By Paul Wooldridge

A movie trailer, and its accompanying teasers, is the time honoured linchpin of cinematic marketing. It seeks to raise expectations, much like dishes described on a menu, or the photographs that adorn the local takeaway’s brightly lit banners seek to entice salivation. It is the film’s opening, however, that, like the starter in a three course meal (if I’m to stretch the food metaphor a little further), that whets the appetite and confirms the hope that the dining experience is going to be as good as you’ve come to expect.

Horror has some great examples of memorable openings which demonstrate the director’s skills at manipulating a variety of emotional extremes from the audience, in only a short space of time. It’s the subgenre flexing its muscles with an opening salvo designed to reassure the audience that they’re in safe hands. 

Classic examples include the murderous POV, that raises tension throughout Halloween’s (‘78) opening, only to reveal the protagonist’s young age before the titles appears.

When a Stranger Calls just one year later, in 1979, encapsulates the classic “call is coming from inside the house” campfire tale. In 1996 Wes Craven’s Scream revitalised the slasher genre and murdered the film’s most recognisable star before the opening credits.

In Funny Games 1997 Micheal Haneke used a title card crash cut, with hellish experimental jazz, to destroy a peaceful bourgeoise family scene. It Follows in 2014, unsettled audiences with the last few moments of an unknown victim whose death prompted questions which the film would delight in leaving unanswered. Even Midsommar 2019 opened with a harrowing murder suicide set in grey wintery suburbia in contrast to the permanent summer sun that blankets the rest of the films runtime.

But, for horror, more than any other genre, gore is at the core of what pulls in the punters, appealing to our morbid curiosity. For me the following 6 stand out as the best examples of gory, bloody intros.

Listed in chronological order it’s perhaps unsurprising that the majority are from the ‘00s, the decade that threw subtlety out the window and opted to set its stall out early, as it were, choosing not to save the shocks for later in the movie but kick things off as it means to go on.

Ghost Ship (2002) opens with a formal dance, on the titular vessel’s top deck, that ends in multiple bisections. The group halving is witnessed by a young Emily Browning, who only survives due to her diminutive statue. Such a grim elaborate accident brings me nicely to the next example.

I defy any viewer of Final Destination 2 (2003) to not have the opening scene replayed in their mind should they ever encounter logs being transported by lorry, on any future motorway journeys.

Zack Snyder’s 2004 glossily gratuitous remake of Romero’s 1978 original Dawn of the Dead revels in an opening sequence that highlights the scale of the undead apocalypse. Infected children tearing into human flesh and shell shocked neighbours take to the streets with firearms, all witnessed by a brief car journey through suburban Milwaukee as it descends into hell.

28 Weeks Later (2007) offers a very British version of infected horror and sees the English countryside bathed in both sunlight and running hoards of Rage infected lunatics. The mundane Britishness of sprinting for your life across open fields while family members are torn apart scares with its simplicity.

Fede Alvarez’s 2013 remake Evil Dead saw audiences bear witness to the immolation of a young girl, by her own father no less. It was with great relief that her deadite possession was confirmed before the film began in earnest.

Lee Cronin’s 2023 continuation of the deadite university, Evil Dead Rise, although set primarily in the crumbling tower block, opens in the more familiar log cabin. With the original demonic flight through woodlands, updated by a drone, the films opening includes scalping and a decapitation, finished with a fantastic title card rising above a forest backdrop.

Whether it’s a flying sheet of barbed wire, an out-of-nowhere car crash, or a possessed girl casually scalping her cousin by the lake, these bloody openings don’t just shock, they set a tone, demand attention, and announce that the horror is here now. In an era where attention spans are short and expectations high, the modern horror intro has become an art form in itself: bold, brutal, and impossible to forget. These first scenes aren’t just hooks, they’re promises. Promises that what follows will be just as gleefully gruesome.