10 Movie Openings That Wanted To Piss You Off
4. A Child Dies In Slow Motion - Antichrist
Lars von Trier is a cinematic provocateur if there ever was one, and his 2009 experimental horror film Antichrist certainly sought to grind the audience's gears from its very first moments.
The film opens with a traumatic incident in which a husband and wife (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) are having sex in their apartment while their toddler son climbs up to an open window and falls out to his death.
The juxtaposition of beautiful monochrome slow-motion visuals and calming orchestral music with the horrific sight of this child's death is enough to jostle audiences, but the fact that it happened while their parents were rutting is ultimately the rage-filled cherry on top.
While there are certainly far more graphic and innately disturbing scenes later in the movie, none stoked quite so much anger among audiences, aghast that a couple's absent-mindedness led to the death of their child and, uh, every other horrible thing that happens in the film afterwards.
Von Trier has proven time and time again that he knows how to push the audience's buttons, and in that regard this opening might well be his mini-masterpiece.