Scariest Opening Sequences of All Time

I was talking to a friend about being scared of certain things on television as a child. Sometimes things that are meant to be perfectly innocent yet still have you hiding behind the sofa.

As a very young child I remember being terrified of this:



Understandable I think - it has all the charm of those infamous Protect & Survive Public Information Films from the 1970s.

Are there any opening sequences that sent a shiver down your spine as a child?

Not an opening sequence of sort, but the 1991 BBC Video ident always used to scare me when putting a VHS on as a child - it's that awful tune! Bit of a sombre introduction for an episode of Postman Pat.

More of a closing sequence for me, and if you left the tape running to the very end...

I remember that one - it was on a Watch With Mother VHS tape (would have been used from 1981 to 1988 I think, before being replaced by the COW globe). I wonder why the striped lettering didn't match the BBC1 and 2 logos from that time?

TThey re-did the music for that ident a couple of times I think as well. One was a synth version of that tune, another was a totally different piece of music.

This one always had me running for bed as a child!

Nah I never had this thing about being scared by idents or logos. And I had many tapes with that 90s BBC logo on it.

True to form though, the logos on tapes would interest me just as much if not more than the actual programme on the tape itself. I have at least one tape where I wore out the bit where the logo animated on.

I stop by this thread just to mention that this is the best BBC Video logo though.

For me there were a couple which seemed scary when it was paired with hard hitting content:

World in action
https://youtu.be/l4LCieQ7UiM

Panorama
https://youtu.be/MKb80AsWSt0

I didn't have a aversion to all hard hitting current affairs....one I used to love the theme to was Thames TV's this week:
https://youtu.be/Fai3186jPfc

Unsolved Mysteries for me.

Near enough the same but with an alternate theme, I believe this is a later variant:


I think there was about four or so variants of these over the years before they dropped it for the globe effect posted above.

The titles to the Equalizer scared me

I don't have any schedules to prove it, but pretty sure that sometime around the mid 1990s, after 'The Crystal Maze' finished on Channel 4, THIS horrifying thing would follow.



I'd usually be in bed soon after which would make it even more nightmarish.