10 Movie Openings That Wanted To Piss You Off

Generally speaking, a movie's primary goal is to entertain above all else - to give audiences a thrill, some laughs, and maybe even make them cry, but more than anything send them home happy.

The journey getting there can be complicated, though, especially as some filmmakers commit themselves so firmly to pissing everybody off right out of the gate.

Obviously there are many examples of films getting off on the wrong foot with viewers from minute one, but every so often a director might intentionally invoke the audience's ire with a willfully challenging opening scene.

Perhaps the scene is gratuitously, shockingly violent beyond expectations, maybe it deliberately denies viewers what they want to see, or it could simply bombard them with a deeply unpleasant audio-visual experience.

These opening scenes generally put entertainment value to the back-burner and instead prided themselves on raising your blood pressure, stoking your rage, and getting you worked up for the movie ahead.

For better or worse it was certainly effective in these 10 examples, ingeniously setting the vibe for the rest of the film no matter that it unavoidably soured the entire experience for some...

It Chapter Two received a considerable amount of flak for its savage opening sequence, which adapted one of the more contentious and unforgettable sequences from Stephen King's book: the death of Adrian Mellon (Xavier Dolan).

The film picks up in Derry 27 years after the original, where Adrian, a young gay man, is attending a carnival with his boyfriend. The pair are attacked by a group of homophobic youngsters, culminating in Adrian being thrown into the nearby river while his boyfriend helplessly watches.

That's not the end of it, though: Adrian just barely reaches the shoreline, where he's intercepted by a returning Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), who promptly bites out his heart as his boyfriend watches from across the riverbank.

Some criticised director Andy Muschietti for lingering on the homphobic abuse suffered by Adrian, that it was excessive and unnecessary to convey Pennywise's return to Derry.

Yet beyond the fact that this scene appears in King's novel, our anger is precisely the point - it's supposed to be nauseatingly brutal, while exposing the ugly undercurrent that still exists in modern Derry beyond the shapeshifting ancient predator that's just rematerialised there.