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.
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
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