10 Horror Movies With Spine-Chilling Opening Sequences

Often mistakenly lumped in with the tired and maligned torture porn subgenre of the time, Martyrs tells a harrowing story of abuse, vengeance and death.

Centred around trauma survivor Lucie and her girlfriend Ana, the film follows Lucie showing up at her abusers' house and gunning them down with a shotgun, before Ana comes to her aid and is inadvertently ensnared by a sinister death-obsessed cult. Establishing an emotional resonance to its three-dimensional characters before brutalising them, this shining light of the New French Extremity movement is a film not be enjoyed, but rather experienced.

Martyrs' cold and unflinchingly bleak depiction of violence is exemplified by its opening. In an uninterrupted single shot, with cold lighting and sparse and chilling sound, a very young Lucie runs through an industrial park. Hair shorn, half naked and covered in blood, the despair in her eyes can only give the audience a glimpse of the nightmare she has been through.

While we may be used to similar scenes in horror, the age of the victim and complete lack of context makes it all the more harrowing, and shows just how many lines the villains and, to an extent, the filmmakers are willing to cross.