As a stripped-down version of the Twentieth Century Fox theme plays, a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show begins. “And God said, Let there be lips!” And there were lips: red lips, white teeth, black background. An androgynous voice sings “Science fiction, double feature.” Between verses, the lips freeze in black and white before fading into a cross above a church.

Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) begins like a Gothic horror movie. With towering trees and a heaping dose of fog, Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto convey a sense of haunting with their very first images. These touches evoke Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films of the 1960s like House of Usher (1960) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) which were exaggerated and experimental but precise due to their small budgets. Demme got his start making films for Corman (who has a small…

“They say if you want to tell a story right, you gotta start at the beginning,” chirps the titular heroine in the opening moments of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. 

“If you have ever eaten a turkey drumstick, caged a canary or gone duck hunting, The Birds will give you something to think about,” drawled the voice of Alfred Hitchcock. It was 1962 and this was a radio advertisement for the film, a clever spot designed to intrigue and titillate audiences while implicating them in the director’s latest horrific tale. 

“Too much blood. And I can see your gaunch!” says Brigitte, annoyed. Ginger, her body impaled on a white picket fence, sticky red blood sprayed across her middle, gives us the finger. “Just do it,” she says. Brigitte brings a 35mm camera to her eye and snaps the photo. An entire world in microcosm.

Perhaps no other living director has done as much for the art of the title sequence as David Fincher. The filmmaker’s work inarguably helped kickstart the title design renaissance of the 1990s, a revival that the medium still enjoys to this day.