10 Great opening title sequences

10 great title sequences

1. Psycho (1960). One of the landmark Saul Bass designs: jumpy, fragmented titles married to Bernard Herrmann’s hysteric strings have you nervously gripping the arms of your chair long before Hitchcock’s slasher classic has spilled a drop of blood.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). An ancestor to Juno’s opening titles, this delicately haunting sequence by Stephen O. Frankfurt uses the paraphernalia of childhood — marbles, crayons, a whistle, jacks — to evoke the world of the film’s five-year-old narrator.

3. The James Bond films (1962-2006). It just wouldn’t be a Bond flick without Maurice Binder’s signature swirling gun barrel and curtain of blood, backed by Monty Norman’s rumbling theme. The only Bond films without it are Never Say Never Again and the 1967 spoof of Casino Royale — neither of them part of the official 007 franchise.

4. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Pablo Ferro’s sly opening for Stanley Kubrick’s jet-black nuclear satire is one of the most sublime in screen history; it features footage of B-52 bombers refueling/fornicating to the romantic strains of Try a Little Tenderness. Freudian symbolism has never been so funny.

5. The Pink Panther films (1964-2006). Perhaps the most famous of cartoon credits sequences. The cool cat of the title was created by the DePatie-Freleng studio for the first entry in this long-lasting series of slapstick comedies. The Pink One proved so popular that he ended up living a double life outside the franchise, as the star of his own animated series.

6. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). I’ll take my spaghetti western with cheese. Iginio Lardani’s garish low-budget titles, which look like grainy wanted posters splattered with blood, are as deliciously lurid as Ennio Morricone’s famous wailing score.
7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Be careful whom you hire to do your opening title sequence. In the Pythons’ comedy classic, moose-obsessed Swedes hijack the foreign subtitles, then infiltrate the English credits; they are finally ousted and replaced by llama-obsessed Latin Americans.

8. Reservoir Dogs (1992). An opening sequence doesn’t have to be complex to be effective. Quentin Tarantino’s slo-mo intro to his seminal crime drama not only ID’s the ensemble cast, it also serves as a long, slow breather before the chaos of blood and profanity to follow.

9. Se7en (1995). Kyle Cooper’s chilling (and much imitated) sequence for David Fincher’s thriller takes Frankfurt’s To Kill a Mockingbird opening and gives it a sickening twist: the paraphernalia here is that of a methodical serial killer. Cooper adds flickering images on scratched film stock and an abrasive score by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to suggest the disturbed mind of a maniac.

10. Down with Love (2003). Animation couple Maximilian Graenitz and Jane Poole put viewers in a retro mood with their exuberant, Saul Bass-style titles for this romantic comedy — a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies of the early 1960s.