The 25 scariest opening scenes in horror-movie history

While anticipation of the inevitable—what’s around that corner, what’s behind the door—can goose adrenaline and ratchet up tension, it’s easy to tip over into predictability. Them, a film in which probably 90 percent of the dialogue happens in the first 10 minutes, uses its opening sequence to demonstrate the power of staying in the moment with a character, rather than wandering ahead. From the moment the mother disappears from in front of the car, the audience is given the daughter’s perspective, close-ups of her face continually intercut with her point of view, frantically scanning the surroundings, without a chance to worry about anything beyond the immediate. When the taunts begin, the hook has already been set—with a last scare that still surprises. [Alex McLevy]

The nerve-jangling first 20 minutes of When A Stranger Calls began life as a 1977 short called “The Sitter,” by writer-director Fred Walton and co-writer-producer Steve Feke, who’d go on to make the feature-length version. Their longer take on the story is sluggish in its final hour (until the excruciatingly tense finale, that is), but act one has been honed into a devastatingly effective weapon. The long opening follows an increasingly nervous babysitter as she keeps getting phone calls from someone who asks, softly and ominously, “Have you checked the children?” From Carol Kane’s escalating anxiety as a woman alone, to the blood-chilling kicker from the police—“The calls are coming from inside the house!”—When A Stranger Calls begins with a sequence that’s a suspense classic in and of itself, touching on our common fear of being stalked where we live. [Noel Murray]

It’s hard to remember a time when Zack Snyder was an exciting new name in genre filmmaking. But for a few harrowing minutes, the man behind really did look like a master of horror in the making. Snyder’s career-launching remake of begins on an idyll of suburban calm that’s nightmarishly shattered when a zombified little girl invades the home of an unsuspecting ER nurse (Sarah Polley). The horror then goes from micro to macro as our traumatized heroine steps out into blinding daylight to discover that her entire neighborhood—and by extension, the entire planet—has gone straight to hell. Snyder’s coup de gras: a that sets an end-of-the-world montage to the apocalyptic folk of Johnny Cash’s “When The Man Comes Around.” On a whole, Snyder’s Dawn is no patch on George Romero’s. But its opening onslaught of terror stands alone, promising a better movie (and career) than the one that followed. [A.A. Dowd]

If you showed somebody unfamiliar with The Stepfather its opening scene, absent any context, they’d be likely to assume that it’s the movie’s finale. In a way, it is—or, rather, it’s the finale of an otherwise unseen prequel that would introduce Henry Morrison (Terry O’Quinn), a man whose expectations regarding the ideal family unit are both unrealistically high and horrifically unforgiving. Director Joseph Ruben, working from a screenplay by Donald E. Westlake, doesn’t try to be cute, showing Henry with bloodstained hands and arms the very first time we see him, standing in front of his bathroom mirror. There’s no doubt that something awful has happened, no big reveal in store. But that just makes it all the more unnerving to watch Henry methodically alter his appearance: trimming his shaggy hair, shaving his beard, and even disguising the color of his eyes via contact lenses. Only when he’s all but unrecognizable does he casually walk downstairs and past the mutilated remains of several bodies—identified as his own wife and children by pictures on the wall, so that we know he’s not some random home invader. Whistling “Camptown Races,” he strolls off to become “Jerry Blake,” seeking a new, unwitting family to disappoint him. [Mike D’Angelo]

The opening moments of Steve Beck’s supernatural sort-of-thriller Ghost Ship are a microcosm of everything great about horror movies. As cruise ship passengers dance romantically beneath the stars, tension builds as the camera tracks a razor-thin wire, slowly stretching taut around them after being set in motion by a mystery person’s hand. When the cable finally snaps, slicing through all aboard—save for one little girl, spared by her height—there’s a pregnant, blackly comic pause as everyone slowly realizes what’s happened. It’s followed by a gory sequence of their newly halved bodies slip-sliding apart, and finally, genuine psychological terror, as the little girl realizes she’s now all alone, in the middle of the ocean, atop a floating corpse-pile. The rest of would be hard-pressed to live up to that, even with a script that wasn’t tedious, predictable claptrap. But for those few fleeting minutes, it’s a classic. [Sean O’Neal]

The opening scene of It Follows—even just its opening shot—immediately earned David Robert Mitchell’s sophomore feature a place in the annals of formalist horror. Running almost two minutes, it’s both tightly controlled and very abstract: The audience has no idea who this young woman might be (in fact, she’ll be dead before the movie hits the three-minute mark) or what she might be fleeing from on this unremarkable suburban street at twilight. Instead, it’s the sound design and the deliberate, persistent movement of the camera that creates the sense of an immediate threat. From this first scene, It Follows teaches its audience to fear the frame. The source of dread isn’t the movie’s invisible, shape-shifting monster—a protean metaphor if there ever was one—but the most basic properties of movie style. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

All five Final Destination movies begin the same way: Some hunk or babe experiences a premonition of mass doom (a plane crash, a malfunctioning roller coaster, a bloodbath at the race track), which they and a few others are then able to narrowly sidestep, incurring the score-settling wrath of death itself. Every one of these opening set pieces is a gory delight, but the best of the bunch is probably the multi-car pileup of the first sequel. The late David R. Ellis masterfully ratchets up suspense, cutting from one driver to another on a crowded, slippery stretch of highway, before orchestrating a spectacular panorama of vehicular mayhem. Like the Final Destination franchise on a whole, this disaster movie in miniature plays on a collective fear of senseless demise, building a diabolical Rube Goldberg device from of our anxiety about freak accidents. Bonus points for doubling the carnage, as these movies always do, by chasing the vision of impending catastrophe with the actual one that follows. It’s two demolition derbies for the price of one! [A.A. Dowd]

John Landis is a comedy director as much as he is a horror director, but no matter what genre he’s working in, he’s always a baby boomer. All of these elements come together beautifully in Landis’ prologue to the 1983 anthology film , which opens with comedians Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd cruising down a dark, winding highway toward some unknown destination, jamming to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Midnight Special” on the car radio. When the tape breaks, the restless duo start playing a series of car games, from the reckless (driving with the headlights off) to the shamelessly nostalgic (a ’50s and ’60s TV-heavy game of “Name That Tune”). This leads to a discussion of Twilight Zone twist endings, which, of course, leads to a twist ending of its own. How very meta. [Katie Rife]

The first thing that hits you in the opening moments of is the oppressive silence. It lasts just long enough to establish a mood of haunted paranoia, as though these are the only people left on Earth—and then all hell breaks loose. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo pulls off the unlikely feat of crafting a worthy sequel to Danny Boyle’s , but the reintroduction to this world steals the show. It’s a miniature zombie movie, told in barely more than six minutes, that nonetheless encompasses an entire narrative unto itself. And, much like Robert Carlyle’s panicked breaths on his escape boat, the sequence leaves viewers breathless and exhilarated, and with the bleak assurance that death is coming for everyone. [Alex McLevy]

is a textbook case of how to do great horror: It takes an old trope (two teenagers telling the story of a mythical boogeyman, only to have it become horrifyingly real) and updates it with a modern conceit. In this case, it’s the VHS tape possessed by an evil spirit, providing a bevy of allegories and ideas for discussion. But in its first minutes, the film is nothing but a master class in suspense, staged by Verbinski as a series of back-and-forth shots between empty but menacing rooms and Amber Tamblyn’s increasingly terrified face. We don’t yet know how the creature works, and that lack of knowledge is the scene’s trump card. Besides that, the entire premise is laid out in a few short sentences, meaning the sequence—and entire film that follows—needs no clarification, just an ongoing white-knuckle wait for the other shoe to drop. [Alex McLevy]

“They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” For nearly 50 years now, that line has cast a pall over joking threats of potential mayhem, evoking a disturbing possibility: Maybe, just maybe, they really are coming to get you. George Romero’s first zombie movie eventually serves up a small army of hungry corpses, but it kicks off with a single, slightly lurching guy (Bill Hinzman) in a suit, looking like just another mourner at the cemetery where Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and her brother, Johnny (Russell Streiner), have arrived to place a wreath on their father’s grave. Johnny, teasing Barbra about how scared she’d been as a kid, pretends that this dapper dude is stalking her, but finds out soon enough that he’s speaking the truth (though he doesn’t get much time to appreciate the cruel irony). Not only does ’s initial murder and subsequent frantic chase launch an enduring nightmare-fuel franchise, it confirms even the most fleeting and ludicrous thought about the intentions of random strangers in deserted locations. Just because you’re paranoid… [Mike D’Angelo]

John Carpenter’s genre-defining was not to the first to use a stalking “creep’s eye” point of view for its opening scene (Bob Clark’s did something similar four years earlier), but it remains the standard. This chilling prologue sequence, set on Halloween in 1963, is almost its own short film, with an ending twist that is perhaps more disturbing than the bloody murder that precedes it. Attempts at imitating the first-person with a camera are often awkward, but Halloween’s unbroken handheld shot is amazingly fluid. Carpenter’s stylized staging of the sequence treats the gaze of the young Michael Myers as elemental; slipping from artful expressionism into lurid voyeurism, the whole unshakeable sequence suggests the perspective of a killer whose psyche could be the dark side of film itself. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

The late Wes Craven was a master of reinvention, and the heralded yet another new chapter in his career. Functioning essentially as a stand-alone short film, the 13-minute sequence informs the viewer that all the rules of horror movies—rules that Craven himself had helped establish—no longer applied. Drew Barrymore’s Casey was not going to make it, no matter how hard she fought back. The biggest star in the film, then in the midst of a career renaissance, was not going to survive through the opening credits. And her death, when it inevitably did arrive, was brutal. Shooting the scene over the course of five days, Craven reportedly kept Barrymore, a devoted vegetarian, upset throughout filming by telling her stories of animal cruelty, a sadistic little touch that fits nicely with his ethos. [Katie Rife]

Poor Chrissie. All she wanted was a relaxing skinny dip on a nice summer night, and maybe to get laid by the drunk hippy she makes eyes with across the beach bonfire. Instead, the girl ends up chum, and the unwitting star of the scariest opening scene in all of horror. Much has been made of the problems Steven Spielberg suffered with his mechanical shark, whose malfunctions supposedly forced the director to rely more on implication than special effects. But it’s clear from the very first scene of this seminal blockbuster that Spielberg was already a master of suggestion: He shows us nothing but the mighty beast’s ominous point of view, but we see everything in our minds—the bloody work being made of Chrissie’s lower half, as she’s thrashed around like a fish on a line, gurgling “It hurts” to no one who can hear her. It’s one of the most convincing expressions of terror ever put on film (the actress, Susan Backlinie, deserves a spot in the scream-queen hall of fame for her three minutes of screen time), and that monstrous fear ripples through all of , staying on our minds even (or perhaps especially) when the shark is “safely” out of sight. You died too young, Chrissie. But we think of you every time we dip our toes in a dark body of water and decide that maybe dry land is the better bet. [A.A. Dowd]