Was this review helpful to you? But Wan plays hauntings like a conductor plays an orchestra. 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 Jaws, staying on our minds even (or perhaps especially) when the shark is “safely” out of sight. But its opening scene is an inspired bit of horror filmmaking, as director Jonathan Liebesman pivots from a hokey opening-credits explanation of the film’s central mythos to a terrific bedtime haunting. Whistling “Camptown Races,” he strolls off to become “Jerry Blake,” seeking a new, unwitting family to disappoint him. Instead, the opening traffics in different, more relatable anxieties: social misery, loneliness, cruel mockery, and an empathetic fear for Carrie herself, who seems so unequipped to navigate this nasty world. Tomasz Wasilewski’s Glupcy, Chris Messina to Star in HBO Max Pilot ‘Verbatim’. A social worker fights to save a girl from her abusive parents, only to discover that the situation is more dangerous than she ever expected. The violent, sexual, and religious content of director Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils has long made it one of the most controversial horror movies of them all. [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. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo pulls off the unlikely feat of crafting a worthy sequel to Danny Boyle’s hit zombie reinvention flick, but the reintroduction to this world steals the show. A deaf and mute writer who retreated into the woods to live a solitary life must fight for her life in silence when a masked killer appears at her window. She takes refuge in a friend’s similarly stylish apartment, where she’s besieged by an unknown supernatural assailant as Goblin’s music whips itself into a pagan frenzy in the background. Menu. [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. It's a How-To that should be taught in screenwriting courses all over the country but probably will never even get a passing mention. (2010). It’s repulsive, excessive, and oddly titillating, just like the rest the film. Then the doc wakes up on a helicopter heading to an abandoned Florida city, on a search for human survivors of the zombie apocalypse. He chooses one, seemingly at random, and, in the blink of an eye, tiny lines appear across his face. Movies. 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. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky], The opening of Dario Argento’s Suspiria perfectly sets the tone for the film, establishing a vividly stylized nightmare world that’s equal parts beautiful and terrifying. CLACKER #1 You look awesome today. The rest of Ghost Ship would be hard-pressed to live up to that, even with a script that wasn’t tedious, predictable claptrap. 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. No one pays much mind. Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents' disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation. 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 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. [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. Snyder’s career-launching remake of Dawn Of The Dead 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). 6 OMITTED 6 7 INT. One of the prop books used in the movie, sold in an online auction for $586, and proceeds went to Dress for Success, a non-profit organization that assists more than 45,000 disadvantaged women each year as they transition into the workforce. 23 on Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments. When it comes to the spooky stuff, sometimes it’s good to get right down to hair-raising business. The actor vanishing silently into a darkened room ends up being far more chilling than any jump scare, and the whole sequence sets up a film that marks McCarthy as one of the more promising young horror directors working today. You died too young, Chrissie. There’s no doubt that something awful has happened, no big reveal in store. 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. I can’t wear cropped pants. [Katie Rife], Poor Chrissie. That fact is a Greek tragedy. With Halloween right around the corner, and Horrors Weeks in full swing, The A.V. 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. 8 of 8 people found this review helpful. Without being able to contact the individuals, he tries to work out who they are, but he can only account for four of them. [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. As the blood begins to trickle, his body separates into cubes of its own, slowly crumbling to the floor like a diced potato. It begins with Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille) imagining herself staring at a pretty picture in an otherwise featureless room, before a dozen writhing zombie arms burst through the wall. To watch the first two and a half minutes of THE DEVIL… The best representation of what the director had in mind can be seen in the movie’s pulse-pounding first five minutes. ELIAS-CLARKE ELEVATOR -- DAY 7 ANDY is a shrub in a CLACKER forest. 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. On paper, the opening of The Conjuring is pure boilerplate (a creepy doll that seems to move when people aren’t around) bracketed with excess information (paranormal investigators listen to the story of the creepy doll and explain what they think is behind it). Get a sneak peek of the new version of this page. They are the CLACKERS of Elias-Clarke. But its opening onslaught of terror stands alone, promising a better movie (and career) than the one that followed. [Jesse Hassenger], Without a word of dialogue, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube establishes the entire, diabolical game of its conceit in just under three minutes. The communication radio in the elevator is broken but the guards, Lustig and Ramirez, observe the individuals via CCTV as events unfold. Release Calendar DVD & Blu-ray Releases Top Rated Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Showtimes & Tickets In Theaters Coming Soon Coming Soon Movie News India Movie … The biggest star in the film, then in the midst of a career renaissance, was not going to survive through the opening credits. A young widower returns to his hometown to search for answers to his wife's murder, which may be linked to the ghost of a deceased ventriloquist. What wrongdoing did each of the trapped people commit. But then the eye blinks and changes color, letting you know immediately something’s amiss. 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. Meanwhile, five strangers are trapped in an elevator in the building where the jumper committed suicide. [Noel Murray], It’s hard to remember a time when Zack Snyder was an exciting new name in genre filmmaking. 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. He joins forces with an unconventional priest, schooled in the rites of exorcism, to combat the possessions that are terrorizing their city. [Noel Murray], A critical and commercial failure in its initial release, The Hitcher has earned a well-deserved cult following. [Alex McLevy], George Romero originally planned to out-do his 1968 cult hit Night Of The Living Dead and its critically acclaimed 1978 sequel Dawn Of The Dead with a grander-scaled third chapter. 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. From the stars of "The Good Place" to a pair of "Pretty Little Liars," check out our gallery of celebrity besties. In this case, it’s the VHS tape possessed by an evil spirit, providing a bevy of allegories and ideas for discussion. [Katie Rife], The late Wes Craven was a master of reinvention, and the opening of 1996’s Scream heralded yet another new chapter in his career. 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. Club is counting down the scariest, creepiest, and most nerve-shredding opening scenes in horror-movie history. The Seventh Seal (Swedish: Det sjunde inseglet) is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman.Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot), who has come to take his life.Bergman developed the film from his own play Wood Painting. [Katie Rife], More than a year after it premiered in Toronto under the title February, director Oz Perkins’ supremely creepy directorial debut still hasn’t crept into theaters. Instead, the girl ends up chum, and the unwitting star of the scariest opening scene in all of horror. Time is running out for the occupants of the elevator, as Bowden realizes he has to get them out quickly. But for those few fleeting minutes, it’s a classic. The scenes themselves range in length, from about a minute to a good 15 or 20, with the only criteria being that they must constitute the first scene or passage, excepting a credits sequence. The scene where Damian visits his attic and starts ranting at the statue of Jesus on the cross, is like an angry adolescent having a … All of these elements come together beautifully in Landis’ prologue to the 1983 anthology film Twilight Zone: The Movie, 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. 0,92 sec 2.34 Great horror can trick its audience into not being able to look away. 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. Drew Barrymore’s Casey was not going to make it, no matter how hard she fought back. A father and son, both coroners, are pulled into a complex mystery while attempting to identify the body of a young woman, who was apparently harboring dark secrets. A pot of boiling water creates an almost unnoticeable transition from day to night; the camera follows two conversations (one by phone, one by computer) through the cramped quarters, efficiently establishing geography; and then a great use of “There’s someone behind you” leads into… nothing. Answering a ringing telephone on the far end of a long hallway, prep-school student Kat (Kiernan Shipka) receives bad news (the voice on the line is an unholy croak), before having visions of an ominous snowbank, a demolished car, and a man in a long, black overcoat. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Attempts at imitating the first-person with a camera are often awkward, but Halloween’s unbroken handheld shot is amazingly fluid. Pretty creepy. That’s how it starts: with an overhead shot of girls in gym class playing volleyball, the camera craning down to find Carrie (Sissy Spacek) standing nervously in the back row, about to screw up a crucial play. [A.A. Dowd], The Pact opens on an unblinking eye, like an inverted homage to the rapidly blinking eye that kicks off Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. 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. 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. 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. Devil (2010) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. From this first scene, It Follows teaches its audience to fear the frame. Time is running out for the occupants of the elevator, as Bowden realizes he has to get them out quickly. Title: 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. The controversial scene from Ken Russell's The Devils. Faust is considered by many to be Goethe's magnum opus and the greatest work of German literature.. 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. [Alex McLevy], James Wan came on the horror scene with the overwrought twistiness of Saw, but his Conjuring movies have a genre classicism that borders on stateliness by comparison. With Chris Messina, Caroline Dhavernas, Bokeem Woodbine, Logan Marshall-Green. Instead, it’s the sound design and the deliberate, persistent movement of the camera that creates the sense of an immediate threat. Meanwhile, five strangers are trapped in an elevator in the building where the jumper committed suicide. That disconnected moment leads into a classic “alone in the house” scenario, and director Nicholas McCarthy is practically Spielbergian in his narrative cleverness. The films range in quality as well, because even a terrible horror movie can start exceptionally strong. The films range in release date from 1960 to next year, when a festival favorite of ours will finally hit theaters. It’s a miniature zombie movie, told in barely more than six minutes, that nonetheless encompasses an entire narrative unto itself. Director-cinematographer Mario Bava’s style is exclusively visual (the acting here is nothing to write home about), hearkening back to expressionist silent film and 1930s Universal horror; his lush, textured black-and-white images relish and even fetishize the torture and torchlight. [Jesse Hassenger], Gruesome by the standards of its time, Black Sunday was the movie that put Italian horror on the map: a lurid Gothic tale of cobweb-filled crypts, fog-shrouded cemeteries, and devil-worshipping Moldavian vampire-sorcerers. I look like a whale. CLACKER #2 Oh, please. The opening credits run with different speeds in the two versions. Yesterday, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna tweeted out the last iteration script of the iconic and endlessly rewatchable film, The Devil Wears … This leads to a discussion of Twilight Zone twist endings, which, of course, leads to a twist ending of its own. When Suzy pulls up to her new home, a German ballet school, in the pouring rain, we switch focus to a frantic young woman fleeing the school on foot. And the best fright flick of the new millennium is half over before anything remotely frightening occurs. Held captive and faced with their imminent executions, fifty strangers are forced to choose the one person among them who deserves to live. A science teacher, his wife, and a young girl struggle to survive a plague that causes those infected to commit suicide. “The Devil’s Brigade” (1968) The classic World War II film starring William Holden, Cliff Robertson, and a slew of recognizable actors tells the true story of a special fighting unit of Canadian Army and U.S. Army soldiers whose initial hate for each other turns to respect and camaraderie that helps them succeed in an impossible mission. Just because you’re paranoid… [Mike D’Angelo], John Carpenter’s genre-defining Halloween was not to the first to use a stalking “creep’s eye” point of view for its opening scene (Bob Clark’s Black Christmas did something similar four years earlier), but it remains the standard. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky], 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. To mark the occasion, we have an EXCLUSIVE clip to share today that offers a look at the film's opening scene. Her delayed first period sends her into a panic, to which her classmates respond by pelting her with tampons, laughing and chanting “plug it up!” as she pleads for help. The film begins with a person committing suicide by jumping from a building narrated by Ramirez (Jacob Vargas) who mentions that his mother tells him stories of the Devil roaming the earth, and it always begins with a suicide. [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. Written by Tensions run high among those trapped, so Lustig calls the police and Detective Bowden assumes the case. 2.14 Again, the woman is dragged a few inches further. 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