20 Horror Movie Openings That Are Practically Perfect
7. Final Destination: Bloodlines - The Sky Tower Disaster
After 2011's surprisingly strong Final Destination 5, which represented a return to form after the risible fourth instalment, it took a shocking 14 years for a sixth Final Destination movie to arrive and when it finally did, its opening set-piece wasted no time in reminding us what we'd been missing.
The Final Destination franchise has made a real art form out of making viewers frightened of innocent, everyday things, and it was immediately business as usual. In the first ten minutes, Bloodlines gave its audience a permanent fear of all sorts of things - skyscraper restaurants, lifts, pianos, even coins - it's a single coin that sets the whole chain reaction off. You'll also never again be able to hear the Isley Brothers' Shout without thinking of this.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is not only debatably the best Final Destination movie to date, its main disaster - a skyscraper collapse - is also one of the franchise's greatest achievements ever. It's a nerve-shredding, paranoia-inducing and darkly hilarious tour de force of Rube Goldberg death traps that bombards viewers with one grotesquely gory death after another, and it's all superbly mounted by directing duo Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein.
Perhaps it doesn't quite outclass the second film's road pile-up (which isn't technically the beginning of the movie and therefore didn't qualify for this list) but it comes damn close nonetheless. To the upcoming Final Destination 7: good luck topping this!