10 Best Horror Movie Opening Scenes Of The 2000s

Arguably the last great film of the New French Extremity - and a late addition to the canon considering the bulk of these films were made around the turn of the 21st century - Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is a trial from the get.

The opening credits sequence plays documentary-style footage of Lucie Jurin (Jessie Pham), charting her escape from a slaughterhouse where she was imprisoned and tortured, into an orphanage, where she befriends Anna Assaoui (Erika Scott). It then transitions seamlessly into the room in the orphanage in which these clips are being watched, by Anna, where we find Lucie has been hurting herself and, in an end-of-scene twist, is attacked by a demonic woman who appears at the end of her bed.  

Whiplash is the name of the game, and Laugier inverts this sequence as we enter the film proper on a scene of happy, peaceful, French domestic life, where a nuclear family is gathered around the table for breakfast. They joke, they eat, and the kids bicker, until the doorbell rings, and a grown-up Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) comes to blow them to kingdom come. Subverting our expectations and muddying the waters on who to root for, or even what the truth of the situation is, Martyrs offers no easy answers from the outset.