20 Best Opening Scenes From Recent Horror Movies
These recent horror movies kicked off in style.
The opening scene of any movie is so, so important in helping establish the tone and set the story and characters in motion.
Get it wrong and viewers might start tuning out immediately, but get it right and they'll be eating out the palm of your hand for the rest of the runtime.
And the opening scene feels especially crucial in the horror genre, where they're expected to give the audience some sort of visceral jolt - often a pre-title kill to keep viewers satisfied before building up to the next one.
But not all horror movies are solely concerned with serving up a brutal death scene as soon as possible - some want to immediately invest the audience in the themes, setting, and so on.
And in recent times, these are the 20 horror flicks that delivered the most evocative, unforgettable, and downright entertaining opening scenes.
Perhaps they were gory massacres, maybe they were suspenseful set-pieces, or they could've even been gut-bustingly hilarious punchlines nobody saw coming.
Whatever they were, they were all brilliant, no matter whether the rest of the film lived up to it or not...
20. Final Destination Bloodlines
As is custom for the franchise, Final Destination Bloodlines of course opens with a stunningly over-the-top premonition sequence, though this one happens to be set in the far past of 1969, as a young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) and her boyfriend Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones) attend the grand opening of a high-rise restaurant tower.
After a young boy (Noah Bromley) throws a coin off the top of the observation deck, a chain reaction is triggered which causes the restaurant's glass dance floor to collapse, killing dozens.
A fire then breaks out and the tower's structural integrity begins to fail, eventually causing the death of everyone else, including Iris.
But rather than pull back out to show Iris averting the disaster with the knowledge of her premonition, we instead leap forward 55 years to the present day, where Iris' granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) experiences recurring nightmares of the incident.
This is one hell of a fun way to start the movie, combining a brutal, expertly crafted calamity sequence with the fun new rub that Death is now targeting the descendants of everyone who survived thanks to Iris.
And let's face it, you'll never hear The Isley Brothers' iconic tune "Shout" the same way again considering how memorably it's used here.