10 Best Horror Movie Opening Scenes Of The 2000s

Rob Zombie may not be the best horror director out there, but he sure knows his classic features, and he loves to pay homage to them at any opportunity. Enter, his first feature, House of 1000 Corpses, which is nothing if not a love letter to the genre, telling the story of a group of youngsters caught in the web of some backwater hillbilly killers, and running the gamut from gothic to body horror, while nodding and winking at everything from Freaks to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Mysterious Doctor Satan to The Hills Have Eyes.

We open on Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen, set smack bang in the middle of nowhere and run by the enigmatic clown himself (Sid Haig), as two hicks try to rob it at gunpoint. After a bit of a silly back and forth, in which Spaulding and his janitor guess the identities of the men, one of Spaulding’s other guys kicks the door open and they blow the gunmen away.

This is all capped with a perspective shot from one of the would-be robbers on the ground as Spaulding puts his lights out for good, the screen fading to black as the Captain complains that they got blood on his best clown shoes, before the titles roll to Zombie’s own song “House of 1000 Corpses”. It’s got black comedy humour and bloody action, and sets up the rest of the film nicely - along with the twist at the end.