20 Greatest Horror Movie Opening Scenes of the 2020s (So Far)

Damian McCarthy's second feature Oddity offers up one of the most masterfully unnerving openings of any recent horror film, delivering a nerve-jangling death scene that's all the more effective for what it doesn't show.

At the start of the movie, psychiatrist Ted's (Gwilym Lee) wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is renovating their new home when one of her husband's patients, a man with a glass eye (Tadhg Murphy), knocks on the door and warns Dani that a stranger is inside her home.

A disturbed Dani is understandably sceptical of his claim, more likely to believe that the man is deranged and delusional, yet later that night she's indeed attacked by a masked assailant.

But as the hammer-wielding attacker moves towards Dani in her tent, McCarthy suddenly jump-cuts to the grisly outcome, the shadow of Dani's corpse only faintly visible in the blood-stained tent.

While some might've preferred to see the kill itself, this restrained approach was ultimately far more effective.