10 Scariest Horror Movie Opening Credits

6. Cape Fear (1991)

Cape Fear Opening Credits
Universal Pictures

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.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.