10 Best First Kills From Horror Movies

You can pretend all you want that you watch horrors for their allegorical takes on societal issues or their willingness to push the boundaries of conventional cinema.

We all know you just like to see people get killed in the most bloody, brutal way possible.

Whilst not every horror film has to have kills in it, you could argue that the most iconic in the genre are stuffed to the gills with absolutely savage deaths. Stabbings, shootings, disembowellings, all the nasty stuff that goes on in Saw - where would horror be without all that?

A good first kill should set the tone for the rest of the film. It should establish the movie's murderous villain and set out exactly what level of guts and gore we should expect over the next 90 minutes or so.

These ten maiden murders are all excellent in their own ways. Some are so good that they eclipse everything else that follows. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's really not.

Spoiler alert (of course), but to be honest, these characters were so obviously earmarked for death that you really didn't need us to tell you that.

In isolation, the death of Theresa "Tree" Gelbman at the beginning of 2017's Happy Death Day isn't all that special.

She's walking down a dark tunnel, where she is approached by a person wearing a mascot costume, and gets stabbed after a brief chase. So far, so formulaic.

However, things get interesting when Tree wakes up as if nothing happened.

As it turns out, Tree is trapped in a time loop. At the end of every day, she encounters the same murderer, only to wake up back in bed each time she gets bumped off.

Think Groundhog Day if Bill Murray was a bratty sorority girl.

To break the loop, Tree must work out who her killer is and stop them. Unfortunately, she dies a lot of times trying to figure this out. 11 times in fact - and those are just the ones we saw.

Whilst some horror movies have killed off their "lead" character in the opening act, few have the audacity to bring them back to life as many times as Happy Death Day does.

Tree's first murder isn't much to look at, but it serves as part of a far more innovative narrative.