The Cold Open Is a Contract With the Audience

The Promise, Kept

Scream begins with a phone ringing. Casey Becker picks it up and for the first four pages she is playing a silly hang-up-pick-up game with a stranger on the line. It is fun. It is flirty. And then it turns creepy fast when the voice asks her name so he can know who he is looking at. What follows is an epic game of cat and mouse between Casey and a mysterious figure. Casey is trying to figure out who is on the other end and how to survive. The mysterious figure is playing with his victim before murdering her in cold blood.

As described above, this cold open is a microcosm of the larger film. Like Casey, the films heroine Sidney Prescott spends the story trying to figure out who is killing everyone before they kill her. But unlike Casey, Sidney survives. She turns the tables and stops the murdering duo in cold blood.

Although the whole film is subverting expectations and playing with the established tropes of the horror genre, the true twist came from casting Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker. Barrymore was originally set to play Sidney Prescott, but a scheduling conflict forced her to turn down the role. Instead, she asked about Casey. Drew Barrymore’s star was on the rise, and audiences went into the film never expecting someone of her caliber to be murdered so quickly. The message was clear in 1996. Anything can happen and anyone can die.

In Inglourious Basterds (2009), Col. Hans Landa visits a dairy farm in rural France. There, he slowly interrogates a farmer under suspicion of hiding a Jewish family. Throughout the cold open, we watch language become a weapon and we feel the power shifting from the farmer to Landa. Landa’s monologue about hawks and rats, his use of English to exploit the hiding family’s inability to understand the conversation, and the steady tightening of control all make the scene feel suffocating.

We see these same elements echoed later in the film, Shosanna dining with Landa years later or Lt. Aldo Raine’s poor Italian pronunciations, moments where language and performance decide who holds power. But like Scream, the ending is subverted. Tarantino uses a revisionist lens to create an alternate history where the hunted fight back and win. Instead of Landa succeeding again the way he does in the opening scene, the Inglourious Basterds get a satisfying revenge that feels originated from the very first act of the film.

Cold opens aren't about shock or spectacle. They're about clarity. They tell the audience what kind of story they have stepped into and what rules apply, even if those rules will later be broken. If your script feels unfocused, it may not be because the story is wrong, but because the promise is unclear. Writing a cold open forces you to articulate that promise. You may keep it. You may throw it away. But either way, you will understand your story better for having written it.