10 Opening Movie Scenes That Wanted To Make You Uncomfortable

Kim Jee-woon's 2010 thriller I Saw the Devil offers up one of the most mesmerisingly disturbing opening sequences of all time, even for the standards of a serial killer movie.

The film begins with a pregnant woman, Jang Joo-yun (Oh San-ha), waiting for a tow truck in the snow after getting a flat tire.

She soon encounters a man, Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), who promises to change the tire, and when she rebuffs him, he responds by smashing her car window and bludgeoning her unconscious with a hammer.

The scene then shifts to Joo-yun waking up naked in serial killer Kyung-chul's lair, covered in a plastic sheet. She watches as Kyung-chul prepares her for dismemberment, while he comments that her soft skin will make her easy to chop up.

Joo-yun desperately begs him to spare her, explaining that she's pregnant, only for Kyung-chul to remorselessly decapitate her with a hatchet seconds later.

We're then forced to watch as he dismembers the rest of her body, cleans up the scene, and scatters her body parts, only for a boy to soon enough discover one of Joo-yun's ears in a field.

It's easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this opening being far more restrained and "tasteful," yet Kim Jee-woon refuses to shy away from his antagonist's sociopathic, detached brutality.

It's incredibly upsetting to watch, and ensures we're just as keen to see the killer get his just desserts as Joo-yun's vengeful fiancee, Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun).

Like Soo-hyun, though, we're likely to reconsider that position by film's end.