10 Opening Movie Scenes That Wanted To Make You Uncomfortable
These scenes were tailor-made to leave you squirming.
Generally speaking, most movies want to grab the audience's attention from the very first scene, whether bamboozling them with an awesome action scene, introducing them to the protagonist in a concise way, or revealing a surprise dramatic nugget which sets up the story.
But sometimes filmmakers will eschew this conventional wisdom in favour of just making everybody watching feel extremely uncomfortable about the whole experience.
These 10 films, from a multitude of genres, all hedged their bets on maintaining the audience's attention through a series of shocking, disturbing, unsettling, and otherwise bone-chilling moments that certainly set the tone for the rest of the movie.
From card-carrying horror films to mainstream studio comedies, these movies all dared to leave the audience feeling off from the very start, such that anybody still watching couldn't really complain about the transgressive places the story went from here.
It's little surprise, then, that the majority of these films are relatively polarising, dividing audiences firmly down the middle from their unnerving opening scene onwards and, in some cases, never really letting up.
In the very least, they let you know what they were about right away...
10. God Bless America
Bobcat Goldthwait's black comedy God Bless America begins as it means to go on, by aggressively provoking the audience on their standards of taste and what they're able to consider funny.
Joel Murray stars as Frank Murdoch, a middle-aged man who has lost his patience with America's descent into stupidity, and so decides to take matters into his own hands in the most ultimate way possible.
The film kicks off with Frank complaining about his neighbours, a couple who keep him awake with their loud TV, inane banter, and relentlessly screaming baby. Despite his repeated requests for them to mind their noise levels due to his migraines and insomnia, they don't listen.
Frank then states a desire to kill them, at which point the scene shifts to him breaking into their apartment with a shotgun and blasting the boyfriend dead.
The girlfriend then begs him to stop, even lifting her own baby in front of her face as a shield, and when she then throws the baby into the air, Frank opens fire, decorating the room - and both himself and the mother - with the baby's bloody remains.
After a moment of gleeful celebration, though, the scene shifts back to Frank in bed, still being kept awake by the screaming baby.
The scene was a fantasy, but all the same, showing a baby getting shotgunned into red paste in the first two minutes of a movie is certainly a way to weed out the pearl-clutchers.