10 Movie Openings That Wanted To Piss You Off

Oliver Stone's highly controversial thriller Natural Born Killers was massively polarising due to not only its extreme depictions of violence but also its intentionally surreal visual style, lending the entire film a disconcertingly heightened feel.

And Stone makes this stunningly clear in the film's gut-wrenching opening scene, where on-the-lam murderous couple Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) swing by a diner for some killin'.

While dancing by the jukebox, Mallory is set upon by a group of rape-y rednecks, prompting her to get defensive and beat the group's leader to a bloody pulp - set to L7's riotous song "S**tlist," no less.

When the rest of the group comes to their ringleader's defense, Mickey steps in, knifing one to death, shooting a line cook in the head, and throwing a knife at another, while Mallory snaps the leader's neck.

The scene wraps up with the duo executing the diner's waitress and deciding to leave one of the diner's customers alive as a witness, to tell the cops what they did.

The violent nihilism leaking out from every frame of this sequence is palpable, and while Stone's dynamic visuals might threaten to paint the scene as "cool", that's ultimately just part of the film's pointed social commentary about the mass media's troubling relationship with violence.

If Mickey and Mallory's murderous actions don't make you feel at least a little bit ill - no matter that most of their victims were human garbage - are you really paying attention?