Editorial Staff
(SPOILER ALERT)
As Scream VI prepares to slay all comers on digital, we look at the franchise’s finest kills. From drawing first blood with Drew Barrymore to Melissa Barrera making her final kill, we pick 12 of the bloody best. Beware there will be SPOILERS.
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Casey Becker played by Drew Barrymore: Scream (1996)
“Do you like scary movies?”
The moment it all began. The first murder in Wes Craven’s classic slasher played with audience expectations and had fanboys screaming in the aisles. In the iconic opener, Drew Barrymore, as Casey Becker, picked up the phone and had a chat with a stranger about her favourite scary movies name dropping Freddie Kreuger and the guy in the white mask who walks around and stalks babysitters. The savage pop quiz that ensues sees her boyfriend dead and, after she gets a Friday the 13th question wrong, her bloody demise. The rest is history, or Becker was history as she is repeatedly stabbed by her masked assailant, ruining her cream sweater in the process. In one pre-credit sequence, Craven announced that there was a new killer and town and that no one, no matter how famous, was safe.
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Anika Kayoko playing Devyn Nekoda: Scream VI (2023)
“Are you fucking kidding me!”
Attempting to flee their NYC apartment and escape from the Ghostface killer after they have killed two people and sliced their way into Anika’s stomach, Sam (Barrera) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) along with the wounded Anika lock themselves into a bedroom. And the only way out is through a window. Luckily their “hot neighbour” has a slightly wobbly plan and passes a ladder between the two apartments as a makeshift bridge so they can clamber to safety. Unfortunately, they are not on the first floor so it’s a long way down. Sam slowly but tentatively crosses successfully followed by Mindy who Anika forces to go first. Then a terrified Anika makes her escape but with Ghostface violently shaking the ladder, Mindy’s panicked girlfriend loses her balance and plummets to the alley below, her head crunching against a dumpster with a sickening thud before her limp lifeless body crashes to the ground. A distraught Mindy screaming as the tragic events unfold.
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Tatum Riley played by Rose McGowan: Scream (1996)
“What movie is this from? I Spit on Your Garage”
Deputy Dewey’s sarcastic sister and Sidney Prescott’s sassy BFF, Tatum meets her end at a killer party celebrating their school’s closure. In the garage to get some beers she is confronted by Ghostface and puts up a brave fight but when she struggles to escape by squeezing through a dog flap in the garage door, the slasher simply presses the doors remote control and she is hoisted up to her death, head crushed on impact and her legs twitching as sparks fly. Thanks to the MPAA, this murder was one of the gruesome moments that was trimmed to ensure the film got an “R” rating.
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Dewey Riley played by David Arquette: Scream (2022)
“Ghostface is back. Don’t come to Woodsboro. Hope all is well.”
It was only a matter of time before one of the “Legacy” cast shuffled off this mortal coil. And it was almost inevitable that it would be Dewey in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillettin’s brutal “requel.” The beloved character gets a death worthy of his character. In a typically selfless act, he saves the lives of Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) and Richie (Jack Quaid) when at the local hospital with Sam (Barrera). When Sam, Tara and Richie escape, the Woodsboro cop is killed when he attempts to finish off Ghostface but is distracted by an incoming call from Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). His demise packs a surprisingly emotional punch. After being brutally sliced in the back and stomach, and before the final devasting thrust of the knife, the killer utters, “It’s an honour.”
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Wes Hicks played by Dylan Minnette: Scream (2022)
“No one cares about the shitty, inferior sequels, Wes. You’re safe.”
Waiting for a pizza delivery so he can spend quality time with his police officer mum, Wes Hicks’s savage murder is a masterclass in sustained tension. Wes’s police officer mother Judy receives a typically referential call from Ghostface in which he cites Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and threatens to kill her son in the shower. She is killed before she can get through her front door to save him. Her son doesn’t fare better on the other side of the door as he is brutally stabbed in his neck in excruciating slow and graphic detail with Ghostface killer’s blade. It is a gut-wrenching pay-off to three minutes of sustained terror.
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Principal Himbry played by Henry Winkler: Scream (1996)
“They found Principal Himbry dead. He was gutted and hung from the goal post on the football field.”
Nobody kills The Fonz! Unless you are Ghostface killer. The death of Woodsboro High’s authority figure, Principal Himbry, proved that being murdered wasn’t, you know, just for kids. The arrogant teacher who showed absolute contempt for the job and even less for his students in his care. The then unknown murderer brutally stabs the principal to death in his office. Winkler told Movieweb, “As he was stabbing me, Wes, in his professorial way, came up and he said, ‘Do you think it might be more excruciating? Do you think being stabbed you would scream a little louder?’ I said I could do that. Then, because I had tubes going up my clothes, coming out my shirt, out of my chest, they filled it back up [with fake blood], and then I screamed much louder.”
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Amber Freeman played by Mikey Madison: Scream (2022)
“I still prefer The Babadook.”
In a franchise that has delighted in butchering its young cast in a gloriously gory fashion, the death of Amber Freeman, one of the two Ghostface killers wreaking havoc in Woodsboro in the Scream “requel,” was a particularly shocking case of overkill but the die-hard fan of the Stab series had proven herself to be a particularly venomous adversary. Her death is certainly over-the-top. First Sidney and Gale smash her over the head with bottles and then a kettle. Then she was stabbed and shot before getting set alight by a lit stove and left to burn to death. After she jolts back to life for one final jump scare, she is shot in the head.
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Jill Roberts played by Emma Roberts: Scream IV (2011)
“You forgot the first rule of remakes, Jill. Don’t fuck with the original!”
Fuelled by an unhinged hatred for her cousin Sidney Prescott and an insane desire to start a clickbait frenzy on social media, Jill Roberts confronts Sidney and Gale but is no match for the legacy stars. After a fracas in Sidney’s hospital room that ends with Sidney on the floor bleeding and Jill holding a gun, the tables are turned when Gale interrupts proceedings and Jill is shocked in the head by a high voltage defibrillator and shot at point-blank range. It’s a brutal send-off but then Roberts proves herself to be unrelenting as the Ghostface killer. As a finale of Wes Craven’s final Scream film, it’s savage in its execution as the two legacy stars kick ass.
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Maureen (Jada Pinkett Smith): Scream 2 (1997)
“Bitch, hang up the phone and star-69 his ass!”
“I want to die the most horrific death that has ever happened in a horror film,” Jada Pinkett Smith told People TV, “I want it to be long and excruciating.’ Wes Craven was all too happy to oblige. Ever since Drew Barrymore met her bloody end in the first Scream, the opening pre-credit sequences have become iconic. The beginning of Scream 2 is no exception. Set in a cinema screening film-within-a-film Stab, starring Heather Graham, Ghostface sits next to Maureen in the seat vacated by her boyfriend (Omar Sepps), who has been stabbed though a toilet cubicle wall, and punctures her gut with a hunting blade. Profusely bleeding, she staggers up to the screen and pleads for help from the audience, many wearing Ghostface masks. As the killer stabs her repeatedly, she screams and falls to the floor in front of the shocked audience.
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Stu Macher played by Matthew Lillard: Scream (1996)
“I’m feeling a bit woozy here.”
Having revealed themselves to be the joint killers, Stu and Billy repeatedly slash each other with a kitchen knife to cover their tracks when the police arrive. Their murderous plan interrupted by Gale who holds them at gunpoint, until they overpower her. During the skirmish, Sidney escapes and threatens them by phone before a weakening Stu, rapidly losing blood, tries to overpower her. She bites his hand and smashes him with a flower vase before crushing his head with a falling television and electrocuting him. Fans of Wes Craven’s other killer franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street, will remember a death by TV moment in the third instalment, Dream Warriors.
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Olivia Morris played by Marielle Jaffe: Scream 4 (2011)
“Spare me the lecture! You’ve done very well by all this bloodshed, haven’t you?”
As Sidney, Kirby (Hayden Panettiere) and Jill—before she has revealed herself to be one of the killers— look on helplessly from over the road, Ghostface slashes Olivia’s hand before gutting her on her bed and smashing her torso through the bedroom window for all to see in a pay-off that recalls Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso aka Deep Red (1975). When Sidney finally arrives in Olivia’s bedroom it looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, the bedroom walls splattered red with blood and the poor victim laying on her bed, her disembowelled guts oozing over her doona. It’s one of the most graphic kills of the whole franchise, proving, if we ever needed it, that director Craven had guts.
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Cici Cooper played by Sarah Michelle Gellar: Scream 2 (1997)
“Why do you always answer a question with a question?”
What do you do when you cast one of the hottest actors on the planet in your sequel? Kill her off naturally. And that’s exactly what writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven did when they cast Sarah Michelle Gellar. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer star played the feisty Omega Beta Zeta sorority sister who is brutally slain while on sober sister duty sitting on her own watching Nosferatu (1922) on the television. After some sassy phone banter and a rousing game of cat and mouse around the house, Cici is stabbed in the back as she runs up the stairs and is finally thrown off the balcony and crashes down onto the floor below.
–David Michael Brown
