10 Scariest Horror Movie Opening Credits

Perhaps the greatest horror movie ever made, Tobe Hooper's transgressive 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is also one of the most terrifying efforts of the genre - a mostly bloodless and yet blood-curdling production upsetting as much for its imagery as it is the spontaneous nature of its violence, which connotes the unpredictability of America's most uncertain decade.

The opening titles for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre exemplify this perfectly. Starting with a news-like, almost documentarian approach that roots the story in real life, Hooper's film immediately draws up imagery of the Vietnam War and the newscasts that beamed back a horror show unfolding in real-time, not to mention news reports that dwelled on the "bizarre crimes" being conducted by a new class of criminal - the serial killer. This opening crawl is effective not because it misrepresents fiction as fact, but because it intimates so many different facets of real-life horror from the zeitgeist, and a trauma that was then still unfurling.

Hooper punctuates this infamous act of horror trickery with one of the most disturbing sequences in the film - a pitch-black image interrupted by guttural sounds, the earth moving, and flesh being torn. Each of these sounds is disturbing in and of themselves, but they are eclipsed by the cold, electrical impulses of what is meant to be a camera's flashbulb (created using two strings of piano wire), which illuminates glimpses of desiccated human remains until the full horror of what has been enacted comes into full view - abstract corpse art proudly displayed against the backdrop of the baking Texan sun.

The full title drop happens immediately afterwards, audio from a radio report now much louder and relaying a story of an oil refinery explosion. Hooper and Wayne Bell's industrial score establishes the rusting, machine-like terror set to unfold, while photography of solar flares placed through a red filter evokes blood coursing outward.

All of this combined makes for one of the most arresting and unnerving opening credits sequences ever produced, its news-like approach typifying the idea that the most unnerving conceit of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn't Leatherface, or the Sawyer family, or even necessarily the awfulness that befalls Sally Hardesty and her friends - it's that messed up stuff happens all the time, and it can happen to anyone.