The 2020s have been an absolute banner decade for horror so far.<\/p>\n
The last six years have seen the genre go from strength to strength, not only as a commercial force to be reckoned with at the box office but also as a staple of general pop culture and at times even an industry awards darling.<\/p>\n
And because first impressions are basically everything, what is any great horror movie without an attention-grabbing opening scene, which immediately lets the audience know precisely what sort of ride they’re in for?<\/p>\n
A poor opening scene can lose the audience in record time, while a fantastic one can have them locked in from the jump, fully invested in the story and characters from that point forward.<\/p>\n
And of the 2020s to date, these are the 20 horror movie openings that few who’ve seen them will ever be able to forget.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Regardless of how the rest of the film turned out – and in some cases it sadly wasn’t pretty – these shocking, hilarious, and just terrifically crafted establishing scenes left one hell of a first impression…<\/p>\n
Zach Cregger’s genre debut Barbarian wastes not a second of the viewer’s time, kicking off with a most relatably creepy setup when protagonist Tess (Georgina Campbell) pulls up to her Detroit Airbnb in the middle of the night only to find a man, Keith (Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd), already inside.<\/p>\n
Keith claims that he also booked the Airbnb and they’re dealing with a double-booking situation, but of course, we as audience members are primed to be immediately suspicious and fear for Tess when she accepts Keith’s invitation to come inside.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It’s an elegantly simple yet brilliantly effective primer for the rest of the movie, Cregger pulling us all in one very clear narrative direction, only for – without spoiling too much – things to take a rather unexpected and grisly turn at the end of the first act.<\/p>\n
Yet without such a pointed but straightforward opening scene, that subsequent rug-pull wouldn’t be nearly as surprising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2020s have been an absolute banner decade for horror so far. The last six years have seen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-788974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}