10 Horror Movie Openings That Get Worse The More You Think About It
There's more to these scenes than you might think.
Horror movies are meant to be scary.
That is perhaps the most obvious sentence ever written behind "Ice is cold" and "Donald Trump was a bad President".
Filmmakers of the scary persuasion have a whole heap of tricks up their blood-soaked sleeves to leave audiences quivering and shaking like babies. Blood, guts, gore, jumpscares, the dark, it's all classic stuff. But it's all a bit obvious, isn't it?
The really scary movies are the ones you have to think about, the ones that get under your skin and make your brain work days after you first watched them. Watching people get disembowelled or eaten alive by zombies is one thing, but the slow-burning psychological stuff? That stays with you for life.
We already ran a list on horror movie endings that are worse than you think, but what about the other end of the timeline? Which horror openings have way more going on than you first thought?
Prepare to have your mind blown very, very gradually as we plunge deeper into these first scenes than Michael Myers' knife into someone's back.
Spoiler alert, he's in this list.
10. Final Destination
Even those not au fait with horror know the basic premise of the Final Destination series.
Someone has a premonition that leads them to avoid death, only for the reaper to stalk them and their fellow survivors until they're all taken out in increasingly gruesome fashion.
It's a solid formula that has generated five movies of good to moderate quality. Even if you know what's coming though, it doesn't make watching the openings of these films any easier.
Take the first one from 2000. Alex Browning's vision might save his fellow students from the plane explosion, but in reality, all he's done is set them up for a much gristlier end. Hung by fishing wire, run over by a bus, head chopped in half. None of these sound very pleasant and might actually be worse than a plane crash.
Knowing what's in store for the survivors makes watching the opening to Final Destination so much harder, but the hardest thing of all is knowing that death actually has every right to claim these souls.
It's a natural process and all this movie is doing is righting a wrong. Only in exceptionally bloody fashion.