12 Movie Openings That Totally Trolled Audiences

Killing off stars! Comedies starting sad! Car crashes! Movies starting out as other, fake movies!

Scream Drew Barrymore
Dimension Films

Some films are determined to mess with the heads of their audience and make no qualms about this from the opening images onward.

Many of the flicks on this list are horrors which became infamous in the jolt-inducing genre for leaving viewers shell shocked before the end of their opening reel, whilst some are comedies, dramas, and even children's films which used their first scene to ensure viewers started off wrong-footed.

This way, the audience knows that the filmmakers are willing to mess with expectations, whether it's to make a meaningful point about the ideas that predictable stories reinforce or just to surprise you the sake of it.

Many flicks which attempt this delicate balance simply end up annoying viewers before the opening credits have even begun (check out the many "it was all a dream" openings of the Bring It On franchise for evidence of this phenomenon), but a precious few pull it off and those are the films celebrated here.

12. The Descent

Scream Drew Barrymore
Lionsgate

Hellboy director Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror masterpiece The Descent is easily the Dog Soldiers director's best loved film, a claustrophobic nightmare which sees a set of women besieged by cannibalistic monsters when they venture far too deep into a remote cave system and become stuck.

Which makes it surprising that this bleak, unrelentingly grim and gruesome movie opens with a happy family picking their beloved mom up from a fun white-river rafting girls trip.

Then there's a little awkwardness on the ride home... and then out of nowhere dad and daughter alike are skewered by a passing truck’s cargo.

Right, there it is, so the unremittingly dark two hour nightmare begins. Start on a gory shock and work your way right back up to them, as the experts always say. Good luck ever sleeping again, viewers!

In this post: 
Scream
 
Posted On: 
Contributor

Cathal Gunning hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.