20 Horror Movie Openings That Are Practically Perfect

Horror films have always had a lovely knack for starting things off with a bang. A good opening scene is a great way to establish a scary tone and immediately get the audience sucked into a horror flick's ghoulish atmosphere.

Thankfully, many horror movies seem to understand this, and as a result, there's an absolute treasure trove of amazing horror openings out there. 

The following 20 scenes, though by no means an exhaustive list, are all great examples of this trend. They come from many different decades and countries, ranging from brutal kills to subtler, more atmospheric cold-opens. These sequences all vary heavily in tone and style, providing a lovely reminder of how versatile horror is as a genre. The one thing they all have in common is that they start their movies in the best way imaginable.

Not all of these flicks are all that good, but whether the rest of the film lived up to this early promise or not, all of them delivered dynamite beginnings that blew the roof off and had everyone locked into the experience.

Even before Suicide Club acquired the cult classic status it enjoys today, viewers at the time would've immediately known they were in for one hell of an extreme, controversial, taboo-busting knockout of a movie. The opening scene alone was the strongest statement of intent imaginable. 

54 Japanese schoolgirls hold hands and cheerfully jump in front of a subway train with extremely gory results, leaving everyone around them traumatized and completely soaked in their blood. All the way through, jolly music plays dissonantly over the sordid spectacle, giving the entire thing an even nastier edge. 

It's harrowing and grotesque, yet you won't be able to look away either. It's mesmerizing in its execution and as a set-up to the movie that follows, it pretty much does everything it needs to do. 

It braces viewers for one of the most messed-up horror flicks of the 2000s and it establishes the movie's central mystery - what is driving a wave of inexplicable suicides across the country? - in the most brutal of ways.

It's an elite opening sequence, although it may (understandably!) be too much for the squeamish.