10 Most Intense Movie Openings Ever
2. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino sure knows how to open a movie, but he's arguably never done it better or with more audience-squirming aplomb than in Inglourious Basterds.
The war film's unforgettable opening 20 minutes depict SS officer Hans Landa (an Oscar-winning Christoph Waltz) arriving at the home of French farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Ménochet) and questioning him about the whereabouts of a local Jewish family, the Dreyfuses.
Tarantino relishes dragging this quietly tense dialogue out to agonising lengths, until revealing to the audience that the Dreyfuses are in fact hiding underneath LaPadite's floorboards.
Landa suspects this, and promises to spare LaPadite's family if he confesses to it, which he does.
Landa responds by having his men fire their guns at the floor, killing the Dreyfuses except for one daughter, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who manages to flee.
From a writing, directing, and performance perspective, this is a basically faultless scene that grabs the viewer tight from minute one and doesn't let go until Tarantino finally shifts to Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) 20 minutes later.
It's proof perfect that intensity need not be loud or outrageously violent: it can be calm and brooding. Mostly, anyway. But that said, our #1 pick is most certainly neither calm nor brooding.