20 Greatest Horror Movie Opening Scenes of the 2020s (So Far)

11. The Monkey

Osgood Perkins' The Monkey certainly begins as it means to go on, kicking off with a 1999-set flashback where protagonist Hal Shelburn's (Theo James) father Petey (Adam Scott) attempts to return a wind-up drum-playing toy monkey to an antiques shop.

Petey is clearly in a hurried panic to offload the cursed item, which soon enough starts playing its drum, in turn triggering a chain reaction of events that eventually causes a harpoon gun to be fired.

The harpoon ends up embedded in the shop owner's stomach, and when it retracts, it pulls the poor guy's intestines with it. This leaves a dejected Petey attempting to destroy the monkey with a flamethrower before vanishing to parts unknown.

That's one hell of a deranged prologue, albeit one that perfectly conveys the sheer chaos that this cursed toy is capable of causing, while serving up a most unexpected cameo from the great Adam Scott, who wasn't featured in any of the film's marketing.