20 Horror Movie Openings That Are Practically Perfect

Alderson (Julian Richings) wakes up in a strange, cubical room. He climbs through several more, each a different colour but otherwise identical, until he reaches an orange-coloured one. He steps forward and there's a sudden noise... before bloody lines appear all over his body. And then, he collapses into cubes, for he's just been cut into pieces by a hidden wire-trap. 

So begins Cube, an awesome death game horror that stands tall as one of the best Western genre films of the 1990s. It was a risky move to deploy the movie's goriest trap so early, but it paid off by immediately establishing just what a terrifying and deadly environment this cube really was. 

It's also one of those scenes you wish you could watch for the first time all over again, as it was such a shock. Most probably assumed that this guy would be one of the main characters, especially as Richings himself is a well-established character actor. To see him die so quickly without meeting any of the other characters was a razor-sharp surprise.