While Scream is one of the best horror movie franchises in history, it works just as well as a mystery. What separates Scream from other slasher movie series like Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that we’re also trying to figure out who the killer is.
That’s a big part of the fun of watching a Scream movie. Although the killer reveal is a big deal, there are plenty of great surprises in each installment of the franchise. Sometimes it’s an unexpected character death, sometimes it’s indeed the Ghostface reveal, and in some cases, it’s the way Scream turns famous tropes on their heads.
Tara Survives The Opening Scene – Scream (2022)
By the time 2022’s Scream was released, everyone know the formula of the franchise. Made famous in the original entry, the opening scene of Scream typically featured a notable actor who gets killed off after receiving a phone call from Ghostface.
When Scream opened with Jenna Ortega, fresh off of starring in Wednesday, everyone believed she was going to get murdered. The scene played out in traditional scary fashion, culminating in her getting stabbed in the stomach. It looked like she was a goner.
However, the movie surprised everyone by revealing that Ortega’s Tara actually survived the assault. This put a twist on what everyone had come to expect from the opening scene of a Scream film. This also wasn’t just a stunt either, as Tara ended up becoming a pivotal character in her two appearances.
Jill Is Ghostface – Scream 4 (2011)
More often than not, people tend to forget about how good Scream 4 is. The film was released a decade after the original trilogy and about a decade before the later requel movies, meaning it gets lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame because it actually features the best Ghostface in Scream history.
That Ghostface pulls off one of the franchise’s most grisly murders and when we get the reveal, it’s pretty shocking. The film seemingly set up Jill Roberts, Sidney’s niece, as the new final girl, who would replace Sidney in future installments and be the new main hero.
So it was a shock when they pulled the rug out from under the audience by revealing Jill as the killer. She was doing all this so she could become famous like Sidney and she came closer to actually winning in the end than any other Ghostface.
Roman Is Sidney’s Brother – Scream 3 (2000)
As fun as it is, Scream 3 was a bit messy and put the franchise on the shelf for over a decade. The film features some convoluted aspects, yet it also never takes itself too seriously, which is one of its strongest selling points.
The biggest twist in the movie came near the end and the fact that Roman was Ghostface isn’t even the shock we’re talking about. The director of Stab 3, which was “filmed” during the events of Scream 3, revealed himself to be Sidney’s half-brother, born out of a sexual assault against their mother.
While you might’ve seen Roman as Ghostface coming, finding out the truth about his background wasn’t easy to predict. The film goes even further, ultimately revealing that Roman pulled the strings in the previous two movies, showing Billy Loomis footage of his father’s affair, which led to Billy’s killing spree in the original Scream.
The opening scene of Scream is iconic and the two sequels delivered more of the same. It never reached the levels of that first film again but they delivered quality scares and featured a character dying. When Scream 4 began in the same fashion, you’d probably expect that the film would just play the hits again.
Thankfully, Scream 4 didn’t go that route and delivered twist upon twist with its opening scene. Two teen girls get the traditional phone call from Ghostface and are killed, only to reveal that they are characters in one of the Stab movies. We then see two women watching the film until one stabs the other.
That’s also revealed to be part of a Stab film, leading us to another scene of two young girls who get stalked by Ghostface, this time for real. It let us know that Scream 4 was going to maintain the meta qualities of the earlier movies and never let you rest or think you knew what was coming.
Randy Is Killed – Scream 2 (1997)
For the most part, Scream knows which characters to kill off and who needs to survive. The core group of Sidney, Gale, and Dewey seemed untouchable until Dewey died in the fifth film. The survivors of the first movie seemed safe as well when Scream 2 rolled around but we were wrong.
Randy Meeks was a key part of the first film because, as a horror movie lover, he understood the “rules” that someone needed to follow to survive. His knowledge in these situations made him someone who seemed like he wasn’t ever going to be murdered. Yet, Scream 2 kills him off in brutal fashion.
Randy’s death felt like it came from out of nowhere and it again subverted expectations. His death meant that, at least on the surface, nobody was safe and any character you grew to like was a potential victim. Moments like these are what help separate Scream from almost every other horror franchise.
Jill Turns On Charlie – Scream 4 (2011)
As noted, the reveal that Jill was Ghostface in Scream 4 is a pretty great surprise but it’s not as good as what happens shortly after. To this point in the franchise, the killers had worked in pairs, outside of Roman in Scream 3. So when Jill explained that Charlie was her partner, nobody saw her turning on him.
They talked about pulling off what Billy and Stu did, stabbing each other to make them seem more like victims. However, Jill fatally stabbed Charlie, explaining that she’d become much more famous and notorious if she were the sole survivor of these attacks.
This betrayal turned the expected ending sequence on its head and proved how far Jill was willing to go to get what she wanted. The fact that she followed this up by harming herself to really sell the image was the shocking cherry on top.
Billy & Stu Are The Killers – Scream (1996)
Sometimes it’s hard to top the original. With 1996’s Scream, we didn’t know what to expect. Once that opening scene ended, it felt like all bets were off. The reveal of the killer was still something the audience was wondering about, yet nobody expected it to be Billy Loomis.
The movie had even removed Billy as a suspect when he was accused earlier and was said to be innocent when the killer attacked while he was in custody. Seeing him pull out the gun was shocking but the even better twist is when Stu showed up, letting us know there were two killers.
It was perfectly done because it explained how Billy was behind it and how the killer was still seen while he was behind bars. Also, nobody went into that movie expecting the murders to be a tandem, again showing how Scream is never quite what you think it is.
Amber’s Ghostface Reveal – Scream (2022)
2022’s Scream is actually filled with surprising moments. Tara’s aforementioned survival is one of them, while the murder of Dewey is another. However, it’s the reveal of Amber as one of the killers that is the film’s best moment.
As the film’s main group of characters reconvene following a Ghostface attack, Amber pulls out a gun and point-blank shoots Liv in the head. It’s a moment you never see coming and it’s so sudden that it rattles the viewer to their core.
Amber is working together with Richie as the killers but the reveal of him being part of it isn’t all that surprising. Amber’s connection to him and the startling way she takes Liv out, basically mid-sentence, makes for a truly great twist and surprise.
Casey Becker’s Death – Scream (1996)
Scream started with a bang and never looked back. The first film in the series began with Drew Barrymore’s character, Casey Becker, taking a phone call that starts innocently enough, only to turn sinister when the person on the other line gets more aggressive with his line of questioning.
The tension gets built up so well as we find out that the caller is a killer who begins to stalk Casey. The audience was fully engaged in this scene, yet blown away when the killer pops up and actually succeeds in murdering Casey. Barrymore was all over the advertising and was the film’s biggest star at the time.
Everyone figured Barrymore would be the final girl who the story was centered around, so seeing her die so mercilessly in the opening 15 or so minutes is stunning. These days, we’ve come to expect this from Scream but when it first came out, this changed the slasher genre and set the tone for the franchise.
