10 Scariest Opening Sci-Fi Movie Scenes Ever

10. Cube

Director Vincezno Natali's directorial debut has followed his career throughout, each film putting its audience in a state of vague confusion and discordance before unveiling the thrust of the story. Cube opens with a Kafka-esque situation, as a bald man in what appears to be some sort of prison outfit awakes in an empty room, a hatch on each of the four walls. It's clear he's uncertain of his surroundings, or even how he got there, so he persists through one of the hatches to explore.

What happens next is fairly infamous, to the extent that noted hack director Paul W.S. Anderson has blatantly ripped it off more than once throughout the Resident Evil franchise. As he cautiously walks forward, a wall of thread-thin, sharp wire flies through him. His body falls to many small pieces in the shape of the title after remaining still for a moment. It's not only jarring, but it sets up the rest of the film - where characters are tasked to find an escape route of booby-trapped rooms - all cubes housed within a larger cube.

That there's no explanation for their entrapment - some sort of twisted variation on the Stanford Prison experiment, a perverse torture dome for billionaires or worse - only adds to the dread set