10 Scariest Horror Movie Opening Credits

One of the best "one for them" movies ever, Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear takes the terror of that film to a new layer, peeling back the curtain to reveal what Thompson's movie could only hint at. Scorsese transforms its story of the American middle class being terrorised by a low-life sicko into a morally ambiguous battle between law, justice, and vengeance, in turn examining how that sacred American middle merely masks a dark interior.

The opening credits of Cape Fear lend extra weight to those themes, touching on the literal danger of the film's namesake (the eponymous Cape Fear River, which becomes Max Cady's grave), but also the mask of tranquility.

The waters of Cape Fear are still and serene, and yet voidless, inky, and obscuring. Suddenly, a bird of prey appears in the water's reflection, before Bernard Hermann's iconic theme (conducted for the remake by Elmer Bernstein) erupts and the film's title settles. Enraged eyes dart erratically on the water's surface, a silhouette appears, before Cape Fear itself turns blood-red.

Cape Fear's opening was the work of the legendary Saul Bass, a frequent collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock's who blessed us with the opening titles for works such as Psycho and North by Northwest. His iconic typography is on full display in Scorsese's film, and while an argument could be made for Psycho's opening credits invoking a more compelling and fragmented sense of dread, Bass' work on Cape Fear lends an added sense of paranoia to the proceedings, perfectly encapsulating the idea of a terror unseen.