9 Horror Movies That Couldn't Live Up To Their Awesome Opening

Horror movie openings are almost always a thing of beauty, depending on the whole beholder thing, since they're crafted to pull you straight into the heart of the grisly action. It's standard practise for us to be offered up a nameless victim to be gleefully torn apart by whatever big bad is raining down terror for the duration of the runtime, giving us a little taster of what is to come should we stick around past the title cards.

And whilst some films can offer up this spooky morsel fantastically well without ever letting up on the tension throughout - as can be seen in Jaws, or It: Chapter One for example - there's plenty out there that blow their load far too early without delivering on the goods. Typical, eh?

Whether it's a case of unknowingly using their best set piece before we've even warmed up, or whether our expectations were so raised by a banger of an opening that we didn't know what to do with ourselves for the rest, these are the films that thoroughly wasted what potential they promised.

Starting with a bang means nothing when you finish on a wet fizzle...

The Final Destination franchise is mostly just big daft fun, bringing every weirdly worrisome intrusive thought you've ever had into glorious, bloody technicolour as its characters are offed in increasingly unfortunate ways. Whether it's being cooked alive on a sun bed or being impaled by a chance flying wrench, the series has prided itself on being as ridiculous as it is drenched in viscera.

And whilst that's the best way to approach its premise, this causes a big problem for the first sequel to grace our screens since it doesn't quite know what to do with itself after its incredible opening act. Depicting a car pile up that sees our protagonists offed in a multitude of gruesome ways - including the infamous log smashing through a car windscreen - the opening of Final Destination 2 far surpasses the confused mess the rest of the movie turns out to be.

Being fair, there's some exceptionally solid death scenes in the film, but the narrative toys around too heavily with its own rules to be anything as coherent and enjoyable as the opening few minutes. The simplicity of entertaining us with a big nasty collective death is a pure adrenaline shot of the franchise, one that always feels hard to get back to with one-off accidents as the film carries on.