10 Horror Movies That Never Got Better Than Their Opening Moments
5. Sinister
Scott Derrickson's Sinister falls a little short of greatness due to its more generic genre elements - namely those pesky jump scares - but delivers one hell of an attention-grabbing opening scene.
Sinister kicks off with grimy Super 8 footage of four people with bags over their heads and nooses around their necks tied to a tree branch. An unseen force cuts through a nearby branch, causing the four people to be pulled upwards into the air and hanged.
We're left to watch for another 30-or-so seconds as the life slowly drains out of the hanging quartet, before the footage pauses and the movie's title card flashes up.
This is the first of numerous Super 8 snuff movies featured throughout Sinister, and while several of them are sublimely creepy, the fresh jolting quality of the first trumps the rest.
From the extremely believable fidelity of the Super 8 footage to the eerie music from Christopher Young, and the simple fact we don't see who is doing this horrible thing to these poor people, it's a perfect setup for the good-but-not-great supernatural horror flick that follows.