10 More Horror Movies That Cleverly START With Huge Twists
7. 28 Weeks Later
The savage opening to 28 Weeks Later is so brilliantly, joltingly unexpected that, regardless of your opinions of the rest of the movie, it basically endures as a masterfully executed short film in its own right.
As the Rage virus continues to annihilate the UK, Don (Robert Carlyle) and wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) take refuge in a rural cottage with other survivors.
Their comparatively tranquil existence is derailed, however, when a terrified boy accidentally lures a Rage-infected rabble to their hideout.
The infected promptly kill their way through most of the survivors, and while Don implores Alice to leave the boy to his fate, she refuses. Don, wracked by fear and sensing the futility of Alice's act, leaves her, fleeing the scene as both he and the audience are left to assume that Alice and the boy are killed by the infected.
It's far from a gentle escape for Don, though, who barely gets clear of the horde by commandeering a nearby speedboat.
Given that most horror movies quickly establish their protagonist as an upstanding or at least basically likeable individual, for 28 Weeks Later to introduce Don as a man who abandoned his own wife to her fate hits like a hard slap in the face. It's a discomfortingly realistic outcome, even if most don't want to admit it.
Though it's later revealed that Alice in fact survived the incident, the fact that Don fled the scene becomes the defining act that reverberates through the rest of the story.