10 Horror Movies With Spine-Chilling Opening Sequences

As much as some horror films can push the envelope and subvert the genre, sometimes you just need a good old fashioned cliche to hook you in. That said, all the tropes we are familiar with to the point of parody had to start somewhere, and few are as iconic as the one which opened 1979's When a Stranger Calls.

In the opening sequence of the film, stretched out to a nerve-fraying 23 minutes, babysitter Jill is troubled by increasingly threatening phone calls from a stranger asking if she has checked on the children. Initially dismissing the calls as a practical joke, Jill's rising dread eventually prompts her to contact the police. After keeping the harasser on the line long enough for them to trace the call, Jill is contacted by the police and told those seminal words: "the call is coming from inside the house".

While the film as a whole was seen as pretty middling by critics, the opening is widely regarded as one of the scariest of all time, inspiring the likes of the meta-horror Scream's own opening phone call. Often imitated but never bettered, this is a trope which would have never endured without such a magnificent origin.