It’s commonplace for any piece of media to try to hook you in, but killer horror openings are expected — often using several techniques:
- Option A: An opening kill
- Option B: A traumatic event that alters the protagonist psychologically… or the case of some of those cheaper 1980’s sequels…
- Option C: A rerun of the last five minutes of the previous entry.
Less definitive is whether these hooks come before or after the title sequence, which can sometimes serve as the hook themselves. The truth is that killer horror openings have a lot more nuance when one digs deep enough.
The Art of Giving Credit
Everyone deserves to receive their fair credit, but to display the names of real people and their roles involved in production over your film feels like inviting a certain disassociation from the story, like a puppeteer putting glitter on the strings to make sure even the kids in the back can see them. The line blurs between full immersion in the story and the fact you’re watching something manufactured.
Maybe they’re so commonplace audiences barely even register them, the visual equivalent of white noise. But because they’re accepted as standard, it’s like a free bit of runtime for the filmmaker to inject a particular feeling into the audience right off the bat.
Slow, Deliberate and Foreboding
The cycle of onscreen credits buys a bit of patience from an audience because the movie hasn’t properly begun yet. Today’s general public would not allow themselves to be entranced by the deliberate crawl in Ridley Scott’s Alien title sequence without the credits being present.
Taking a minimalist approach, Jerry Goldsmith’s calm, ambient score fits the endless nothing of space where the story takes place. There’s an unease to the peacefulness. Whatever the inverse of claustrophobia is, this is it. But what’s most unique here is the slow reveal of the title. “Alien” appears in small pieces at the top of the frame as the rest of the credits cycle through below. It lets the audience slip slowly into the dread instead of being plunged into it.
A filmmaker can use a title sequence as a tool. It can establish a mood (as Scott does with Alien) or advance its story.
What’s in the Box?!?!
David Fincher’s SE7EN opening does both. A director who cut his teeth on music videos shows it here with an unnerving edit of intense close-ups of serial killer John Doe in various activities. He develops photos, writes in his journal, and cuts his fingertips. It’s all set to a remix of Closer by Nine Inch Nails, an appropriate choice given the religious nature of the original version’s lyrics and the film’s own subject matter.
It might even be my favorite opening credits sequence ever.
Oddly enough, another one I could compare it to is Coraline. Mysterious metal fingers work meticulously on a doll with surgical tools, not too unlike embalming until it looks like the titular little girl. Like the movie itself, this process isn’t as innocent as it may seem.
Opening Title Cards
While there’s freedom for stylization in contemporary films, there used to be a clear divide between credits and the start. In old Hollywood, they’d put all of their credits before the film, leaving just a final “The End” as the runtime comes to a close. But even then — a horror staple like the original 1931 Dracula can feel appropriately eerie with its spiderwebbed bat design credits accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
There’s power in a movie announcing itself after an opening scene. Sometimes it’s comedic like when “Cabin in the Woods” appears with a sudden musical sting after some vague but generally normal conversation between innocuous office coworkers. On the other end of the spectrum is the droning descent post-Annabelle introduction as “The Conjuring” slowly fills the frame. But these are title reveals, not full sequences.
Storytelling During Open Sequences
Zack Snyder (who has one of the better expositional title sequences in his Watchmen adaptation) uses Dawn of the Dead’s opening credits to roll news footage illustrating global armageddon. Society has collapsed. There’s no hope.
Employment of journalistic reports is used even more effectively on a smaller scale in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A single news anchor delivers one disturbing piece of news after another via voice over. The stories paint a depressive hellscape. They’re read in conjunction with crackling, red-filtered images, instituting an overbearing swelter to the proceedings.
In regards to pure in-theater adrenaline’s opening titles, I think of Midsommar. With Ari Aster’s follow-up to the modern genre classic Hereditary, I was prepared to feel immensely uncomfortable in my seat. And sure enough, after a devastating tragedy for protagonist Dani (see option B in my first paragraph), the camera moves above her walls out into the snowfall outside with an expertly timed “A24 Presents.” It was ceremonial and confident, especially given the studio’s reputation. I was sick to my stomach and excited to see what was next.
Even Aster’s most vindictive opposition couldn’t claim he doesn’t have a distinct vision in his work. The same could be said for Tim Burton.
Sleepy Hollow’s opening credits sequence invites you into its aesthetic along with Ichabod Crane. Conscripted to investigate a series of murders in upstate New York, the credits roll over his carriage journey. The urban landscape gives way to ghastly countryside and the onscreen text materializes and disappears along with the fog.
Shamelessly silly transition here, but the opening credits for John Carpenter’s The Fog are more subtle. After a campfire ghost story, the town of Antonio Bay is introduced sans any of the film’s score (which is one of Carpenter’s best, by the way). It’s another example of the onscreen text giving necessary patience to a viewer. The final credit rolls a little after the 12-minute mark of a 90-minute movie. In that time, buildings shake and machinery malfunctions as anomalies occur across the sleepy town. It lays the groundwork that something is very wrong here without anything overly dramatic.
But it’s Carpenter’s earlier film that has one of the most famous title sequences in horror history.
Set, Setting and Atmospherics
Halloween’s slow roll toward the jack-o-lantern is one of the lasting bits of iconography from the series. Adapted in four of its sequels, it’s the closest horror comparison to Star Wars’ staple opening text crawl, albeit with crew names instead of galactic exposition.
I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the non-pumpkin opening that gets mentioned for the series: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. While Halloween III is an outlier in more ways than one, this was what it claimed to be – a return, not only to the main villain, but to Haddonfield, Illinois. And that’s what these opening images convey immediately – the Midwest in autumn.
Four years before Michael Myers returned, another horror icon was introduced in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Introducing Characters
Wes Craven wastes no time introducing Freddy Krueger, albeit in shadowy glimpses as he constructs his finger knives. Craven makes a distinct choice to relegate these images into a box at the top of the frame with the attributive text separated beneath it. But when Freddy puts this new glove on, its deadly significance is personified immediately; the box subsides, the title emerges, and the following picture fills the entire frame. The audience is enveloped into the nightmare with the series’ first doomed dreamer Tina. It’s another example of how opening credits can be a brief liberation of form from whatever the rest of the film.
Even standalone sequences without any live action footage can be designed to hint at themes, like the fractured, splitting text in Psycho. It can be a montage of visual gags, like in zombie comedies Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland. It can be a surreal glimpse into a character’s mind, like Mia Goth’s Pearl as she loses herself to a daydream.
Even something as straight-forward as the start of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas can be effective. Like Halloween 4, it places you in a distinct season. It’s a static image of the sorority house adorned with gleaming red and green lights, underscored with a choral rendition of Silent Night and a frigid winter wind. With an expectation of what’s to come, it’s chilling.
