10 More Horror Movies That Cleverly START With Huge Twists

4. Alien 3

You're well within your rights to hate it, but Alien 3's opening gambit was nothing if not a totally jaw-dropping way to throw the audience off-kilter for the ride ahead.

David Fincher's infamously polarising threequel begins by revealing that Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the sole survivor of an escape pod crash which killed Ripley's fellow survivors from the previous film, Hicks (Michael Biehn) and young Newt (Carrie Henn).

While there are many fair arguments about Alien 3's opening undermining Ripley's quest to save her surrogate daughter throughout the last movie, it does nevertheless let fans know from the jump not to expect a purely crowd-pleasing, fist-pumping slice of entertainment like James Cameron's Aliens.

Alien 3 is a decidedly more rough-edged, nihilistic film from its grim opening all the way through to its bleak ending. 

Sure, many would've loved to see Ripley, Hicks, and Newt effectively playing happy families, but how exactly would that have operated within the framework of an Alien movie anyway?