The 5 Most Haunting Opening Scenes in Contemporary Horror [Watch]
First impressions are everything. Whether it be a first date, a job interview, or meeting your significant other’s rogues gallery of eccentric family members, first impressions tell people who you are and what you are about. The same is true with films. In an age where moviegoers have one eye on their phone and one eye on the silver screen, movies need to quickly inform audiences why their particular tale is worth an audience’s time and (in the case of horror) sanity. Before we know a narrative’s particulars, those opening scenes—or a film’s cold open—inform the audience of what is to come. This could be traditional terror or, even more importantly, evoke the tonal direction a creative is striving for with their work.
Here are five of the most compelling contemporary cold opens in horror. Reader beware, spoilers abound below.
Sinister (2012) (dir. Scott Derrickson)
Lasting just over a minute long, the opening scene from the 2012 home-movie-from-hell Sinister showcases the film’s grungy visual style. True crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) is investigating a series of snuff films tied to the mysterious figure Mr. Boogey. The film opens with one such film, depicting the brutal hanging of a family of four.
Sinister‘s sound design is imperative to crafting tension before the family even appears on screen. The film opens to black, but we hear the scratching sound of 8mm film catching slightly on the projector wheel, informing us that the “show” is about to begin. As much as Sinister‘s grainy, snuff film aesthetic is praised, Christopher Young’s score deserves credit for elevating every dread-inducing beat of the Oswalt family’s tale.
And then the family comes into the cigarette-burned frame, each with a wool sack over their head and a noose around their necks. It’s a quiet but brazenly disturbing sequence that captures director Scott Derrickson‘s desired effect of recreating a snuff film for each death set piece. We watch for what feels like an eternity as this family succumbs to their gruesome fate, the reel only stopping once their bodies sway calmly in the wind, and the title is crudely sprawled across the lower third of the screen.
Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)
While Osgood Perkin’s supernatural serial killer film, Longlegs, didn’t make me lose control of my bodily fluids, it was a masterclass in satanic dread and featured the best opening scene of the year. The film opens with the more restricted 4:3 aspect ratio, as we watch a young girl being approached by the disheveled figure we’ll come to know as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage).
The audience’s initial view of Longlegs is from the mouth down due to the camera being pushed in and the 4:3 aspect ratio effectively chopping off his facial features. There is safety in the restrictiveness of this perspective, as Perkins obscures just enough of the audience’s view of Longlegs that our minds cannot help but formulate our terrifying idea of what his face must look like. Fortunately, Cage’s creepy cadence, disheveled clothing, and near-incoherent rambling about “wearing his long legs” are sufficiently terrifying before this reveal.
And then, Longlegs’ head suddenly drops into the frame, mouth aghast, before slamming to the film’s title card. The reveal lasts only a moment, but Perkins’s shattering of that sense of safety in the 4:3 aspect reminds audiences that while Longleg’s cinematic influences may be apparent, Perkin’s execution is anything but predictable.
It Follows (dir. David Robert Mitchell)
David Robert Mitchell’s 2015 masterpiece, It Follows, is the only entry on this list lacking a traditional title card. Yet the film’s cold open remains as inventive as the film’s unique premise. It Follows opens to a one-sided perspective of your typical horror chase sequence, but from the killer’s perspective. A woman in pajamas stumbles out of her house, distraught and seemingly fleeing from something. Despite her distraught composure, she assures her father and nearby neighbor that she is alright. Her eyes are tracing her idyllic suburban neighborhood for something, but we, the audience, never see what that something is. We are in the dark contextually; all we know is that she is petrified. And that is the nightmarish beauty of It Follows’ opening.
The minimalist approach of It Follows results in a film that is less concerned with traditional horror trappings (gore, jump scares, etc.), instead choosing to capture its victims’ emotional unraveling. The cold open’s POV gives us a front-row seat to the effect the film’s entities have on their victims. The entity doesn’t have to have fangs or claws to elicit a response from the subject of its haunting. It simply has to follow its victim, wearing them down, stripping them of their will to live, and then, once they have accepted their fate, the entity calmly approaches them and has its way with them.
Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster)
Ari Aster’s sophomore film, Midsommar, has an all-time bummer opening. While Aster’s debut film, Hereditary, wasn’t exactly a cheerful film in its own right, Midsommar‘s cold opening shows a quieter but no less effective approach to exploring grief-laden tragedy. The audience is slowly led through the halls of a home that they will come to learn is a crime scene of a murder-suicide. The audience is observing the aftermath of the crime, but in typical Aster fashion, the minute details of the scene make Midsommar’s cold open a gut punch. The camera guides us, following a yellow hose that snakes from a running car’s exhaust in the garage, through the house, and finding its way underneath a bedroom door.
It isn’t just that we see the bodies of a couple who have horrifically succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning, but the minor detail that the crack underneath the door has been duck-tapped to ensure those inside perished. The camera then follows another hose, this one snaking down the hall and being duct-tapped to the mouth of a third victim, the killer, so to speak. It’s a devastatingly depressing scene, both in the act and also in the implication of a mental health crisis being the catalyst for the killing.
There is capturing disturbing imagery on screen, and then there’s Aster’s ability to make anguish palpable for an audience.
The Empty Man (dir. David Prior)
Being released at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic did David Prior’s cosmic horror stunner, The Empty Man, little favors in initially finding an audience. Though, as with the best of cult classics, The Empty Man‘s lofty narrative ambitions found its audience, thanks partly to Prior’s singular, haunting approach to crafting cosmic dread.
It opens with a 20-minute short film detailing a group of friends’ backpacking trip through the Ura Valley in Bhutan, which provides little context for what The Empty Man is actually about. And yet, Prior’s knack for crafting a chilling atmosphere and unease sells you on this particular brand of cosmic horror, which allows the film to stand out amongst its cosmic peers.
Whether it is the striking imagery of a hulking humanoid skeleton or a cloaked figure stalking the group during a snowstorm, Prior’s visual storytelling and versatility in scares amounted to a film that, despite a rocky release, was destined to find its audience. Regarding first impressions, The Empty Man‘s cold open is as effective as bewildering.
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