What is the importance of an opening sequence?

An opening sequence is extremely important to the success of a film. It establishes the genre and mood of the film just by an introduction to the setting. An opening sequence allows the audience to make quick assumptions and predictions based upon the genre and their previous knowledge of what lies within the particular genre. For example, the genre that we as a group have chosen is horror therefore, the audience would expect to be scared. The horror genre entails victims and some sort of villain, which can fall into the sub-genres of slasher or psychological, depending on what sort of villain it may be.

An opening sequence looks at the main characters which allows the audience to be introduced to them and make judgements on who they are and what role they will play within the film.Character analysis can be used to look at the characters that have been introduced and establish the plot based upon this.  The final girl theory applies to this, sometimes the audience can distinguish who will take on this role from the very opening scene which allows them to make predictions for the remainder of the film. This allows the film to engage the audience from the beginning and encourage them to make a positive assumption of the remainder of the film.

An example of this is The Woman in Black which engages the audience and allows them to make predictions on the remainder of the film just based upon the first scene. The innocence of the adolescent girls emphasises the horror aspect that we be a continuation throughout the film. The horror is introduced due to the unnatural nature and actions of these girls, it allows the audience to engage early on and want to discover what led them to do what they did and how the remainder of the story will unfold. The audience becomes intrigued and it hooks them and allows them to continue watching the film in order to further their opinion and expectations.