A fast and funny opening that euphorically yodels its way through the set-up and dashes headlong at the cartoon qualities to come. By the time the credits come in, the road stretches ahead with the promise of a fun time.
2. Dawn of the Dead
– George A Romero, 1978)
Dropping directly from a restless sleep directly into nightmare, it’s as if Romero already assumes we know the set-up for zombies and goes headlong into the surreal and brutal.
3. Dawn of the Dead
Zack Snyder’s style is ideal for credit sequences as it often resembles pop-video aesthetic (‘Watchmen’ has an excellent credits sequence), and of course we’ve become used to the laughable qualities of this technique; but there was a time where this opening – which is measured until it unleashes its attack in unrestrained fashion – promised so much from him. The film lulls in the middle but ends on a high note by steering for an island seemingly occupied by the Italian genre strain of zombies. And the use of Johnny Cash’s ‘The Man Comes Around’ felt truly inspired at the time – but since then, of course, use of incongruous music in horror is the norm.
4. The Accidental Tourist
- Lawrence Kasdan, 1988
Which begins with Kathleen Turner telling William Hurt that she is leaving him, a scene that films usually lead up to. Such emotional resonance is not ordianarily achieved so quickly and quietly so soon – it sets the tone of grief instantaneously.
5. Dead Or Alive
- Takashi Miike, 1999
A bravura sequence of editing and outrage that counts itself in and then explodes breathlessly with a messy montage of sex, death, druges and food that leaves you so shell-shocked that you don’t quite realise the next burst of violence isn’t for about the next fifty minutes. A prime example of Miike’s “Fuck it” approach.
So much promise when this came along to reboot Bond with Daniel Craig, immediately squandered afterwards. But this pre-credits sequence is in black-and-white, brutal, no-nonsense. It offered a James Bond as a not-nice non-campy killer, which surely suited a post ‘Bourne’ taste. The following films fell into their own mythology and felt we had to visit Bond’s childhood, etc., but for one film, there was the promise of something a little more based in reality.
7. Cross My Heart And Hope To Die
- Marios Holst, 1994
This opening sequence is like the moment just before someone breaks in to a smile: patient, holding its cards close to its chest, and then…
8. Down By law
- Jim Jarmusch, 1986
In which Jarmusch sets up a scruffy, jazzy black-and-white vision of a shrug of a town in which moments of drama are happening between people… somewhere… Of course, it helps to have Tom Waits in person and on the soundtrack to cast a freewheeling, amused and slightly melancholic mood. It’s a mood that lasts the whole film.
9. The Hunger
- Tony Scott, 1983
The rest of the film loses itself quickly by mistaking Eighties artiness and pretty visuals for poignant abstraction, but the opening-as-music-video introduces Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as vampires as Bauhaus perform ‘Bela Legosi’s Dead’ and captures the Goth vibe perfectly.
10. Fanny and Alexander
- Ingmar Bergman, 1982
In Which Bergman portrays warm if dysfunctional family festivities before footnoting this with Death casually crossing a room without flinching in tone at all.
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