Any good movie needs to capture the attention of its audience as quickly as possible, and that is especially important with horror films. The first few minutes set the tone of what horrible things await the viewer if they can manage to survive the opening. There are few that are as iconic as the beginning of Steve Beck’s Ghost Ship, a 2002 release about maritime mass murder that underwhelmed at the box office, but has remained an evergreen internet video that always finds it way to sneak into the algorithm while often titled “Best Opening Scene In A Horror Movie Ever.” I remember my first time seeing it in college on a beat-up VHS rental, with my roommate telling me “You won’t believe this,” and he wasn’t wrong.
The movie is a forgettable 90 minutes that sinks as soon as it gets going, and neither critics nor audiences were willing to throw it a life jacket while it limped in the open sea against much better movies that October. The nightmarish opening minutes, however, stay with viewers years after they watch it and has become legendary to many fans of the genre. Some would call it ridiculous or over the top, but most say that is what makes it so great. It’s an epic and unexpected moment that comes with nearly no warning, and is almost guaranteed to shock a first-time viewer who has no idea what’s about to unravel.
Ghost Ship begins in the past — 1962 to be specific— on board an Italian ocean liner named the Antonia Graza taking a group of vacationers out to sea for a lovely time. There’s dancing on the main deck, with a live singer serenading the dozens of happy cruisers all gently waltzing to the ebbs and flow of the swaying sea beneath them. Suddenly, a mysterious hand of a yet unknown passenger pulls a lever, causing a metal cable to tighten across the ship and suddenly snap. The music stops and the dance floor freezes as the camera slowly reveals that metal cable has sliced anything four-feet above the floor in half.
Limbs are cleaved straight through, torsos are dropping, and nearly every lucky human that was kissed by that steel rigging is now dead. The unlucky ones are still writhing on the floor in agony beside their missing arms and legs. The only survivor, a young girl named Katie who was just the right height for the cable to miss her, screams as she sees the field of cadavers around her, and realizes the captain who held her in his arms was chopped in two right in front of her.
By the end of the scene, there was nearly as much blood flowing on the deck of that ship as there was water in the ocean. It’s a massive tonal shift that jumps instantly from the delightful ambience of smiles and champagne into guts and blood that transforms it into the opening scene for Saving Private Ryan. But it wasn’t just the gore that made this so impactful. It was the emotion of seeing every person on that ship cut down within seconds by a faceless killer with no prejudice, and the tense uneasiness as the victims and audience simultaneously come to the same gruesome realization of what just happened. To top it off, that poor little girl who narrowly avoided execution is now alone on the ship, surrounded by the dead and the trauma inside her mind.
Ghost Ship’s opening is a triumph for those reasons, but it’s also a movie marvel regarding how they put this wild scene together. People get drawn and quartered in plenty of other horror movies (it even happened in one of Beck’s previous films, Thirteen Ghosts), but the unimaginable scale of this scene is what really makes it special.
While not as shocking as the opening scene, one of the biggest behind the scenes surprises of it was how much of it was done with practical effects and not with computer-generated imagery. Actual actors were employed using a false floor, allowing them to continue to perform despite missing their lower halves. Piles of prosthetic limbs and over 80 corpses were made to fill the ship with physical bodies, and crimson liquid was bought in bulk to make sure the vessel was dripping from bow to stern with blood. The creative team behind the effects on Ghost Ship purposefully chose to use less CGI because they wanted something raw and authentic, which they felt was more shocking than something a viewer could quickly identify as being artificial. It’s funny how a well-placed mannequin can make something like this feel more visceral than a highly-rendered digital body, but the proof is in the (blood) pudding.
Digital effects were still used, especially for certain shots of body parts sliding off their owners. The poor captain who was cut off at the mouth did have a prosthetic version of his half-head made, but the scene showing his top-half make its exit was made with the help of computers. The two types of effects went hand in hand, as the digital VFX team often relied on scanning the physical casts to help make their 3-D models more realistic. These techniques helped the movie’s opening scene age like a fine, keeping it shocking and relevant over 20 years after it was made.
Do you remember the first time you saw the opening scene for Ghost Ship? How did you react, and can you think of other horror movies that have start the film in an equally shocking way? Let us know in the comments.
