4 Great Character Introductions in Film

You’ve got a great film hero and you’re just dying to make audiences fall in love with the character. How do you make that happen effectively? Introducing a character is no easy task, but it helps that there are dozens of examples of great introductions in film.

The best character introductions have a few things in common. They are efficiently shot, with nothing in the frame going to waste. They tell the audience the essentials about the character, usually without a lot of dialogue. And they get viewers invested not only in the character, but the film as a whole.

The list below is by no means comprehensive, but it represents what comes to my mind when I think of great character introductions. This being a purely subjective list, it is tinted heavily by my love of pop culture. That said, I do think that each of them stand out as great moments in cinema.

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Hannibal Lecter versus the Incredible Hulk

Guest commentary by former Marvel Comics’ president Bill Jemas.
REAL guest commentary by Charlie being an asshole and making fun of former Marvel Comics’ president Bill Jemas.

This fight features two of the greatest characters of all time. In one corner, we have Hannibal Lecter, the most terrifying fictional character of all time, be it in the trilogy of Thomas Harris novels, Thomas Mann’s film Manhunter, or his absolutely amazing depictions by Anthony Hopkins. Not even Ridley Scott (a director I despise more than George Lucas…well, maybe not that much) could stop Hannibal from being an incredibly interesting, downright frightening, and yet somehow very charming individual. Going against him will be my favorite comic book character of all time and the one character who seems to find a place in almost everything that I write…the Incredible Hulk. Victim to a massive bombardment of gamma radiation, Doctor Robert Bruce Banner (changed to David Banner in the old 80s TV series because the creators were homophobes) now finds himself transformed in times of stress into the dark personifcation of his repressed rage and…of screw it, if you don’t know that spiel by now, you obviously need to go back and read one of my previous Hulk fights. Or the stories that I write that reference the Hulk. Or my Hulk music videos. Hulk is the artsiest one there is.

Hannibal the Vampire

This was going to be a rant on how much I hate the Twilight franchise, but you know what? That’s been done to death. There is a pretty well-established divide between people who find Stephanie Meyer’s writing and the franchise it has spawned to be utter drivel and those who have an almost rabid loyalty to all things related to sparkling vampires. So instead of ranting about things I hate, I decided to refocus my energy toward things I like. Specifically, the vampire myth and Hannibal Lecter.

My assertion is simple: in a modern-day world where the vampire myth has been done to death in spin-offs and variants, one of the best parallels we have to classic stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and John Polidori’s The Vampyre is the gentlemanly serial killer Hannibal Lecter, originally created by Thomas Harris and aptly played on the screen by Anthony Hopkins.

Vampires have been a prevalent myth throughout human history and have popped up in a variety of cultures. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll be focusing on them in their most widely-known form, largely defined by Bram Stoker’s classic piece. These vampires appear human, but are actually monstrous creatures that feed on the blood of the living. They are associated with death and decay, and represent the prevalent fear that much of humanity has that death and disease can not only kill someone, but can change them into a monster.