Top 10 Best Horror Movie Openings
Who doesn't love a scarily good opening to their horror film? A sequence that succinctly sets the tone for the macabre horrors guaranteed to follow. That manages to transport the viewer to the edge of their seat within an impressive handful of minutes. That gives us just a tantalizing taste of what's in store for our horror-cherishing hearts. In this day and age of ADD-afflicted audiences, it's difficult to keep them engrossed in a story for anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours or longer, so coming up with an introductory scene that raises their pulses and gets their heartbeats thumping straight away is paramount to a successful cinematic experience.
However, there are plenty of horror films that opt to commence slowly and calmly, lulling their audience into a false sense of security via operating at a patient pace and priming them for the untold horrors ahead without assaulting their senses with bucketloads of graphic gore or in-your-face, jump-out-of-your-seat-and-skin jump scares. And you know? That's perfectly respectable as well. Every horror movie is different because every screenwriter is different, and some possess the patience, as well as the faith in their audience's intelligence, to introduce their characters and conflict in a manner that's subtle, that doesn't scream, "I'm a horror movie!"
Take the opening of William Friedkin's 1973 supernatural horror masterpiece, The Exorcist. This is a movie that's been hailed time and time again as the scariest film ever unleashed on the screen, and with damn good reason. Children are, after all, the most precious, sacred gifts in our world (apart from pets), and The Exorcist utterly, shamelessly, masterfully obliterates that notion by depicting the demonic possession of a 12-year-old girl whose only "transgression" was fooling around with a Ouija board. As a consequence, her body is tossed around, contorted, desecrated beyond recognition. One of the film's most unforgettably grotesque images is of her head twisting around her neck at 360 degrees, at such a slow speed we can hear every bone crunching and cracking. Green vomit (played cleverly by pea soup) spews out of her mouth onto a priest trying to save her poor soul. Cuts appear all over her body. It's without question the most harrowing horror film this critic has ever witnessed. And yet, if you were to just watch the opening 10 and a half minutes, you'd have absolutely no way of anticipating the degree of savagery ahead because it's so restrained and disciplined, yet in no way giving off a positive vibe.
A priest named Lankester Merrin is partaking in an archaeological dig in a desert in northern Iraq when a little boy frantically notifies him of a peculiar discovery: a stone talisman of a winged demon named Pazuzu. All it is a stone, right? It can't cause harm to anyone, at least not on its own. Yet the look of nauseating dread on Max von Sydow's brilliantly expressive, world-weary face foreshadows the battle between good and evil that will transpire in the bedroom of 12-year-old Regan MacNeil later on, accentuated by a powerfully symbolic shot of Merrin standing across from an enlarged statue of Pazuzu.
There's nothing particularly frightening or shocking about this scene, but it immediately conjures an atmosphere of disquiet through its leisurely pace, foreign sun-drenched setting, ancient demonic imagery, the mournful singing on the soundtrack, and most importantly von Sydow's rattled performance that enables us to share in his unease without even knowing what exactly he's up against.
Nonetheless, there's something to be said and celebrated about the "less sophisticated" genre achievements that drop the viewer directly into the mayhem, show us explicitly the brand of horror awaiting our characters, and keep us salivating for more. While The Exorcist serves as a noteworthy example of how to immerse an audience into a horror story with the discipline to avoid any overt butchery or easy frights, I've reserved the list below for the opening scenes that feel almost like short films in and of themselves, unleashing their nightmarish threats right out of the gate and saturating the screen in euphoric bursts of blood that leave us in no uncertainty about lies in store.
Here are the top 10 best opening scenes in horror history. Relive these chilling introductions and let me know in the comments if any of your favorites did or didn't make the cut.
10. Halloween (1978)
Bob Clark may have originated the holiday slasher with his Black Christmas, but John Carpenter, directing from a screenplay he co-wrote with Debra Hill, established the blueprint for the modern Mad Slasher subgenre with his seminal 1978 classic, Halloween. Before Carpenter and Hill introduce us to their virginal protagonist-turned-iconic final girl badass Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her almost-as-indispensable, ill-fated best friends, Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (P.J. Soles), they kick off their creation with one of the most imitated opening hooks in horror history.
Instantly putting us on edge is the suspenseful synth score composed by Carpenter himself, which plays over the opening credits. Afterward, Carpenter transports us to the sleepy suburban town of Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night in 1963. Utilizing point-of-view camerawork, a figure emerges from behind a tree and stands before a large white home. The eerie music has ceased and is replaced by the peaceful hoots of owls. No one else is present within this person's view. Slowly, they begin to make their way toward the house and turn to the right side, looking in through a window to find two teenagers canoodling on a sofa. "My parents won't be home until 10," says the young woman. This is Judith Margaret Myers (Sandy Johnson) and her boyfriend, Danny (David Kyle). The figure watches as they take the party upstairs, and the camera backs away and stares up at a bedroom window. Once the light goes out, an ominous piece of music blares on the soundtrack. This simple flip of the switch implies that sex is about to transpire, and Carpenter uses his brilliant music to tell us there will be consequences.
The figure skulks about the property as ominous music keeps our attention glued to the screen and continues throughout the scene. We enter through an open backdoor and proceed to the kitchen, where a puny hand reaches inside a drawer and extracts a large butcher knife. Carpenter grants us a tour of this suburban home. It's beautiful, with candles on the dining room table and a rocking chair in the corner of the living room. Yet it's also ominous, cold, drenched in darkness. Danny tells Judith it's getting late and has to leave, promising, in a most unconvincing, I'll-accept-my-paycheck tone of voice, to call her tomorrow. He walks downstairs and out the door, the mysterious figure watching him go. The camera takes us upstairs, and Carpenter refuses to employ quick transitions. His pacing keeps us attached to our unseen stalker, and we walk slowly up each stair alongside them. That same hand reaches down and picks up the clown mask Danny had briefly worn while kissing Judy and puts it on, our eyes now placed behind the narrowed eyes of the mask. We hear singing emanating from a bedroom, and the figure follows it to find Judith sitting in front of a mirror, clothed only in a pair of panties as she brushes her hair. As the figure inches closer, she turns around and angrily exclaims, "Michael!" All of a sudden, he begins stabbing Judith repeatedly in the chest and stomach while she screams helplessly.
The biggest hindrance to this otherwise masterful exercise in suspense-saturated filmmaking is Sandy Johnson's acting. True, she's not called upon to deliver much in the way of an acting showcase. (Or a singing one, for that matter.) Her job is merely to show up, lock lips with a handsome blonde dude, remove her bra, and accept a stabbing. For the most part, she accomplishes that, but her screaming and crying are woefully unconvincing, like that of someone who has no concept of how it sounds to die a horrible death and is forcing it as best as she can. Nonetheless, there are compensatory attributes: the stabbing sounds that accompany each thrust, the shot of Michael's hand plunging the knife down and raising it with each penetration, and the final shot of Johnson lying on her back, exposing her bloddied breasts. That last part is what my father would refer to as "the forgiveness factor."
Keeping us locked in the killer's perspective, Michael makes his way downstairs and out the front door, where a car has just pulled up. Out come two grownups, and the man walks up to us. "Michael?" he says before removing the mask. Carpenter then switches to an objective shot to show us the identity of the perpetrator, revealing the most jaw-dropping twist of any slasher movie of its time: it's a handsome six-year-old boy, standing motionlessly in a clown costume while holding the bloody knife in his right hand. Obviously we knew there was a relationship between the victim and perpetrator, but who could've guessed the latter would turn out to be her preteen brother? (Okay, the tiny hands may have been a slight giveaway.) In one of Halloween's most disturbingly unforgettable images, Carpenter holds the camera on Will Sandin's face, traumatized, confused, frozen in shock. Did he just want to experience the sensation of killing his sister? As the haunting, propulsive melody plays on without pause, Carpenter tracks backward and rises, showing Michael's parents standing on either side of him, similarly rooted to the spot in horror and confusion.
9. Jaws (1975)
Before I began compiling this list, it never quite occurred to me how many lessons John Carpenter learned and traits he adopted from Steven Spielberg's 1975 creature feature, Jaws. While both movies are entirely different in terms of plot and their brand of horror, their opening sequences share a number of similarities: both pictures begin with equally iconic, recognizable theme scores; both introduce us to a pair of young lovers; the victim in each scenario is the woman (in Halloween, the boyfriend is spared because he left the house in time; in Jaws, the guy fortunately passes out drunk before he can make it in the water. Alcohol never served as such a life saver.); the women in both die naked (however, Spielberg shrouds his opening actress' body in shadow; Carpenter isn't quite as tactful with Sandy Johnson.); and both directors place us in the perspective of their antagonists via POV shots spying on their prey.
It's nighttime in the summer resort island of Amity. A horde of hippie teenagers are gathered around a campfire at the beach, smoking marijuana and cigarettes, drinking liquids that probably aren't water or cranberry juice, making out with members of the opposite sex, all while one guy plays a serene tune on a harmonica and another strums a guitar. It's a scene straight out of your run-of-the-mill teen slasher movie, and raise your hand if that dampens your involvement in the slightest. Didn't think so.
Sitting with his back turned to the group is a blonde, surfer-looking dude named Tom Cassidy (Jonathan Filley). He's sipping a beer while keeping his attention focused intently on a pretty blonde girl named Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie), who flashes him a come-and-get-me smile. Taking one last sip for a confidence boost, Tom walks up to Chrissie, and seconds after getting on his knees, Chrissie stands up and runs off toward the ocean, removing every last article of clothing on the way. Tom follows suit, though he finds himself stumbling. Perhaps he sipped a little too much confidence. Determined to get his adolescent rocks off, Tom perseveres and chases Chrissie to the water, gracelessly stripping off his clothing before tumbling down a sandy hill. Entirely naked, but with all her parts thoughtfully concealed by the darkness of the sky, Chrissie plunges into the water and swims out, urging Tom to join her. Before he can even take off his shoes, Tom passes out on the shoreline, loudly insisting, "I'm not drunk. I can swim. I just can't walk. Or dress myself."
As Chrissie swims, Spielberg places the camera at the ocean bed looking up at her nude body, effectively putting us, the audience, in the predatory eyes of a hungry man-eating great white shark. John Williams' score makes a return from the opening credits, and it instantly engenders an atmosphere of mystery and menace. Once Chrissie stops to swim in place, the music develops into something more horrifying as the camera slowly rises to her legs. Transitioning above water, Chrissie is without warning yanked. Her head doesn't go under, though. Then she's pulled harder. This time her head does sink below the water. When she emerges, she begins to hyperventilate. Pulled under once more. "Oh God! Help!" she screams after resurfacing. Unlike Sandy Johnson in Halloween, Backlinie is actually a sensationally talented screamer, and it makes all the difference. Her initial anxiety, quickly mounting terror, scream-for-your-life desperation, and agonizing suffering and pain are excruciatingly palpable, and they generate chills every single time I watch this inimitable opener.
Under the gorgeous blue moonlight of Bill Butler's cinematography, Chrissie is thrashed around side to side, screaming with heart-rending authenticity and vulnerability, "It hurts," the water clogging her ability to speak. Meanwhile, lucky drunky Tom accepts his inebriation, falling asleep peacefully while forgetting all about what's-her-name. Granted a momentary release from the shark's razor-sharp teeth, Chrissie clings to a nearby buoy, only to be dragged forward seconds later. "God, help me! God, please help!" she screams to the sky, before finally being pulled under, this time without resurfacing. The music and screaming go silent. Tom is fully asleep now. And the last shot we see is of the buoy standing still in the ocean, filmed in a wide shot. In the snap of a finger, a poor, innocent (if somewhat loose) young girl is gone, swallowed up by a monster shrewdly left hidden for the majority of the film (thanks in part to beneficial budgetary constraints), and Spielberg holds the camera on an image of pure, scenic serenity, reinstating a sense of quiet and calm amid the blood-curdling slaughter.
Following the critical and financial success of John Carpenter's Halloween, Victor Miller set out to craft a screenplay that adopted the most innovative techniques of the aforementioned prototypical teen slasher while carving out its own original story and memorable characters. The result, as controversial and unshared an opinion as this will undoubtedly be, is a groundbreaking addition to the subgenre that not only surpassed its inspiration but paved the way for one of the most phenomenally successful and enduring franchises in horror history, not to mention one of its most iconic boogeymen.
While Friday the 13th boasts the remarkable accomplishment of producing three solid sequels back to back following its initial installment, each one better than the one before it, none of them managed (or arguably really attempted) to recapture the elegant simplicity, picturesque beauty, humanistic poignancy, or chilling suspense that characterize this 1980 masterpiece and set it apart from its supernaturally inclined follow-ups.
The first shot that we see is of a full moon in a pitch-black sky, accompanied by the serene natural chirping of crickets. The setting is Camp Crystal Lake in 1958. In the distance, we hear the cheerful, innocent voices of a group of teenaged counselors singing in unison "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" inside a cabin. Borrowing the immersive camerawork of Carpenter's introductory sequence, Sean S. Cunningham, working in tandem with cinematographer Barry Abrams, cleverly puts the audience in the perspective of a mysterious prowler. Accompanied by the creepy, suspenseful theme composed by Harry Manfredini, the figure enters and skulks through a children's cabin, watching the occupants as they sleep safely in their beds. Intermixed with Manfredini's music is his own signature internal whisper, "ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma," a haunting sound that will take on a psychological significance during the climax.
Returning to the counselors' hangout cabin, everyone is sitting in a circle near a campfire finishing their singalong, led by the guitar-playing Claudette Hayes (Debra S. Hayes), whose radiant smile and eyes are directed exclusively at fellow counselor Barry Jackson (Willie Adams). He returns the flirtatious smile, and once she finishes the song, Claudette mouths, "Come on." As the remaining members of the group begin a new song, Barry and Claudette lock hands and wander off to a barn. Inside is the surreptitious stalker, still portrayed by Abrams' camera. It observes the young couple as they make out and excitedly run upstairs to a private room. Laying out a blanket, Barry and Claudette lie atop one another and continue to kiss passionately, progressively removing their clothing. One of the ways in which Cunningham's direction asserts superiority over Carpenter's is the fact that he zeroes in on his sexually active characters. In Halloween's opening, Carpenter shoots Judith and Danny from behind a window kissing on a sofa but not displaying much passion, a matter unaided by David Kyle's stilted line delivery. Here, Adams and Hayes demonstrate a genuine, impassioned chemistry, holding hands, kissing, and making cutesy conversation like an actual pair of love-struck teenagers enjoying the bliss of their honeymoon phase. And Cunningham keeps his camera close at hand, capturing their unabashed attraction in intimate medium shots.
In a creative technical contrast, when the focus is on Barry and Claudette, the soundtrack is silent, save the bilabial lingual ingressive click of their kissing and brief dialogue; when editor Bill Freda cuts to the POV shot of the mystery figure, Manfredini's theme reactivates, instilling a sense of impending doom and alerting us to the danger awaiting our literally hopeless romantics. Like Michael Myers, the unseen stalker slowly proceeds up the stairs, pausing for a moment to observe the couple in their final happy moments. Before they can even fully remove their shirts, Claudette realizes someone's there and alerts Barry. Immediately the two get off one another, Claudette frantically re-buttoning her shirt while Barry rises to his feet, pulling up his shorts. An embarrassed smile and forced chuckle from Barry imply that they know this person. Perhaps their employer? Someone in authority, you would imagine, unhappy to find them separated from the group. "We weren't doing anything," insists Barry in the tone of a mischievous child who's just been caught red-handed. "We were just messing--" Before he can complete that excuse, a hunting knife is thrust into his stomach, but Cunningham refrains from showing it. Instead, Barry lets out a distressed groan and collapses to the floor, followed by a horrified scream from Claudette. The only instance of bloody imagery in this scene is of Barry falling on his back, clutching his stomach as blood pours out of a gaping wound, in addition to his mouth. Unlike in Carpenter's opener, both members of the couple suffer a gruesome fate here, eradicating any accusations of misogyny on either the attacker's or filmmakers' part.
Refocusing their attention on Claudette, the unseen assailant moves forward while a hysterical Claudette begs them to stop and runs in any direction she can think of. Abrams' camera tracks her every which way from left to right. Escape is completely futile. Backing up into a corner, Claudette resorts to throwing boxes at her pursuer, her desperation and powerlessness captured in taunting slow motion as the assailant silently closes in. There's no stopping them. As the music rises to a crescendo, Claudette falls to the floor and lets out one final ear-piercing scream of horror and defeat. Rather than presenting Hayes' murder in graphic detail, Cunningham freezes the frame and slowly pushes in for a close-up of her wide-eyed, open-mouthed face. No breasts are shown to compensate for subpar acting (cough Sandy Johnson). In fact, there's no nudity in this opening whatsoever (the characters here don't even make it to fourth base). No visible desecrations are made against the female body. And the identity of the murderer is withheld until the end of the movie. This is no mentally disturbed six-year-old who simply wanted to experience what it felt like to take a life. While never explicitly stated why the killer chose these particular two kids as their first pair of victims, the implication, once their figurative mask is removed, is as transparent as it is deeply personal.
It may seem contradictory to include the opening of Brian De Palma's Carrie after deliberately excluding William Friedkin's to The Exorcist. After all, they both have something in common: neither could be considered conventionally frightening. Furthermore, they each immerse the viewer into the tortured mindset of their titular protagonist, hinting at the unspeakable horror that awaits them without explicitly detailing what that will be. Whereas the first 10 and a half minutes of The Exorcist are leisurely paced and contemplative in their exploration of Lankester Merrin's psychological disquiet, the initial seven minutes of Carrie are faster paced and infinitely more entertaining. Not to say it's "entertaining" per se to watch a naked, naive teenaged girl get bullied by her classmates while suffering her first period, but... oh, what the hell. I don't need to defend myself. Quality filmmaking can produce entertainment out of literally any subject matter. And Brian De Palma is one hell of a quality filmmaker.
It's gym class at Bates High School, and the female student body is throwing themselves into an exuberant, competitive game of outdoor volleyball. Well, everyone except 17-year-old Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), who's more or less acting like she's involved in the game but in actuality is just lingering on the sidelines, praying (probably literally) that the ball doesn't fly in her direction. Of course, when the inevitable happens, Carrie blows it, immediately ending the game and earning the ire of her peers. As the girls storm past, Carrie just stands there with her hands behind her back and an embarrassed smile on her face, passively accepting their jeers and taunts. One vindictive girl, Norma Watson ('70s scream queen P.J. Soles), smacks her upside the head with her baseball cap, and Norma's best friend, Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), turns around to snarl, "You eat shit!"
In a somewhat humorous tonal transition, De Palma relocates to the girls' locker room. As Pino Donaggio's soothing, sentimental music plays over the opening credits, cinematographer Mario Tosi treats us to a slow-motion tour of the steam-covered locker room, panning the camera to the right to observe the carefree goings-on of the graduating seniors. With their words drowned out by the beautiful score, the young women chatter joyfully among themselves as they get dressed, playfully tossing clothes at each other. Most of them are either fully clothed or clad in their bras and panties; a select few are still completely naked, unashamed to bare their slender bodies to each other and the camera. It's rare to find full-frontal nudity in an opening credits sequence, but De Palma and Tosi aren't shying away from the authentic behavior of women in the shower, capturing them at their most uninhibited, bathing in the prime of their youth and beauty.
When the camera locates lonely outcast Carrie, she's the only one still in the shower. Tosi films Spacek in a most evocative and psychologically insightful manner, zooming in for a series of close-ups that suggest something passionate and a tad erotic. A stream of hot water pours out of the shower head and onto Carrie's face, her head tilted back with her eyes closed and mouth moving in ecstasy. She rubs a bar of soap on her cheeks, caresses her breasts, avoiding the house key strangely wrapped around her neck. She moves the soap down to her stomach then massages her legs. The use of slow motion, intimate camerawork, and passionate music suggest that showering is the only time this girl is permitted to touch herself, to derive pleasure from her own body. That all comes to a stop, along with the music, when a pool of blood supersedes the water cascading down her legs. Carrie looks down, and in close-up her eyes narrow in confusion and rising anxiety, while the blood seeps through her fingers.
Under the misguided belief that she's bleeding to death, Carrie storms out of her stall and toward her classmates with her arms outstretched, moaning like a helpless child who can't articulate her emotions with words. She makes a clutch at the other women, unintentionally getting her blood on their clothing, which automatically engenders their disgust rather than sympathy. "Help me!" Carrie pleads tearfully, but these women have none to offer. Instead, they callously push her around and scream at her to get away. Very quickly, their collective repulsion descends into gleeful sadism once Chris dangles a tampon in Carrie's face. "Hey, Norma, Carrie's got her period," she says laughingly, realizing she has no understanding of her own body's reproductive processes and deriving sick joy from her ignorance. Carrie screams at the top of her lungs for help as she backs into a corner, her eyes wide and mouth agape. The other women, led by Sue Snell (Amy Irving), utilize this as an opportunity to humiliate her, pelting her with tampons, sanitary napkins, and underwear while chanting "Plug it up" in unison. Slowly Carrie sinks to her knees, an expression of agony contorting her freckled face.
De Palma offers a powerfully affecting commentary on the disastrous effect of groupthink. If only one girl were witnessing Carrie's panic attack, it's possible she would have merely contorted her face in disgust and handed her a tampon. Because these women are in the company of one another, experiencing the same feeling ("How is it possible this 17-year-old girl has never been taught about menstruation?"), they feel more comfortable yielding to their darker impulse to assert their superiority. Since a few people are throwing things at Carrie and laughing at her and mocking her, there's no harm in one more person joining in, right?
Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) witnesses the assault from her office and intervenes. When she first lays eyes on Carrie, all she can think of is, "What is this pathetic girl's problem? It's just her period, for God's sake!" Believing she'll find safety in an authority figure, Carrie frantically grabs her gym teacher by her shorts while screaming incessantly, silenced only when Miss Collins slaps her across the face. The shock of a teacher hitting a student brings an automatic end to the chanting, filling the room with uncomfortable silence. Initially sharing in the disdain felt by her students, Miss Collins tries to shake Carrie to her senses and orders her to "grow up and take care of [her]self." At the moment Carrie lets out one final ear-piercing shriek, a light bulb suddenly explodes. Carrie breaks down crying in Miss Collins' arms, and she responds with a compassionate, nurturing hug. Chris and Norma look at each other and crack up. Miss Collins orders the women out of the locker room, and once it's cleared, she apologizes to Carrie and promises to talk to her about what's happening to her body.
The acting is impeccable throughout this prologue, with far more depth and nuance demanded of its actresses than to scream bloody murder like in a more traditional horror film. Sissy Spacek was 26 at the time of filming, but she flawlessly inhabits the skin of a teenager with the emotional maturity of someone far below her years. Her eyes practically bulge out of their sockets when she looks around to ensure her classmates are gone. And I give Spacek a lot of credit for her willingness to render herself as naked physically as she is emotionally. If she were struggling to hold a towel over her body as Chloe Moretz did in Kimberly Pierce's abortion of a remake, it would've robbed the sequence of its gut-wrenching impact. Betty Buckley is authoritative as she shoves past her students and demands to know what's going on. Once she comprehends Carrie's ignorance and suffering, she exudes a maternal warmth and compassion, holding Spacek in her arms, wrapping her hands around her cheeks, pushing her hair out of her face, caressing her head, and softly assuring her that the other girls are all gone. Amy Irving, after having the time of her life initiating the assault on Carrie, conveys instant remorse using only her face. Once the high of the moment ceases, Sue is given time to reflect on the wrongness of her actions. Meanwhile, Nancy Allen and P.J. Soles double down on their characters' cruelty, experiencing absolutely zero change of heart. Soles in particular is outstanding. While many actors assuming villainous roles chew the scenery, she chews the gum, literally, with an ebullient smile that lends such irresistible personality to Norma. Even though her behavior is undeniably vicious, I can't help but like her because Soles makes her so deliciously malicious.
Spacek engenders the necessary sorrow for Carrie because she sells her naivete, fear, desperation, helplessness, humiliation, and vulnerability with the authenticity of a developmentally delayed adolescent. I feel exactly how I'm supposed to for her. However, De Palma and his other actresses enable me to identify with the bullies' behavior as well, without ever excusing it. At the end of the day, it is human nature for the strong, confident, and beautiful to band together and spit on the weak and vulnerable, and no scene in a genre movie exemplifies this truth with more conciseness and hard-hitting, graphic honesty than this one. It may not feature demonic imagery or jaw-dropping violence, and the only blood may be shed from the uterus of the protagonist, but if the sight of a young woman cowering in a corner, naked and gushing blood, screaming and crying for help, only to be reduced to an object of ridicule by her own cold-hearted, not to mention female, classmates doesn't qualify as true horror, I don't know what does.
6. It (1990)
There are technically two openings to Tommy Lee Wallace's two-part 1990 miniseries, It, an adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 supernatural horror novel of the same name. The more popular one among fans of horror in general and King's narrative in particular is undoubtedly the second one, in which Georgie Denbrough, the little brother of protagonist Bill, loses his papier-mache sailboat down a sewer drain, followed by his arm at the hands of a shapeshifting alien in the disguise of a clown named Pennywise. Both post-opening credits sequences feature the murder of children and are inherently terrifying in their own right. However, I'm going to shed a spotlight only on the first and less-discussed opening, which, unlike the second, didn't find its way into Andy Muschietti's 2017 big-screen adaptation.
On a rainy, overcast day, a little girl named Laurie Anne Winterbarger (Chelan Simmons, who would later star in David Carson's 2002 remake of Carrie, another made-for-TV adaptation of a supernatural horror Stephen King novel) is innocently riding her tricycle around the quiet neighborhood of Derry, Maine, happily singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider" as she does so. Her mother (Merrilyn Gann) is outback collecting laundry in a basket, and when Laurie Anne arrives home, she tells her to come inside, sensing a storm approaching. This scene expertly plays on the parental fear of something horrible happening to your child the second you turn your back on them. Foolishly but understandably believing her daughter to be safe, Mom heads inside. Wheeling her tricycle forward, Laurie Anne comes across a doll lying on the ground and picks it up. As she stares at it, a terrifying, booming laugh is heard close by. Laurie Anne turns toward its direction, but the only thing in front of her is a clothesline, on which pristine white sheets blow ominously in the wind. Nobody appears to be standing behind them, yet we hear the voices of children laughing. Editors David Blangsted and Robert F. Shugrue cut back to Laurie Anne's face, more curious than concerned, as befits her age. When the sheets are blown apart, we catch a glimpse of the nightmarish face of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, iconically originated by Tim Curry. "Hi," he says with the warm tone and cheerful grin of an experienced pedophile. Laurie Anne gives a radiant smile in return, charmed by his deceptively silly, colorful appearance. When we cut back to the sheets, the clown is now gone. Laurie Anne's smile suddenly weakens, and once the sheets are blown apart once again, Wallace treats us to a second glimpse of Pennywise. Only this time, his charming smile has also ceased, replaced by a violent, predatory expression in his eyes. Richard Leiterman's camera dashes toward Laurie Anne's face, now frozen in fear, before the screen fades to black.
Seconds later, Mom returns to untether some more clothes, and calls out to her daughter, turning around to find her tricycle overturned and Laurie Anne nowhere in sight. Instantly experiencing a wave of apprehension in the pit of her stomach, she walks downstairs and calls to her once more, her calm voice edged with quickly mounting fear and desperation. When she turns her head to the side, she lets out a heartbroken, horrified scream, which continues to sound over a close-up shot of Laurie Anne's tricycle wheel spinning until it stops.
Because It is a made-for-TV production, Wallace was obviously limited in what he was able to show, so cutting to black before Laurie Anne was killed and cutting to the shot of her tricycle wheel in place of the gruesome sight of her corpse were motivated far more by an obligation to the network than a genuine artistic choice to leave the most graphic imagery to the viewers' imagination. However, the rule of thumb in horror is that the power of suggestion and building of tension are more often than not scarier than an onscreen onslaught of carnage and viscera. And the primal, viscerally shattering scream of a mother resting her eyes on her deceased child, who moments before was safe and happy in her own backyard, paints a more harrowing picture than just about anything the director could've displayed.
5. The Grudge (2004)
Speaking of horror films that spoil us with double openings, Takashi Shimizu's 2004 American remake of his own 2002 Japanese supernatural thriller, Ju-On: The Grudge, dispenses two heart-stopping sequences, one before the opening credits and one after. Now, I know what you may be thinking: why write about both opening scenes to The Grudge but only one to It? And the less monumental one, at that. Well, let's start with the obvious: this is my blog and I have the freedom to write about whatever I want, or not. And secondly, unlike in the preceding entry on this list, the sources of horror in both of these scenes are distinct from one another. In the double opening of It, an extraterrestrial clown murders two children, one in the present and the next in the past. In The Grudge, the opening scenes achieve their attention-grabbing horror through vastly distinctive means.
An opening text informs us that when someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born and resides in the location where the death transpired. Anyone who so much as steps foot inside said location is doomed to be consumed by this horror. An eternal grudge, if you will. With that simple but alarming piece of information in mind, Shimizu commences his non-chronological narrative at a high-rise apartment building in Tokyo, Japan. Peter Kirk (Bill Pullman), a school teacher, awakens early in the morning and stands at the balcony of his apartment, overlooking a serene river below a bridge. Without uttering a word, Pullman communicates a heavy load of unease and disorientation on his face and in his body language. He appears discombobulated, and his movements from side to side are stiff. It's immediately apparent something horrible has either happened or is happening to this man, but neither Pullman nor Shimizu is spelling it out for us, at least not this early. Did he undergo a traumatizing incident? Was something horrible inflicted on him, or did he witness something unspeakable being inflicted on someone else? Right off the bat Shimizu suffuses the atmosphere with a nearly unbearable degree of mystery and undefined trauma.
Peter's wife, Maria (Rosa Blasi), soon awakens to find her husband absent from their bed and standing at the balcony with his back facing her. In a soft, sultry voice that speaks of a loving, happy marriage, Maria bids Peter good morning and asks if he's okay when he doesn't respond. Slowly he turns around to face his wife with an intimidatingly indecipherable expression. Frankly, it's difficult to discern whether the glimmer in Peter's eye is one of depression or impending murder. Is he mentally preparing himself to kill his own wife? Maria doesn't sense anything particularly amiss. Maybe this is how Peter often acts in the morning after he wakes up? Instead of lunging at his wife, as his expression faintly forewarned, Peter turns back around, and without warning, in total silence, he lifts himself up and hurls himself over the railing. Shot from Peter's perspective, we fall headfirst toward the street below, the sound of the wind rising to an eardrum-shattering crescendo. Like the visceral sensation at the end of a nightmare, the second before Peter's body collides with the asphalt, editor Jeff Betancourt cuts to the horrified reaction of Maria, accompanied by a thunderous thud. In a state of mind-boggling shock, Maria walks to the balcony and stares down at the splattered remains of her husband, gasping for breath. Hideo Yamamoto's camera tilts down from the high-rise and zeroes in on Peter's mangled corpse, lying face down in the street with a puddle of blood forming around his head. This unforgettable, ice-cold open pushes the boundaries of the PG-13 ghost story, accomplished primarily with expressive acting, pitch-perfect pacing, nearly agonizing silence, POV camerawork, deafeningly precise sound effects, and just a splash of the red stuff.
Following the opening credits set to Christopher Young's terrific score, Yoko (Yoko Maki), a young Japanese caregiver, bicycles to the home of Emma Williams (Grace Zabriskie), an elderly woman suffering from severe dementia. Upon entering the house, Yoko calls out to anyone else living there, but no one responds. She finds Emma sitting by herself on a sofa, looking disoriented and vaguely unsettled. Yoko asks if she remembers her, but Emma is too far gone to reply. After putting Emma to sleep, Yoko makes a phone call and picks up various pieces of trash strewn all over the house, making her way upstairs (the worst place to go in a haunted house horror movie, by the way).
She hears a strange noise emanating from one of the bedrooms and goes to investigate (also one of the worst things a character can do in a haunted house horror movie). A creak is made above the ceiling, followed by a thud inside a closet. Yoko slides open the closet door and crawls inside, squeezing herself into the attic. As suspenseful and foreboding as this sequence undeniably is, Yoko's motivation for putting herself in harm's way is a little murky. Yes, she's being paid to look after this decrepit woman and clean up around the house, but where in her job description does it say she's required to investigate mysterious sounds and explore the creepiest, darkest, most claustrophobia-inducing spaces until she ascertains their origins? Putting aside the genre cliche of characters making poor decisions for seemingly no other reason than to get themselves killed, Yoko pulls a lighter out of her apron and looks around the attic, an expression of palpable apprehension washing over her face as she swats away cobwebs. The production design of the attic and its accompanying cobwebs and darkness is bone-chilling in its nightmarish beauty, and the tight focus on Yoko emphasizes and transfers the feeling of confinement. As Yoko slowly turns around (is there any other speed at which to move in this type of film?), her lighter illuminates the petrifying, pale face of Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji). In a judiciously brief close-up jump scare, Kayako lunges forward, and the next shot we see is of Yoko's legs, filmed from the outside in an aperture in the closet, being violently dragged upward while her helpless screams reverberate around the room until they suddenly cease.
The haunted house subgenre contains no shortage of imposing, dimly lit residences, pasty-faced ghosts with long, black hair, unsettling creaks, and, of course, goosebumps-generating jump scares. But Shimizu manages, in just under four minutes, to pack each of those time-tested ingredients into an introduction that may not break new ground, but is tautly edited, soaked in rapidly increasing dread, and blood-curdlingly, not to mention bloodlessly, effective all the same.
4. It Follows (2014)
The opening scene to David Robert Mitchell's supernatural horror flick, It Follows, is one of the most taut, ice-cold, and merciless I've seen in a modern chiller. It dives headfirst into the action, provides little in the way of dialogue or exposition, elicits instant concern and empathy for its victim, and concludes with an image so vile and horrifying you can't fully trust that your own eyes just witnessed what they did.
Borrowing an autumnal aesthetic and musical score from John Carpenter's Halloween, Mitchell opens his film in a quiet, empty suburban neighborhood. It's late in the evening during autumn. The sky is dark blue. Trees line the entire block. Leaves are strewn all over the grass and sidewalks. In a single, silent shot, Mitchell immerses us in a melancholy, brooding atmosphere, accentuated by an eerie absence of people or cars on the road. Mike Gioulakis slowly rotates the camera to the right, settling on a brick house. The front door bursts open and a young woman named Annie Marshall (Bailey Spry) races out in a pair of high heels (the only silly and inexplicable detail in the whole scene). The camera tracks (or should I say follows) her as she runs into the middle of the street, turning her head around as she does so. Clearly someone or something is after this poor girl, but we're denied access to what she sees. As Annie slowly backs away in the street, a neighbor asks if she's okay and needs help, but Annie unconvincingly declines. (Okay, in one more somewhat silly detail, the neighbor proves either so gullible or apathetic that she takes Annie's word for it, frightened as her voice sounds, and heads inside her home. Talk about loving thy neighbor.) In the distance we hear Annie's father open the door and ask what she's doing. "I'm fine, Dad," she answers, her breathing becoming more labored. Whatever is distressing this girl is presumably inching closer. The camera performs a complete rotation as Annie runs down the sidewalk across from her house, crosses the street, and darts back to her house, where her father is waiting for her in the front yard. He asks once again what's going on, but she rushes past him and into her home, and her dad follows. A moment later Annie reemerges from the front door with car keys in hand, jumps into her car, and zooms off, her nerve-fraying frame of mind emphasized by the heart-pounding, propulsive synthesizer theme composed by Richard Vreeland (better known by his stage name Disasterpeace).
The sky is now utterly black, and Annie is still driving, looking over her shoulder as her phone rings. Filmed in a wide shot, Annie sits on the sand at an isolated beach. Her father calls her, and she tearfully professes her love for him and her mother, apologizing for ever being disrespectful. Granted, Spry's delivery isn't quite as gut-wrenching or sincere as Heather Donahue's during her legendary monologue in The Blair Witch Project, but it's powerful enough in its hushed gravitas and heartbreaking resignation to mix pathos with the suspense. Looking straight ahead, Annie's eyes widen almost imperceptibly, as though it has found her, but all we can see is her car, with the headlights penetrating the darkness and the driver's door open. When Mitchell cuts back to Annie, the time is now early morning, and she's lying lifelessly on her back. Her complexion has turned a chalky white, and her right leg has been grotesquely twisted toward her face. Rather than revealing the source of his character's unnerving horror or showing a single second of her gruesome ordeal, Mitchell opts for a smash cut straight to the aftermath, juxtaposing Annie's visually horrid fate with the scenic beauty of her setting and the calming susurration of the ocean.
3. A Quiet Place (2018)
Two months before Milly Shapiro would lose her head in a collision with a telephone pole in Ari Aster's supernatural family drama debut, Hereditary, John Krasinski, directing from a screenplay he co-wrote with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, utterly and mercilessly obliterated one of the hitherto most sacred rules in horror ("Never kill the children!") with his groundbreaking sci-fi chiller, A Quiet Place, commencing his story of a small family forced to navigate the challenges of living in a world dominated by blind, hearing-enhanced aliens with one of the most economically detailed, breathlessly paced, beautifully filmed and scored, and ultimately viciously daring introductions in 21st-century horror to date.
A Quiet Place may not be the first horror film to put the lives of children in jeopardy. In James Cameron's 1986 action-oriented sci-fi horror sequel, Aliens, Rebecca "Newt" Jorden (Carrie Henn) is captured by the aliens and cocooned in their self-produced resin. However, this seemingly "shocking" development is essentially a plot device to strengthen Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver) resolve to protect the closest thing she has to a daughter and bring an end to the colony of malicious face-hugging, chest-bursting creatures once and for all. Once she locates Newt, it turns out to be disappointingly easy to free her from her web-like constraints, undermining the sense of danger for which Cameron was clearly striving. Krasinski isn't so quick to let us -- or his child characters -- off the hook quite so conveniently.
There are two ways a filmmaker can approach a story like this: (a) provide a before-and-after contrast by depicting what life was like for the characters before the arrival of the aliens, or (b) drop the audience directly in the middle of the invasion without any background context or verbal exposition. To the warm approval of the majority, the trio of writers have opted for option b, opening the narrative on day 89. Cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen paints a vividly bleak portrait of upstate New York in this alien-invaded world. A traffic light rests on its side on the ground. Leaves are strewn over the desolate street. Multiple missing person posters are taped together on a wall. The only sound we hear is of the harsh, lonely wind as it blows the leaves inside a dark pharmacy, in which the shelves are almost completely empty and a shopping cart lies overturned on the floor.
In our first glimpse of remaining human life, a little boy named Beau Abbott (Cade Woodward) skitters up and down the shadowy aisles, followed by his older sister, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), who walks barefoot on tiptoe. When the camera focuses on her, the sound abruptly dissipates, and she's shown to wear a cochlear implant, the visual and aural detail efficiently immersing us in her soundless perspective. Sitting behind the counter in visible, silent agony is their middle brother, Marcus (Noah Jupe), while their mother, Evelyn (Emily Blunt), quietly searches for medication. With his childhood innocence and naivete unharmed, Beau draws a rocket in crayon on the floor, arguing that this is how they'll get away from their predicament. After, he runs off to the toy section and reaches for a battery-operated rocket, almost knocking it onto the floor before a life-savingly alert Regan slides on her knees and catches it just in time. Krasinski's direction is so tense and effortlessly immersive, his pacing so precise, that it's impossible not to mimic the gasps of simultaneous fear and relief uttered by Simmonds. Patriarch Lee (Krasinski) gathers supplies to boost the signal on his radio and increase the hearing of his daughter. The family communicates with each other in whispers and sign language. The entire sequence plays out in near silence, clueing us into the life-and-death importance of not making any noise and transferring the sense of perpetual dread felt by the characters to the audience.
As the Abbotts prepare to leave before it gets dark, Beau approaches them carrying the toy rocket, their horrified, heart-in-throat reactions suggestive of him coming at them with a fully loaded gun. Gently, Lee removes the rocket from Beau's hands, along with the batteries, and places them on a table, insisting it would create too much noise. But Beau is still too young to fully comprehend the gravity of their living situation, the lethal effect that even the most minuscule sound could spring on him and his family. Sympathetic to her little brother's symbolic attachment to the inanimate object, how it represents his desire and hope for freedom from a practically uninhabitable world, Regan secretly hands him the rocket on her way out of the store, putting her finger up to her smiling lips and giving a knowing wink. Once she turns her back, however, Beau also snatches the batteries, aware that his family wouldn't approve but unable to resist the urge, as befits his age.
With the rocket tucked safely behind his jacket, Beau exits the store and follows his family for their walk back home through the beautiful forest. A flock of birds fly peacefully in the overcast sky, unaffected by the catastrophe that has wiped out most of the human population. Below them, the Abbotts walk along a sand path in a line from tallest to smallest, accompanied by the mournful piano and violin melody of Marco Beltrami, reminiscent of Hans Zimmer's from The Ring. Their bare feet are captured in close-up on the sand, emphasizing their carefully thought-out strategies to avoid noise however possible. At the forefront of the line is Lee, who's carrying a sick Marcus. Behind them are Evelyn, Regan, and Beau respectively. While crossing a bridge, their soothing silence is suddenly shattered by the deafeningly loud beeping of Beau's space shuttle. Lee stops dead in his tracks and slowly turns around to find Beau cheerily waving the now-activated toy in the air, blissfully ignorant to the horror he's just awakened. Putting Marcus down, Lee races toward Beau as fast as humanly possible, while Evelyn despondently puts both hands over her mouth and drops to her knees. As Lee runs, panting with exertion, he glances nervously into the woods, and Krasinski affords a glimpse through the trees of an alien running on all fours alongside him. Accentuating his desperation and urgency is Beltrami's heart-pounding, propulsive orchestral score, this one reminiscent of Steve Jablonsky's from the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's like a living nightmare brought to life on the screen, Krasinski playing on every parent's worst nightmare of failing to protect their children. Beau is standing still only about six feet away, obliviously holding his prized possession above his head, yet no matter how fast Lee runs, no matter how urgently he does so, he can't get to him in time. The ginormous, spidery, four-legged, sharp-toothed alien springs from the forest and snatches Beau just before his father can grab him. In a flash, an innocent little boy is gone, devoured by his own impulsivity and selfishness, and a family is left emotionally torn to pieces in his wake. Krasinski described A Quiet Place as, at its core, an allegory for his personal insecurities of parenthood, and no scene encapsulates that universal anxiety with more breathtaking force and uncompromising ferocity than this 10-minute nerve-shredder.
Rather than showing Beau's mangled remains after the fact, or even a spritz of blood during the moment of consumption, Krasinski captures the nightmarish powerlessness, paralyzing terror, and cold-hearted swiftness of the Abbotts' tragedy through their gut-wrenching facial expressions and the brilliantly layered sound mixing of Beltrami's brooding incidental music, the incessant beeping of the toy rocket, the snapping of branches, and the whoosh of air that accompanies the voracious, relentless alien as it descends on its latest, puny human prey.
Before the franchise would wholeheartedly embrace the self-aware meta humor that distinguishes it from its more serious-minded contemporaries, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson put in the effort to deliver a genuinely terrifying and deliciously suspenseful horror film with their debut installment. By 1996, the teen slasher subgenre had come close to taking its last breath, but thanks to an affectionately ingenious screenplay that simultaneously sent up and celebrated the conventions we all know and adore, Craven managed to singlehandedly reinvigorate it, giving birth to a new modern icon of horror in the process.
While presently I cannot comment on the latest two installments, I have seen the original four films directed by Craven, and can confidently assert that Scream is the most consistently entertaining slasher franchise out there, with nary a single failure among them. With that said, while the first three sequels are above-average slasher films that offer their own silly, gory delights, none of them have approached -- or even tired to approach -- the genuine bone-chilling heights achieved by the original. And while each sequel boasts its own memorable opening -- with a special shout-out to the movie theater double homicide of Scream 2 -- there's absolutely no matching, let alone surpassing, the unforgettable, harrowing, heartbreaking 13 minutes that jumpstarted this franchise, which remain a master class in taut screenwriting, tactful editing, immersive cinematography, and three-dimensional acting.
Late one night, while her parents are away, 17-year-old Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) is alone in her luxurious California home making popcorn and getting ready to watch a horror movie with her football-player boyfriend, 18-year-old Steven Orth (Kevin Patrick Walls), when the telephone rings. On the other end is a strange man who feigns confusion as to whom he's called and what number he's trying to reach. Casey politely tells him he has the wrong number and hangs up, but he immediately calls back "to apologize." A short while later, the man calls again, and even though Casey can sense something is off about this situation, she decides to humor him, assuming he's some lonely guy in need of opposite-sex interaction. She divulges her plan for the evening, and quickly the two settle into a lighthearted conversation about their shared love of horror movies. The man asks if she has a boyfriend, and amused by the thought of him wanting to ask her out, Casey lies and claims she doesn't.
Their conversation soon takes a far more sinister turn when the man lets it slip that he's watching her. Growing steadily alarmed, Casey tells him she has to go and hangs up, but this only provokes him to keep calling back, becoming more and more aggressive each time. Finally, he threatens to "gut [her] like a fish" if she hangs up on him again, and Casey runs to lock her doors and threatens to call the police, but he insists they'd never make it in time. The man then reveals he not only knows the name of her boyfriend, but that he has him bound, beaten, and gagged to a chair in the backyard. The fate of Steve's life now in her hands, Casey is forced to partake in a horror movie trivia game. If she answers correctly, Steve lives. While she answers her warm-up question correctly -- the name of the killer in her favorite horror film -- she's tricked into giving the instinctive, inaccurate answer to her "real" question, forgetting that Pamela Voorhees was the original antagonist of Friday the 13th before Jason superseded her in the sequel. Consequently, Steve is gutted.
When a traumatized Casey, tearfully pleading for her life, refuses to answer her final question as to which door her assailant's at, a chair is hurled through a glass patio door, and Casey runs into her kitchen to arm herself with a knife before slinking outback. As her parents are driving down the road, the assailant, cloaked in black and disguised by a white screaming ghost mask, smashes through a window and grabs Casey's arm, but she knocks him down with the phone and runs around toward the front yard. Her parents pull into the driveway, and as Casey pauses for a moment to bask in short-lived relief, Ghostface jumps through a side window and pounces on her. She gets up and runs away, but he catches her, wraps a gloved hand around her mouth, and stabs her in the chest with a hunting knife. She collapses on the lawn and clutches her gushing wound, sobbing. Ghostface kneels down, and Casey smacks the knife out of his hands. He grips her throat with both hands, damaging her larynx, and she kicks him in the groin. Casey staggers to the porch and calls out to her mother, but it comes out in a hoarse whisper. Unable to see or hear their daughter just a short distance away, they walk inside and are horrified to see the kitchen on fire and their patio door smashed to pieces. Ghostface, having recovered, walks up behind Casey, and she collapses on her back. As he towers over her, she uses her final ounce of strength to unmask her killer before he proceeds to stab her to death. Casey's parents frantically search their house for her, and when her mother picks up the phone to call the police, she can hear her daughter gasping for breath on the opposite end as she's stabbed and dragged across the lawn. Her father instructs his distraught wife to go to a neighbor's house, and as soon as she steps out front, she lets out a horrified, top-of-the-lungs scream, dropping to her knees. Her husband follows, and is greeted with the harrowing sight of their daughter, disemboweled and hanging from a tree.
On a purely narrative level, this opening sequence has visibly utilized the ones from Halloween and Friday the 13th as blueprints -- a young couple stalked and stabbed to death by a masked psychopath -- but what sets it apart from the pack is Williamson and Craven's sympathetic, humanizing approach. Specifically, they switch the perspective from that of the perpetrator(s) to the primary victim. In the aforementioned openings, John Carpenter and Sean S. Cunningham filmed their characters' murder from the perspective of their killer via a POV shot. As a result, we viewed the characters the same way their killers did: horny, oblivious, dead teenagers walking (and kissing). Here, Williamson and Craven flip the script by zeroing in on Casey, fleshing out her personality and defining her as a real character as opposed to a mere slab of meat waiting to be carved up. (The same can't be said for poor Steve, who spends the entirety of his minimal screen time tied to a chair, his screams and pleas muffled by a piece of tape wrapped around his mouth.) Sure, in the end, she suffers the same fate as Steve and her cinematic ancestors, butchered beyond recognition, but because we spend enough time with her and get to know her on an intimate level, we root for her to make it out alive and ache for her inability to do so. Of course, none of that would be possible without the stellar, career-defining performance from Drew Barrymore bringing this character vividly to life.
When casting was underway for Scream, Barrymore was originally offered the starring role of final girl Sidney Prescott. However, in a demonstration of the utmost modesty and shrewdness, she requested to play Casey Becker instead. While this meant she would only be able to enjoy less than 13 minutes of screen time, Barrymore had the forethought to realize the value of her character being killed off in the introduction: if this movie had the balls to eliminate its most prominent star this early in the proceedings, then that means literally anything could happen from that point forward. But this wasn't just an act of subversive stunt casting. This was an instance of one of the most multitalented yet underrated actresses showcasing her brilliance in a remarkably short amount of time. If there justice for horror at the Academy Awards, Barrymore would've at least been nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1997. In the openings of most slasher films, the actresses aren't required to do a whole lot more than strip and scream; Barrymore bares her entire soul and strips herself emotionally naked, developing Casey into a fully realized, achingly relatable human being who loves horror movies, is eagerly awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend, is thrust into a nightmarish situation that she could never have imagined, and will summon every last ounce of strength in her body to defend herself. In my senior year of high school, my theater teacher, Carolyn Messias, made an observation that has stuck with me ever since: "There's no such thing as small roles, only small actors." Barrymore personifies that very sentiment, making the absolute most of her limited time onscreen. She runs the emotional gamut from charming, sunny, forthcoming, and flirtatious to nervous, irritated, infuriated, and terrified in the blink of an eye, without missing a beat. Barrymore's ability to physically inhabit her role is otherworldly, dissolving into a visceral outpouring of tears at the drop of a hat, clutching her cramped stomach, pleading desperately for her life and the life of her boyfriend, crouching down and crawling into the corner like a petrified child, quivering with unimaginable fear. When she screams almost silently to her mother, it devastatingly evokes that sensation of helplessness in a nightmare when you attempt to scream to your loved ones for help, but no matter how close they are in proximity, no one can hear or see you.
Some of the credit for Barrymore's physically and emotionally draining performance must be distributed to Craven, who craftily exploited his star's affection for animals by telling her real-life stories of animal abuse on set. This Kubrickian directorial cruelty drained Barrymore of seemingly every last tear in her slender 21-year-old body, but in the process brought the absolute best out of a Hollywood icon still awaiting her proper recognition. The depth of honest emotion, uninhibited vulnerability, and sheer role commitment Craven acquired from Barrymore matches, if not surpasses, that which Kubrick elicited from Shelley Duvall in The Shining. Casey's wardrobe (the blonde bob, white V-neck sweater, and light blue jeans) may have become as indispensable to the set piece as everything else, but if it wasn't for Barrymore's full-bodied performance, this opening sequence likely wouldn't have achieved and maintained its status as one of the greatest in the genre 27 years after its theatrical release.
None of this is to undermine the tremendous vocal work put in by Roger Jackson. Unlike in the future sequels where he would begin every phone call sounding immediately like an obvious serial killer, here Jackson modulates his voice to imbue Ghostface with a more rounded personality. At the start of the conversation, his voice is soft, inquisitive, and somewhat darkly charismatic. He sounds like a relatively normal, if vaguely creepy, human being who may have dialed the wrong number and is simply looking for somebody to talk to. When he mentions that he only eats popcorn at the movies and takes an interest in Casey's liking for horror movies, Jackson puts her, and us, at ease. He makes this man affable, someone you wouldn't mind spending a few minutes on the phone with. However, once Casey becomes fed up and decides to cut contact, Jackson sheds his patient, nice-guy persona and shifts effortlessly, almost imperceptibly, to a demanding, menacing tone, with a sadistic laugh that would make Freddy Krueger tip his fedora in deference. This man is blessed with a naturally gravelly voice perfect for a villain who takes pride in inflicting pain and suffering on others, and he knows when to insert a judiciously timed pause to increase the pulse-pounding terror, as when he reveals his knowledge of Casey's boyfriend's name ("His name wouldn't be... Steve, would it?"), the fact that she had already turned on her patio lights ("Turn on the patio lights... again."), and his ability to see her ("Can you handle that... blondie?")
Of course, he's given a helping hand by Williamson's brilliant script, which supplies Jackson with a myriad of genuinely intimidating lines. In the exchange that officially announces the malicious intent of the initially pleasant-sounding caller, Casey answers the phone and screams, "Listen, asshole--" but before she can finish her sentence, Ghostface counters, "No, you listen, you little bitch, you hand up on me again, I'll gut you like a fish, understand?" Casey's responses and reactions are entirely believable and in the moment, elevating Jackson's ability to instill dread and increase our heart rate. "Is this some kind of joke?" she asks, her tone considerably lowered in heart-stopping fear. After Casey locks her front door and threatens to call the police, he replies, "They'd never make it in time. We're out in the middle of nowhere." "What do you want?" Casey whimpers. "To see what your insides look like." These lines are terrifying, repulsive, ripped straight out of a nightmare. Now contrast that with this witless, perfunctory exchange between Ghostface and Jenny Randall (Aimee Teegarden), one of the two opening victims in Part 4:
- GF: Think of me as your director. You're in my movie. You've got a fun part, so don't blow it.
- Jenny: What movie?
- GF: Same one Marnie's in. Only her part got cut way back. But you? You're the dumb blonde with the big tits. We'll have some fun with you before you die.
- Jenny: I have a 4.0 GPA and a 135 IQ, asshole. What did you do with Marnie?
- GF: She's on the cutting room floor.
- Jenny: That's not funny.
- GF: This isn't a comedy, it's a horror film. People live, people die. And you'd better start running.
Williamson also uses this opening back-and-forth to convey, through Casey, his reverence for Carpenter's 1978 holiday horror classic. When asked the question that would come to define this franchise -- "What's your favorite scary movie?" -- Casey takes a moment to ponder before settling on Halloween. In a sly dig at Craven's own Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Casey and the killer agree the original 1984 film is scary, but the former opines that "the rest sucked." It's that kind of cheeky, wink-wink self-debasement that establishes the mischievous tone of the Scream universe. It's meant to be taken seriously, but not too seriously.
Cinematographer Mark Irwin accentuates the scenic beauty and soothing quiet of the suburban setting while highlighting its isolation and potential for unlimited menace. Following the initial conversation between Barrymore and Jackson, editor Patrick Lussier cuts to an exterior shot of the Beckers' residence. Irwin begins at the top of a large, bushy tree, and lowers to reveal a mammoth, beautiful, affluent white house. The only sound is that which is produced from the gentle creak of a swing tied beneath the aforementioned tree, blowing softly in the wind. On the inside of the house, Irwin keeps his camera trained exclusively on Barrymore, but as she moves about, he tracks her to highlight the spaciousness, the numerous windows and corners. All the room in the world for an invader to hide. As Ghostface delivers his first official threat, Irwin zooms in for a close-up of Barrymore's suddenly horrified face, immersing us in her tortured emotionality. Our vision is limited to only anything she can see. When Casey peeks through the windows into her back and front yard, all we can see is the greenery of the grass, bushes, and trees, and the blackness of night. We know the killer(s) is out there somewhere, watching and waiting, enjoying every second of his little game. But we can't see him. Lussier's most bizarrely brilliant choice is to cut constantly to an insert shot of the tin foil of Jiffy Pop rapidly enlarging on the stove until it bursts into flames, an apt visual metaphor for Casey's rapidly increasing apprehension and frustration. While Casey is lying on the lawn after being stabbed, she sees her parents have just gotten out of their car, and Irwin turns the camera upside down to reflect her disoriented perspective. For his presentation of Ghostface, Irwin tantalizes with second-long glimpses of the costumed Dane Farwell captured in wide shots. As he runs across a hallway or slinks through the living room crouched down, all we can see is the black robe and a splash of white. That is, until Irwin finally obliterates such subtlety (quite literally) with the money shot, a jolting close-up of Ghostface turning around and standing face to face with a screaming Casey from behind a glass patio door.
The ambient quietness that commenced the scene gives way to ear-piercing sound effects as the tension escalates. The crackle of the popcorn accentuates the gnawing disquiet eating away at Casey's sense of domestic safety. The ringing of the telephone takes on a more ominous quality with each call. As Casey walks from the front door to her kitchen, sobbing and holding her stomach, the doorbell suddenly rings, and it sounds so shrill because it punctuates a moment of agonized silence. The ring intermingles with Barrymore's masterfully timed, authentically terrified scream. It's the exact reaction we would give in an identical moment. When Casey refuses to answer her last question, the voice replies, "Your call." We wait, along with Casey, in a state of anticipation for the consequence to follow, and a chair crashes through the glass door. At the moment Casey comes face to face with her assailant, he smashes his fist through the patio door to grab her. A lot of glass is shattered during this attack, and the incredible sound design is engineered to feed into the horror and maximize the emotional impact rather than devolve into an exercise in empty cacophonous chaos.
Despite qualifying as a slasher film in its own right, the gore quotient of Scream is fairly low, with most of the blood reserved for the aftermath of the victims' murder. Take the execution of Steve's, well, execution. As soon as the light goes out, signifying his disembowelment, Irwin's camera cuts to Barrymore for a reaction shot. We hear the sound of the knife tearing into flesh, and Casey flinches away in repulsion. Once the porch light is turned back on, Steve's head, filmed in close-up, falls back. Lussier cuts back to Casey, her traumatized face frozen in horror and stained with tears, then to a momentary wide shot of Steve's corpse, his blood and intestines spilling out of a gaping wound in his abdomen. As for Casey, Craven focuses more on her emotional suffering and instinctive desire to live than providing a graphic depiction of her brutal stabbing. The only penetration shown onscreen is her initial stab to the chest, filmed in dramatic slow motion as she runs to her parents, emphasizing how the promise of safety is so close yet teasingly outside her grasp. The blood pours rapidly out of her sweater, Barrymore's sobs of agony ensuring our emotional investment remains intact. At the precise moment Casey removes the mask from her killer, Irwin elevates the camera to his bloody, upraised knife. Now Casey can see the face of the person who's about to take her life, while we're still left in the dark. Once the knife is thrust downward, Lussier tactfully cuts to an interior shot of Mr. and Mrs. Becker (David Booth and Carla Hatley, respectively) in their house. When Casey's body is first displayed, Irwin adopts the perspective of the parents, filming her swinging corpse in a wide shot. Once Booth dashes forward, Irwin employs a fast zoom on her grotesquely mutilated body, her once-white sweater almost entirely drenched in red, her eyes drooped and drained of life.
By weaving Casey's parents into the scene, Williamson and Craven do something most movies in this subgenre conspicuously avoid. What often distances us emotionally from the slasher violence is the absence of the victims' loved ones. When a character is stabbed, beheaded, throat-slashed, or split from groin to sternum, we don't witness the emotional effect it has on their parents. Therefore, it's easy to enjoy the "awesomeness" of the slaughter from a safe remove without feeling overwhelmed with the crushing real-world implications. Not the case in Scream, where we're forced to watch two distraught parents frantically call out and search for their dying daughter in vain. Hatley, in particular, is hauntingly powerful. Taking a note from her onscreen daughter, she refuses to phone in her brief appearance and crafts a credibly hysterical portrait of a mother who knows her child is in grave danger and is powerless to help her. Booth plays his role as the levelheaded alpha male, bravely containing his mounting panic as he consoles his more overwrought wife and sternly orders her to get in the car and "drive down to the McKenzies'" (a fun, if less-than-subtle, Easter egg for the horror movie PhDs). Together, Hatley and Booth increase the poignancy and sense of tragedy to Barrymore's slaying. As a result, this opening is as emotionally gutting as it is physically.
The cheerful, attractive, horror-loving teenager we met in the first frame, who had her whole life ahead of her, and whose only intention was to spend the evening snuggled on the couch with her boyfriend and watching a scary movie, is now nothing more than a hollowed-out carcass. But the force of Barrymore's phenomenal performance, combined with the tender direction of Craven and grounded characterizations of Williamson, ensures the memory of Casey Becker will never be forgotten.
1. The Ring (2002)
There's something inherently terrifying about a house, nighttime, rain, and being alone in said house, even if it's your own. In the opening scenes of most horror films, especially regarding those of the slasher subgenre, the characters in question are usually a pair of opposite-sex lovers. In the case of The Ring, they're two teenaged female best friends having a sleepover. And by the traumatic conclusion, one of them will turn up dead, her appearance disfigured beyond recognition or even human familiarity.
Based on the 1998 Japanese supernatural horror of roughly the same name by Hideo Nakata, Gore Verbinski's 2002 American remake establishes an atmosphere of muscle-tightening, nightmarish foreboding right from the first frame. Cinematographer Bojan Bazelli opens on an establishing shot of a large brown house in the middle of the night. Complementing the blackness of the night is the deceptively soothing patter of rain. The only source of light available is emanating from the upper window on the right side of the house. On the opposite end are two teenaged girls dressed in private school uniforms. One of them, the sullen Becca Kotler (Rachael Bella), sits on the floor aimlessly and listlessly surfing through channels on the TV. The other, Katie Embry (Amber Tamblyn), is lying on her stomach on her bed with her feet in the air, philosophizing about the potential brain damage being caused by the sheer act of watching television. Becca hands her the remote, and Katie turns off the TV. Suddenly springing to life with a mischievous smile, Becca sits up on the bed and recounts an urban legend about a video tape that supposedly kills you. "You start to play it, and it's like somebody's nightmare," she says. A woman appears, smiling at her viewer through the screen, and as soon as it's over, the phone rings, and on the other end is that same woman informing you that you will die in seven days. It's a short and simple but spine-chillingly effective story on its own, but what really raises goosebumps is Kotler's telling of it, her head cocked slightly down and her delivery measured and darkly gleeful, and Bazelli's camerawork, slowly zooming in for a close-up of her face, lit up with impish delight. He bathes the screen in a dreary, otherworldly mint-green filter.
However, this may not be such an urban legend after all, as a suddenly frightened Katie reveals that she watched the tape last weekend with her boyfriend, Josh, and some of his friends, who rented a cabin in the mountains and were trying to record a football game. Amber Tamblyn is outstanding in her conveyance of fear. With her incredibly expressive face filmed in an invasive close-up, the anxiety and desperation to be believed radiate powerfully from her eyes, which well with tears. Her voice descends into a solemn whisper. So much of the terror from this scene is attributable to Tamblyn, who serves as the surrogate for the audience. Becca brushes off Katie's claim as an attempt to scare her, but then Katie starts to gag and choke. She clutches her throat and collapses into Becca's arms. As Becca becomes more alarmed, asking if she's okay, Katie flashes a "gotcha" smile and laughs. Amusingly annoyed that she's apparently been had, Becca playfully throws her onto the floor and hits her with a pillow. The mood of seriousness and tension has seemingly subsided into one of feminine frivolity. Perhaps this video tape is a joke after all? Becca asks if she and Josh "did anything" during their stay at the cabin. Katie feigns ignorance as to the subtext of that question, leading Becca to believe they had sex. As the two throw pillows at each other and laugh about the possible loss of Katie's virginity, the telephone rings. At that precise moment, Katie's lighthearted laughter ceases and the expression of breathtaking terror returns on her face. Bazelli zooms in for an ominous close-up of the clock, which reads 10 o'clock, as if to say her time is up. Becca reads the genuine terror on her friend's face and realizes she wasn't fooling around. "There really is a tape?" she asks, her voice soft with astonishment. Reluctantly Katie nods her head.
Together, the girls walk downstairs, the incessant ringing of the phone reverberating throughout the house. Bazelli foregrounds the phone, mounted on the left side of a wall. Once Katie and Becca step into frame, the phone blurs. They inch toward the phone, staring at it as though it were a gunman ordering them to come a little closer. Katie pauses, too scared to see who's on the opposite end, and Becca follows suit. Convinced they're just scaring themselves, Becca bravely rushes forward and picks up the phone. Katie rushes behind her and pleads with her not to like a child grabbing their parent's arm and begging them not to answer the door late at night. But it's too late. The confident smile on Becca's face quickly disappears, superseded by a look of grave concern. We don't hear who's on the other end, but it seems to be someone or something horrible. She turns to Katie and puts the phone up to her ear. Just barely able to bring herself to say hello, Katie answers and is both relieved and annoyed to realize it's just her mom. Becca has pranked her back, as if to say, "how do you like it?" As Katie talks to her mom and pours herself a glass of lemonade, Becca walks off.
Once her mom hangs up, Katie walks away and prepares to take a sip of her drink, when out of nowhere the TV comes on in the living room. The only thing on the screen is static, and it's producing a shrill hiss. Katie instantly stops dead in her tracks, and Bazelli goes in for another close-up of Tamblyn's dread-filled face as she slowly turns her head to the side. Thinking Becca is playing another practical joke on her, Katie asks for the remote, only to look down and see that it's lying on the sofa. She turns off the TV and turns around, but as she steps back into the kitchen, the taunting hiss returns. Katie runs up to the static screen and yanks the plug out, hyperventilating. While staring at the black screen, a reflection of a figure runs across the kitchen. Katie gasps and spins around, but nothing appears to be staring at her through the kitchen windows. She cautiously enters the kitchen, and is greeted by the slow opening of the refrigerator door. What's so remarkable about Verbinski's direction is the way he manages to take these seemingly innocuous images and sounds -- the ringing of a telephone, the static on a TV, a remote sitting on a sofa, a refrigerator door -- and imbue them with heart-stopping apprehension and menace. Of course, he's abetted tremendously by the unforced, organically raw performance of his leading lady, whose terrified facial expressions, deliberate movements, and heavy breathing communicate and transfer palpable fear. Katie runs up to the fridge door and slams it shut, taking several deep breaths. A mysterious noise draws her attention to the staircase. She calls out to Becca, asking if she can hear her. Katie runs up the stairs, and Bazelli films her legs in a low-angle partial body shot.
When she reaches the top, Bazelli's camera is placed on the floor in front of her bedroom door. Exiting through the gap is a puddle of water. Once again, Verbinski manages to make water terrifying because it's obviously unnatural for water to be leaking out of your bedroom. After all, what's in your bedroom apart from a bed and maybe a TV? Slowly Katie walks across the hall until the only part of her body onscreen are her legs and feet, stepping into the puddle. The pacing is excruciating in its unhurried brilliance, instilling a sensation of nerve-racking, "no, no, don't go in there!" empathy. Katie's face is captured once more in close-up, highlighting her nervousness. She's terrified to open the door, but it's almost as if there's a force compelling her to. Editor Craig Wood cuts to a close-up of her hand as it slowly reaches for the knob, also dripping with water.
After a moment of hesitation, Katie quickly pushes the door open, determined to invalidate her own irrational worry, and is consequently punished for it. Staring at her from across the screen isn't the woman from the tape, but rather her TV, now displaying an image of a well in the middle of a field. Accompanied by an ear-piercing screech, Bazelli zooms out at breakneck speed from the TV, then in on Katie, signifying that an apparition has exited the screen and is now hurling itself at its next target. Before she can let out a scream, her face instantaneously contorts. Her complexion turns a diseased bluish-green. Her eyelids turn dark red. Her eyes themselves roll up into her head. Verbinski affords only the briefest up-close look at this grotesque sight. It's a transformation that happens so quickly you'll legitimately miss it if you blink. So unsightly and monstrous you may not even believe what your own eyes are telling you. To get a complete picture of Tamblyn's slack-jawed face, and the immaculate makeup effects that drain the youthful beauty from her in a millisecond, you'll have to pause the video at just the right moment, likely more than once. Like waking from a nightmare, as soon as the camera dives in for a close-up of her face, the screen suddenly cuts to a variety of unrelated images of a burning tree, the interior of a well, and the eye of a horse, before cutting to static.
While many horror films capture the feelings of a nightmare -- the helplessness, the seclusion, the irrationality -- the initial seven minutes of The Ring play out like an actual nightmare. Much like Samara Morgan's uncanny ability to transfer random images from her own mind into those of others, so too does Verbinski transfer a nightmare sequence from the pen of Ehren Kruger to celluloid.
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