Editorials
10 Horror Movie Opening Scenes So Good We Were Instantly Hooked
Some horror movies opt to lull viewers into a sense of comfort or complacency before ripping the rug out from under them; films like Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, or Psycho take a while to introduce the world and its characters before unleashing the horror. Other horror movies prefer to go straight for the jugular right out of the gate, delivering an attention-grabbing scene before unwinding the narrative.
That opening scare not only serves as a memorable introduction but it establishes the film’s overall tone as well. It’s long since become a staple in horror. Whether the rest of the film holds up to the opener is an entirely different story, though. For those memorable, attention-grabbing opening scenes that elicit jolts, chills, and thrills, here are 10 of horror’s best.
When a Stranger Calls Back
1979’s When a Stranger Calls has a fantastic opening spun from the urban legend about the babysitter and the caller within the house. The rest of the film? Not so great. But this made-for-cable television sequel is surprisingly much better and the opening scene is an all-timer. This time the babysitter, Julia, is played by Jill Schoelen (The Stepfather, Popcorn). While Julia is on duty at her regular gig, the kids are fast asleep upstairs when a stranger knocks on the front door. He pleads to use the phone to call in help for his broken down car. Julia refuses to open the door to let him in (she’s smart), but offers to make the call for him. Except, she finds the phone is dead. It’s the beginning of a very intense cat and mouse game, especially when Julia notices stuff within the house has been moved around.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
How do you follow up one of horror’s most vital classics, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? If you’re Tobe Hooper you approach the sequel with pitch-black humor, and you announce it to your audience with a great opening hook. Set 13 years after the first film, the opening sequence not only introduces us to final girl Stretch (Caroline Williams), but reacquaints us with Leatherface in an unexpected way; a crazy car chase. Leatherface dances in the back of the pickup before gleefully dispatching his victims. It’s a scene that screams this is going to be nothing like predecessor in the most entertaining fashion.
The Conjuring
James Wan’s film featured an opening so strong that it earned its own spinoff series. It’s easy to see why, too. Not only does it effectively introduce the Warrens and their paranormal submersed world, but the self-contained story of Annabelle plays out like a perfectly conducted symphony of scares. The dread building, music, timing, and camera angles all work in tandem to escalate Annabelle from throwaway creepy doll to menacing demonic presence in mere minutes. It’s a great bookend to the Perrons’ haunting, and the true birthplace of the Conjuring universe.
It
Whether we’re talking the 1990 TV miniseries or the 2017 adaptation, take your pick; they both open the same way. After Bill makes his younger brother a paper boat while sick in bed, little Georgie takes it out into the rain for a test drive. When the rain carries the boat down into a storm drain, he finds Pennywise the Dancing Clown offering to retrieve it for him. The TV version isn’t nearly as bloody, but both have a terrifying pointy-toothed Pennywise and the demise of little Georgie. So, team Tim Curry or team Bill Skarsgard? Either way, we come out a winner with this fantastic opener.
Ghost Ship
It’s difficult to imagine anything that followed this scene could have lived up to the high bar that was set. Opening on a luxury cruise ship in 1962, wealthy passengers enjoy an elegant dance on the deck with music by an Italian lounge singer. Everyone is enjoying their evening, and there’s even a cute moment where a young girl accepts an offer to dance by the ship’s captain. This is the precise moment where an unseen person presses a lever that releases a wire trap. One moment everyone’s dancing and happy. The next they’re bisected with their guts spilling out. Gloriously gory and shocking, it remains an all-time best opening scene.
Suspiria
Dario Argento unleashes an onslaught of sensory overload in the opening minutes of beloved classic Suspiria. Unsuspecting Suzy Bannion arrives at the German dance academy late on a stormy night, while frightened student Pat flees. Both Pat and the audience know someone, or something, is after her. We just don’t know what. The vivid color scheming against Goblin’s frenzied score builds along with the tension, a supernatural mystery grabbing hold of the viewer and refusing to let go. Even after the opening scene ends with the brutal hanging of Pat.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
By 2004, the zombie apocalypse had become a bit formulaic and stale. We’d long been accustomed to the fall of civilization by way of zombie outbreak since George A. Romero broke the mold in 1968. This remake gets all that stuff out of the way in the opening scene, beginning with a subtle bite victim in a hospital to waking up the next morning with the world in flames. It’s fast and unrelenting. Also fast and unrelenting? The zombies. From the vicious death of Ana’s husband to his near-instant turn, Dawn of the Dead ushered in a faster, meaner brand of zombie.
Scream
So much can be said about Wes Craven’s film and its game-changing effect on horror, but we’re specifically talking opening scenes here. It doesn’t get much better than this one, either. An intense 13-minute standoff between teen Casey Becker and Ghostface killer is a master class in horror on its own merit. Clever writing, effective suspense, and quotable dialogue that pervaded pop culture since, it all culminated in one of horror’s most shocking deaths of all time. No one ever suspected that the character belonging to the film’s biggest star, Drew Barrymore, would die in the opening scene, let alone that she would be viciously disemboweled with her parents just seconds away.
Halloween
A continuous tracking shot that places the viewer in Michael Myers’ point of view as he walks through the Myers house, puts on a clown mask, get a knife, and then murders his post-coital older sister on Halloween night. It’s chilling in both its atmospheric dread and that it’s clear that this murderer is an emotionless killing machine. The opening scene ends with a shocking twist; the killer is just a child. Brilliantly shot and choreographed, John Carpenter sets the tone right out of the gate and establishes that this killer is someone to fear long before he set his sights on Laurie Strode. He really is the Boogeyman.
Jaws
Perhaps it’s no surprise that the film credited as the first ever blockbuster has a killer opening. By now it’s well documented that the mechanical shark “Bruce” malfunctioned to the point where director Steven Spielberg had to get creative. It worked in the film’s favor with Spielberg crafting sequences and shots that forces the audience to rely on their imagination, rendering a far more terrifying film with a mostly unseen apex predator lurking beneath the water’s surface. The opening scene exemplifies this, when a young woman sneaks away from a beach party to skinny dip. The underwater POV of the shark looking up at its prey treading water is powerful; the audience knows the woman is in danger long before she does. Even when the shark clamps down on the woman, we only see her body being thrashed about as she gurgles and screams for help. Alone and far from shore, no one hears her violent end. It’s pure horror.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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