Usually, the best horror films earn their scares with gradually escalating tension.
The following flicks, however, jump straight into the scares before the audience even gets
settled in their seats.
Many of them are among the scariest movies ever made, and every one of them boasts opening
sequences that are certain to have the faint of heart nervously eyeing the exits.
These are some of the most terrifying opening scenes in horror history.
It Follows
As one of the breakout horror film hits of 2014, everything about It Follows seemed designed
to keep the viewer permanently off-guard.
Its methodical pace mirrored that of its "monster," a relentless pursuer who could appear as anyone
and could only be shaken off by passing the curse to someone else.
"See, everything's okay."
[Scream]
In its terrifying opening, we follow an obviously traumatized young woman as she flees down
a street to the beach - and something else is following her.
We don't know what it is yet, but we know she's scared to death, and by the end of the
scene, we know it was for good reason.
Some viewers may have been put off by the movie's ambiguous ending, but there was certainly
nothing ambiguous about its opening, a master class in nerve-jangling terror.
Split
M. Night Shyamalan was on top of the world after the success of 1999's The Sixth Sense,
and after a long rocky stretch, he returned to form with 2016's Split.
This psychological thriller is anchored by James McAvoy as Kevin Crumb, a disturbed man
with 23 different personalities - plus an additional one only known as the Beast.
[Grunting]
The opening scene illustrates every teen's worst nightmare, as a trip to the mall for
three teenage girls turns suddenly sinister as Crumb nonchalantly takes his place in the
driver's seat.
IT
Stephen King's IT is widely regarded as being among the finest of his standalone novels,
and its 1990 TV miniseries adaptation scared the pants off of many a '90s child.
"Bring your friends."
[Evil laughter]
The opening scene, in which young Georgie encounters Pennywise while looking for his
paper boat in a storm drain, is familiar to many - which makes the version offered by
the 2017 adaptation all the more shocking.
Much of the film's pre-release speculation centered on whether Bill Skarsgard would be
able to live up to Tim Curry's classic turn as the evil clown monster, but that question
was answered definitively within seconds of the appearance of those predatory eyes, floating
in the darkness of the storm drain.
It's an opening that would have been all too easy to mess up - but instead, the sequence
established a vicious tone for one of the best horror films of the year.
Halloween
John Carpenter's 1978 masterpiece gave birth to a thousand horror tropes.
It was a film unlike anything fans of fright flicks had ever seen - and that includes its
opening sequence, which put the viewer squarely in the shoes of a maniac.
The scene leads us through the halls of a suburban home, from the point of view of an
unknown person who dons a clown mask, grabs a huge kitchen knife, and uses it to stab
a teenage girl.
The first-person point of view is only broken at the scene's end, when the girl's parents
arrive home to find the murderer standing on their front lawn - revealed to be the victim's
six-year old brother, Michael Myers.
"Michael?"
Carpenter would go on to a long and distinguished career of scaring the living daylights out
of audiences, which anyone brave enough to sit through the first five minutes of his
breakout hit could have easily predicted.
Cube
Released in 1997, Cube operated with a mind-bending sci-fi premise that revealed itself gradually
after a stunningly effective cold open.
A man awakens to find himself in a cube-shaped room with several apparent points of exit,
completely unaware of how he got there or what he is supposed to do.
After finding all exits to be essentially identical, he picks one and goes through.
And then…
The rest of the film features some similarly violent scenes - but none of them blindsided
us quite so hard as the first.
The Hitcher
A young man picks up a hitchhiker by the side of the highway, in the middle of nowhere,
on a dark and stormy night.
"My mother told me never to do this.
That's a pretty spooky premise on its own, but 1986's The Hitcher quickly turns it into
something even more sinister with an opening scene that left audiences with no doubts about
where the movie was going.
"Because I cut off his legs and his arms and his head…
And I'm gonna do the same to you."
This opening scene introduces Rutger Hauer's John Ryder as an agent of pure mayhem, and
Hauer's performance makes his previous turn as psychotic replicant Roy Batty in Blade
Runner look positively endearing by comparison.
"Do you wanna know what happens to an eyeball when it gets punctured?"
Evil Dead
Horror film fans had plenty of reason to be wary of 2013's soft reboot of Sam Raimi's
classic Evil Dead.
But those fans had no way of knowing at the time that the project was in the hands of
a major talent: writer-slash-director Fede Alvarez, who made no attempt to rehash what
had worked in the previous series, but brought a wickedly inventive tone all his own instead.
The film opens with a terrified young woman being hunted down and captured in the woods
by her own family, who appear to be religious fanatics bent on burning her alive.
But as her father fumbles with the matches, the woman's tearful pleas take a hard left
turn - and it suddenly becomes obvious that the only terrible mistake this family made
was not getting that fire started a lot sooner.
"I'll rip your soul out, daddy.
I'll rip your soul out!"
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