10 Movie Openings You're Not Supposed To Understand

The Cabin in the Woods is an ingenious exercise in subversion from its very first scene, because anyone who went into Drew Goddard's horror-comedy expecting a straight-forward riff on a typical cabin-set slasher flick - as the trailers implied it would be - got something quite different indeed.

The film kicks off not with a grisly death scene or by introducing us to the inevitably doomed teenage protagonists, but instead focusing on two suited-up men (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford) walking through an office while talking about child-rearing of all things.

The pair are eventually met by a co-worker (Amy Acker), who informs them of a non-specific international issue with their work involving Sweden, but the two quickly brush her off and ride away on a motorised cart while again discussing the mundanities of their home lives.

And just then, the film's title flashes up and the scene abruptly transitions to a more typical opening for a horror movie: our plucky protagonist, Dana (Kristen Connolly), walking around her apartment in her underwear.

Again, this is a movie that aimed to bemuse and surprise from first minute to last, and by offering up a totally context-devoid opening scene set in an office/lab - pretty much the last thing you'd expect to see in a film of this sort - we were all baffled from the jump.

Of course we learn why we've been shown this once the big sci-fi twist has been dropped, but for a solid 20 minutes you're meant to be completely bewildered by it.