re: Greatest Opening Scene of a Movie

I'm going to throw in Snyder's 2004 "Dawn of the Dead." I'm guessing most people recognize the brilliance of the credits scenes with "When the Man Comes Around" as a perfect and counter-intuitive accompaniment, but the entire opening sequence before that is an underrated example of how to set the tone through emphasis of certain color saturations, camera angles, and well-done cuts. If you went into this movie completely ignorant of what you were about to watch -- no title, no genre, nothing -- you'd realize even before the zombie girl appeared that something deeply unsettling lurked at the very edge of the normalcy of being at work and coming come to domesticity. Until the girl, there's nothing explicitly horrifying (except for that skull x-ray to open, I guess, but there was a good reason for that to exist) but there's a slowly-developing sense of dread in how Snyder chose to shoot and score it.