Sickening scene voted most shocking start to a horror movie in history

Horror film fans aren’t easily shocked, it has to be said, but one film has many agreeing it has the most shocking opening.

When it comes to horror films, those that come to mind are classics like Scream, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street.

However, according to ranker.com, none of these films were the top choice for horror fans when it came to decide the horror film with the most shocking opening.

This one film starts off gruesomely and well, it only goes up... or down from there I suppose.

One noughties film's opening scene has been voted as the most shocking. (Warner Bros.)

And it is all because the opening opens with a very memorable and gore-filled opening and was ranked as the most shocking horror opening on ranker.com.

This is 2002's Ghost Ship, with a cast including Karl Urban of Lord of the Rings and The Boys fame. The film follows a crew of marine salvagers as they comb through a haunted ship which has gone adrift in the Bering Straight.

Haunting stuff indeed.

However, it's not the actual salvage and inevitable supernatural encounters on the ship that make it stick out, but the opening.

This opening shows how one moment can be filmed in incredible detail in a movie. Take a look:

At the start of the film, we join a group of people dancing on a ship in the 1960s and everyone is having a great time - this can't possibly end well, right?

Sure enough, while everyone is right in the swing of things a wire cable snaps.

There's a moment as it whips through the entire crowd, taking the heads of a bunch of flowers first, leaving us with the sight of the cable covered in blood.

The movie seems frozen in time as the horrified guests contemplate what happened. Then, one by one they start to literally fall apart after the wire bisects them.

Ghost Ship follows a crew of marine salvagers as they comb through a haunted ship. (Warner Bros)

Limbs drop off, top halves separate from bottom halves. Only a little girl survives, and that's because she wasn't tall enough to be hit by the wire.

The idea is pretty horrifying in itself, but the way it's done and the effects it shows, definitely crosses over into the camper side of horror as well.

Something that is so over the top that it is almost too ridiculous to be actually scary.

However, no matter how you feel about it, thinking its brilliant or terrible, I think most people can agree it is certainly memorable.

Topics: Film and TV, Horror

Gerrard Kaonga

Gerrard is a Journalist at UNILAD and has dived headfirst into covering everything from breaking global stories to trending entertainment news. He has a bachelors in English Literature from Brunel University and has written across a number of different national and international publications. Most notably the Financial Times, Daily Express, Evening Standard and Newsweek.