The 5 Best Opening Scenes (& 5 Best Endings) Of Horror Movies

Horror movies need to grab the viewers with a scary hook and leave them haunted at the end. From Scream to Psycho, here’s the best of the genre.

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Opening scenes of horror movies are tricky to pull off because they have to introduce the characters, hook viewers into the story, and establish the terror of the movie. The masterfully slow-paced first act of Alien gives the audience time to get to know the characters before bringing the facehugger into the mix.

Endings of horror movies are even trickier to pull off as the audience has to be satisfied by the conclusion of the story. But if everything is wrapped up in a neat bow, they have nothing left to fear. As a result, a lot of horror movies end ambiguously, which has worked more effectively in some cases than others.

10 Opening Scene: Scream

Wes Craven perfectly establishes his self-aware slasher Scream in its opening scene, in which Drew Barrymore is home alone late at night and gets a call from a masked killer who’s going to murder her boyfriend if she can’t answer his horror movie trivia questions.

There’s a meta layer to the scene, but meta-ness notwithstanding, Scream’s opening murder is suitably terrifying. The Ghostface killer instantly became an icon.

9 Ending: Night Of The Living Dead

Some of the best horror movie endings have a bitter irony attached to them. After defying the odds to survive the onslaught of the undead in the basement of the farmhouse, Ben hears sirens and comes upstairs to join the posse that’s tearing through America’s zombie population.

However, he’s mistaken for a zombie and shot dead. They toss his body on a burning pile of corpses and move along. This ending also hauntingly feeds into the movie’s commentary about racial tensions in the U.S..

8 Opening Scene: 28 Weeks Later

The opening scene of 28 Weeks Later, the loosely-connected sequel to 28 Days Later, is more terrifying and exciting than the whole rest of the movie.

It’s a visceral vignette detailing the backstory of Robert Carlyle’s character, Don, who left all the survivors he was holed up with to die while he fled a horde of zombies and narrowly escaped on a boat.

7 Ending: The Silence Of The Lambs

By the end of The Silence of the Lambs, the only horror movie (and one of the only movies, period) to win Oscars in all five major categories, Clarice has brought Buffalo Bill to justice and is being hailed by the FBI as a hero.

But along the way, Hannibal escaped. He calls Clarice from Bimini to tell her he’s “having an old friend for dinner.” Then, he starts following an unsuspecting Dr. Chilton. There’s something wonderfully unnerving about an ending where the villain gets away.

6 Opening Scene: Suspiria

The opening minutes of Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria set the stage perfectly for the director’s operatic vision. Young, bright-eyed Suzy arrives at the prestigious Tanz Dance Akademie and immediately encounters a student named Pat fleeing the school in terror.

Pat hides out at a friend’s apartment, where she’s promptly butchered by an unseen paranormal entity. Argento starts loading the audience up on nightmare fuel from the offset.

5 Ending: Psycho

The final twist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho reveals that Mrs. Bates is a mummified corpse in the basement, so she couldn’t have committed the murders, at which point Norman appears in the doorway, disguised as his mother, carrying a kitchen knife.

This is followed by one of the most unsettling final scenes (well, technically second-to-last) in movie history. After the detectives explain that Norman killed his mother and then recreated her as a second personality so she could live on, Norman stares blankly into the camera as the “Mother” personality blames Norman alone for the killings in voiceover narration. Hitchcock then cuts to the alarming image of Marion’s car being recovered from the swamp, incriminating Norman.

4 Opening Scene: Halloween

John Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween movie set the template for the modern slasher and its opening scene is one of the genre’s best. Set on Halloween night in 1963, the scene shows a masked killer’s point-of-view as he breaks into a suburban home and stabs a teenager to death. So far, pretty standard horror fare.

But then, the mask is removed and it’s revealed that the killer is a six-year-old boy in a clown costume: Michael Myers. It’s one of the best villain introductions ever, not just in the horror genre.

3 Ending: The Shining

Stanley Kubrick felt that if the audience could make complete sense out of his movies, he failed as a filmmaker. 40 years later, moviegoers haven’t quite managed to crack the exact meaning of The Shining, but they keep coming back and trying to figure it out.

In the deliciously ambiguous final moments of Kubrick’s horror opus, the camera closes in on a framed photo from an Overlook ball in 1921, with Jack standing front and center.

2 Opening Scene: Jaws

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is the perfect example of “less is more.” The first-ever summer blockbuster revolves around a 25-foot great white shark devouring the residents of a quaint seaside town, but that shark only appears on-screen for about four minutes in the whole movie. Spielberg learned all the right lessons from Hitchcock in his direction of Jaws.

In the opening scene, the shark makes itself ominously known without actually appearing on-screen. The underwater point-of-view shots and John Williams’ tense, iconic score tell the audience everything they need to know. Chrissie gets pulled underwater by something.

1 Ending: Rosemary’s Baby

Like fellow Ira Levin mystery The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby ends with the inevitable shocking reveal we saw coming from a mile away but didn’t want to believe could be true. Rosemary is pinned down by her husband’s Satan-worshipping cult as she gives birth to the Antichrist.

In the final scene, the whole cult is gathered around Satan’s baby, lying in a cradle. Rosemary spits in Guy’s face when the cultists urge her to raise the child, but when she hears the baby crying, she gently rocks the cradle. What makes the scene work so well is that we don’t see the baby. We only hear it, so to any moviegoer, the unique mental image created by those sounds is what the baby looks like. It’s one of the most unnerving movie endings of all time.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-horror-movie-beginning-final-scenes-ranked/