10 Opening Horror Movie Scenes That Should've Been Cut
Sometimes less is better.
How any movie begins is so, so important.
An opening scene needs to immediately get the audience's attention and draw them into its world, because if you lose viewers in the first few minutes, you're facing one hell of an uphill struggle to win them back.
And so it's extremely common for movies of all kinds to open with a jolting sliver of action or chaos, or in the horror genre, a death scene or instigating incident of some kind to pique the audience's interest.
That's all well and good, except there are sure instances where the filmmakers just didn't quite get it right, and that opening scene ends up being more of a turn-off than a turn-on.
And that's totally true of these 10 horror movies, all of which kicked off with scenes that were offputting for all the wrong reasons.
From pointlessly spoiling later elements of the plot to showing way too much or even needlessly killing a character off, these scenes absolutely didn't need to happen - at least not this way.
If you cut each of these scenes, the respective movies are instantly better...
10. Rocky Gets Dragged - Don't Breathe
Don't Breathe is a terrifically suspenseful horror film that nevertheless takes the lazy, cynical approach of kicking things off in medias res - that is, in the middle of the story - with a tantalising tease of what's to come later on.
The movie's opening shot shows the Blind Man (Stephen Lang) dragging unconscious protagonist Rocky (Jane Levy) through the streets. An unnerving visual with which to kick the film off, for sure, albeit one that robs the third act of much of its suspense.
For one, it assures the audience that Rocky will be incapacitated and captured by the Blind Man when she attempts to escape his house much later on, and the fact that she's alone also implies that her fellow thieves, Alex (Dylan Minnette) and Money (Daniel Zovatto), are likely dead - which they are.
The teaser opening feels especially unnecessary considering that Don't Breathe is only 88 minutes long, and Rocky, Alex, and Money break into the Blind Man's home barely 10 minutes into the movie proper. As such, it was almost certainly mandated by a twitchy studio executive.