Skip to main content

The best kills in Scream 6, ranked

The premiere of Scream 6 has brought back tons of familiar faces, with Gale Weathers carrying on the torch from the original trilogy, Kirby returning from Scream 4, and the survivors of 2022’s Scream all together again … this time in New York City. But, as the franchise continues, so does its shock factor. In the trailer alone we saw Ghostface wielding a shotgun and plowing down an entire bodega, making it clear from the start that the movie is more extreme than ever before.

But, surprisingly, the movie’s kill count isn’t that high. Unlike the new Halloween trilogy, where Michael Myers chops up 20 to 30 people (or more) per movie, Scream 6 took the franchise back to its roots, where it’s not about how many people are killed, but more about how suspenseful and terrifying those kills are. Read on to find out what Scream 6‘s best kills are, but beware … this article contains spoilers.

5. Anika (Devyn Nekoda)

Sam and her boyfriend hold out a ladder for their friends.
Paramount Pictures

One of the most brutal deaths in Scream 6 was Anika, the girlfriend of Scream 5 survivor, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown). While Brown wasn’t that compelling in the last movie, she really perfected her character in Scream 6 and did a great job, which only made it more difficult to watch her and her new girlfriend get attacked. Early in the film, the survivors all camp out with Tara (Jenna Ortega) in her apartment. Sadly, Ghostface is already there, hiding in the bathroom. The first to get stabbed is Anika, who gets a pretty severe jab to her abdomen.

Being a classic NYC apartment, one of the bedroom windows is only about 7 feet away from the next apartment … but they’re also six stories up, so they need to use a ladder to climb across to the other side.

Knowing she’s likely been mortally wounded, Anika crosses the ladder last, letting everyone else escape. By the time Anika gets on the ladder, Ghostface isn’t far behind her, and as she tries to climb across, the killer starts shaking and bouncing the ladder. Paralyzed with fear, Anika holds on as best she can, but after Ghostface tilts the ladder, she slips off, falling and crushing her head on the side of a dumpster as she smashes into the alley below.

It’s an absolutely brutal kill, and it’s also one of the most emotional. Anika sacrificing herself so the others could live is the kind of maturity you don’t often see in horror movies these days, making it even more painful and heartbreaking to watch her die.

4. Ethan (Jack Champion)

Ethan arrives on campus and discovers a murder has happened in Scream 6.
Paramount Pictures

“I’ve always wanted to stick something inside you” is the gross and misogynistic line Ethan says to Tara as he tries to stab her. The cute, nerdy, naïve Ethan turns out to be one of the killers at the end of the film and his boyish charm instantly fades once his secret is revealed. Unfortunately for Ethan, he’s the one who’s about to get something stuck inside him … as Tara thrusts a knife straight into his open mouth.

As she turns the knife, Ethan chokes on his own blood and it seeps out of his mouth, dripping down his chin. It’s a gory and intense kill, but considering how much Tara and her sister have been through, and the number of people Ethan has killed by this point, it’s also oddly satisfying to watch him get what he deserves.

3. The Bodega Guy

Sam and Tara hide behind a shelf in a bodega in Scream 6.
Paramount Pictures

The wildest scene in the whole movie actually comes relatively early on, when Ghostface chases Tara and her sister into a crowded bodega. After Ghostface stabs a man, the shop owner pulls out a shotgun, but misses, and is ultimately stabbed as well, before the killer takes the gun and shoots him.

The scene is absolutely bizarre and, under normal circumstances, would feel totally out of touch with the Scream movies. But Scream 6‘s tagline says, “New City, New Rules”, letting us know that these new killers aren’t going to follow the old ’90s tropes. Somehow, the scene works and fits in with the movie’s vibe, though, with America’s mass shooting epidemic, something about the bodega scene does feel a little too real and hits a little too close to home, making it terrifying in a whole different way.

2. Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox)

Gale Weathers answers her phone in her apartment in Scream 6.
Paramount Pictures

Fortunately, Gale Weathers got the death scene she deserved. She played it smart, she was strong, and she didn’t go down without a fight. Unfortunately, two killers had snuck into her penthouse apartment, and when you’re 50 stories up, you don’t exactly have many places to run. But Gale didn’t go down easily. She used everything she could to fight back, including a gun, a cast iron skillet, and even a vase.

Because of her legacy status with the franchise, emotions run high during the scene because you want her to survive so badly, but after seeing what happened to David Arquette in the last film, you also know that nobody is safe anymore. Gale ends up getting stabbed multiple times and, despite fighting back as hard as she could, she ends up collapsing and seemingly dies.

By the time the medics arrive, she seems all but dead. Luckily, they find she still has a weak pulse. Though Gale didn’t technically die, this was certainly a kill scene because fans thought she had died. Its suspense and chase also made it one of the best scenes in the whole movie.

1. Jason Carvey (Tony Revolori)

Jason receives a phone call from the killer in Scream 6.
Paramount Pictures

Scream 6 continued with Scream 5‘s tradition of not including a Stab-based opening scene. Instead, it focuses on a film studies professor (Samara Weaving) who is lured into a blind date by one of her students, Jason, who wants to kill her because he’s desperate to revive the Stab franchise.

After he murders her, he takes off his mask and goes back to his apartment where he chats with his friend on the phone about how great it felt to murder someone. Immediately, he’s unlikable. First off, nobody wants to see the killer at the start of the film. Secondly, he has the demeanor of an over-privileged man-baby. And lastly, he doesn’t even deliver his lines that well. To have this be our killer in Scream 6 would have been an absolute disaster. Luckily, the guy he’s talking to on the phone isn’t actually his friend, a fact Jason quickly finds out when he discovers his dismembered body has been stuffed in the fridge.

When Ghostface reveals himself, there’s a massive sense of relief. Finally, we have a killer who is in control, smart, and hates Jason as much as the audience does. It’s horrible to say this, but watching Tony get stabbed to death felt good. For a brief moment, it seemed like Scream 6 was going to be an awful movie with an immature douchebag of a killer. Luckily, Scream did what Scream always does and subverted expectations, executing the scene flawlessly and revealing the movie’s first major twist right off the bat.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Keith Langston
Keith Langston has been obsessed with entertainment ever since he was a kid. He fully believes The Faculty and Deep Blue Sea…
The Night of the 12th is one of 2023’s best movies
Two men look back in The Night of the 12th.

The Night of the 12th (2022) | Trailer | Dominik Moll

2023 has been a year like no other for movies, and in this instance, that's a good thing. The COVID nightmare years of 2020 and most of 2021 seem to be finally left in the past, and a diverse slate of movies have been released that have captured the public's attention. From the horror-comedy pleasures of M3GAN to the animated romp The Super Mario Bros. Movie to the phenomenon known as Barbenheimer, there's been no shortage of cinematic offerings to watch and write about.

Read more
Why The Dark Knight is still the best comic book movie of all time
The Joker and Batman sit across from one another at a table.

Let's travel back to 2008 and revisit pop culture, shall we? The most popular TV show in the country was American Idol. Studio comedies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall could still gross over $100 million at the box office. Plus, superhero fatigue did not exist, which is the perfect segue into our conversation about the best comic book movie of all time, The Dark Knight.

Fifteen years ago today, The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's highly-anticipated sequel to Batman Begins, hit theaters in the U.S. For a film billed as the event of the summer, The Dark Knight managed to exceed expectations and change the entire industry. A comic book movie centered around a caped crusader and a villain wearing clown makeup forced the Academy to nominate more films for Best Picture. This is the same Academy that somehow awarded Crash Best Picture. Yet, it bent the knee to a Batman movie.

Read more
Why the first Mission: Impossible movie is still the best one
A man looks out from the shadows in Mission: Impossible.

Everyone loves the Mission: Impossible movies. There are a variety of reasons why: they offer old-fashioned cinematic thrills; they are a form of escapism akin to the James Bond movies, but tougher and more American; they feature one of the last truly great movie stars, Tom Cruise. Ever since the fourth installment, Ghost Protocol, resurrected the genre from pop culture oblivion, the conventional wisdom is that the modern M: I films just keep getting better and better, and are the series' best entries.

Well, nuts to that. I'm not going to defend the much-maligned M: I 2, which doesn't really deserve reconsideration (seriously, what's with all those doves?), but the original Mission: Impossible, in my eyes, is perfection, and hasn't been topped by any other M: I film ... or any action movie, for that matter. The peak of '90s Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, Mission: Impossible delivers two cinematic giants, Cruise and director Brian De Palma, at the height of their powers, and is perhaps the most fun mainstream movie Hollywood ever produced. Here are just a few reasons why the original M: I still holds up today.
The opening titles
Mission: Impossible (1996) Opening Title Sequence

Read more