10 MORE Horror Movie Openings That Get Worse The More You Think About It
8. The Thing
John Carpenter's impeccable sci-fi horror classic The Thing begins with a Norwegian pilot touching down at the American Antarctic research base while chasing and firing his gun at a fleeing sled dog.
The pilot screams in un-subtitled Norwegian before the base's spooked crew members unsurprisingly return fire, killing him.
But it turns out the pilot was simply trying to put down the dog because it was infected with the titular shapeshifting force. The pilot actually says:
"Get the hell away from that thing. That's not a dog, it's some sort of thing! It's imitating a dog, it isn't real! Get away you idiots!"
While you can argue that the pilot could've stated his case in a manner less inclined to panic MacReady (Kurt Russell) and company, he was clearly in a desperate panic to stop the Thing from wreaking havoc anywhere else.
There's a believable level of frantic confusion to this scene, where something as simple as a language barrier prevented this guy from stopping the Thing overrunning the American base.
That and the butter-fingered passenger blowing himself and the chopper up with a dropped grenade, of course.
To the Americans, the pilot probably seemed like a crazed terrorist, even if his actions made total sense from his own perspective, having witnessed what the Thing is capable of first-hand.