boogeyman, released in 2023, kicks off by letting the audience know that it’s throwing normal horror-movie rules out the window. In its opening scene, an infant girl lays in bed when – as they tend to do in horror movies – her door creaks open. A voice lets her know there’s no need to be worried, it’s just her father coming in to check on her, but even this small child knows this isn’t true.
She begins crying when the camera pans up to a picture above her bed of her and her smiling family. Then, a splash of blood violently splatters across the family portrait, and the crying ceases. From then on, it’s clear that children aren’t safe in this movie, which is a pretty upsetting idea to lots of people.
Filmgoers found this scene disturbing, but what better way to make them worry about the movie’s child characters than showing a child’s death? Once you know typical movie rules don’t apply, every scene in which a child is in danger is far more tense.
The rest of the film is about the child-killing entity and its latest family of victims, and this leads to the eldest daughter having to uncover the mystery behind this monster who preys on the weakest possible targets.
A Movie, Within A Movie, Inside Another Movie Starts ‘Scream 4’
Photo: Dimension Films
If you’re a fan of the Scream franchise, then you know they like a fast start. The openings of Scream movies are always entertaining because they’re usually playing off some sort of genre trope while also subverting your expectations, like when the first film unexpectedly killed headliner Drew Barrymore in its very first scene.
Scream 4, released in 2011, opens with Lucy Hale – at her peak during the first few seasons of Pretty Little Liars – answering the phone and refusing to play the telephone game with a Ghostface voice just before the masked killer slaughters her and her friend.
But then, in a twist, the film cuts to Kristen Bell and Anna Paquin, two teen girls watching the latest installment of the movie-within-a-movie franchise, Stab. But then, another twist is revealed when Bell stabs the judgemental Paquin, only for this to also be revealed as another Stab film. The real viewers are actually Aimee Teegarden of Friday Night Lights and Britt Roberston of Tomorrowland.
That’s right, the film opened with a parody movie of itself that’s revealed to be another parody movie inside of the real movie. If you’re confused, that’s totally fine – there’s nothing confusing about what comes next.
Teegarden plays a prank on Robertson’s character by going upstairs and calling her phone while using a Ghostface voice imitator, but when Teegarden returns downstairs, her friend is nowhere to be seen. After picking up the phone and chatting with a threatening Ghostface, her friend’s bloody corpse is thrown through the window, and she’s then hunted down and slaughtered.
The movie essentially has three opening scenes with popular young actresses of the time getting killed, and all of them help kick off the movie at a breakneck pace.
A Doomed Girl Can’t Outrun The Monster In ‘It Follows’
Photo: RADiUS-TWC
The 2014 film It Follows wastes no time showing the audience the consequences of failing to outrun the evil entity at its center.
A teen girl, Annie, runs out of her house, then slowly walks backward down the street, never taking her eyes off someone – or something – unseen by both the camera and other people outside. Her father comes out to check on her, but after insisting she’s fine, she bolts back inside the house for a few tense moments before returning outside, hopping in her car, and taking off down the street.
Whatever she’s running from, it’s clearly a matter of life or death, and as such, she drives through the night to escape. Next we see her, however, she’s sitting on a dark beach in the illumination of her headlights, calling her father and apologizing for her past behavior, clearly making amends before her upcoming death.
She ends the call just as she seemingly spots something in the distance, and a quick cut to morning reveals she’s not only dead, but her body has been horribly mutilated, with one of her legs snapped off at the knee. Looking like a nightmarish yoga pose, the disturbing corpse is a warning sign for the viewer of what the creature – who will soon be hunting our protagonist – is capable of.
The story soon unravels, and the monster is revealed to be an STD-like nuisance that tracks, follows, and hunts its victims. The only way to escape it is by sleeping with someone and passing it on, but if they die, it’s coming back for you. Another element that makes this monster unique is that it always walks in a direct line toward its victims, and while it can trick you and shape-shift into people you know – or even total strangers – the one horrifying giveaway is the straight line in which it walks.
Soon after Annie’s death, the man who passed it to her, in order to save his own skin, sleeps with the film’s protagonist, a college girl named Jay. From then on, she has to outrun the entity or she’ll face a brutal death just like Annie’s.
