10 Best Horror Movie Opening Scenes Of The 2010s

Post-Lord of the Rings, Elijah Wood reinvented himself in a big way, sidestepping conventional leading man roles in favour of producing and starring in indie horror flicks. Franck Khalfoun's first-person remake of the 1980 slasher Maniac puts Wood front and centre (and yet behind the camera) as Frank Zito, a schizophrenic young man who is in the business of mannequin restoration and bloody murder.

Maniac opens with a canted, wide-angle shot of a young woman leaving a bar at night, tracking her back through the streets, through the film's credits, and home. We realise only gradually that we're not viewing the scene from the traditionally objective camera perspective, but are ourselves players in the scene, inhabiting Frank, the killer-stalker's perspective - and, equally, only gradually do we come to understand that he is a stalker-killer, implicating us in his crimes.

This leads to a brutal, up-close and personal kill. Caught at her own front door, the girl turns and looks straight into the camera as Frank plunges a knife up through her throat and into her brain, cutting off her scream at source, before scalping her. It's an early kill by any movie's standards, and a deeply disturbing one at that - enough to separate the wheat from the chaff in cinema audiences, sending those with weaker stomachs back up the aisles.