Scream 6 has been released in theaters and is providing audiences with another great entry in the infamous slasher franchise. While many fans are falling in love with the newer cast of characters and the fresh setting for the franchise in New York City, others are marveling at some of the particularly brutal kills that the movie has included.
While there are a variety of great scenes based in New York that utilizes the city well, there are a number of scenes where key characters manage to escape Ghostface by the skin of their teeth as well. Nevertheless, Ghostface got a fair share of murders this time around, and it is difficult to choose a favorite.
9 Gale’s Boyfriend
A completely unnamed character who is known as much for having muscles as anything else, this character is Gale Weathers’ new beau in the movie and is taken out by Ghostface while the killer attempts to hunt Gale.
A completely irrelevant kill in the overall movie, Gale doesn’t seem overly shaken by the loss herself. Meaning that members of the audience were never going to connect to him either. Fortunately, there were many victims with more emotional investment attached throughout the rest of Scream 6.
8 Dr. Stone
Sam’s physiatrist was another character who didn’t particularly endear himself to the audience. Sam’s frankness in her session with him at the beginning of Scream 6 was a fairly comedic moment, the ridiculousness of her situation punctuated by the fear that he felt being alone with her.
A short while later, Ghostface pays a visit to Dr. Stone and kills him before stealing Sam’s file. This was all in an attempt to make it look like Sam was the real killer behind both the murders in 2022’s Scream and the fresh ones occurring in New York. None of it was particularly emotional for the audience, though, with the scene being relatively low on the excitement factor.
7 Jason Carvey
Toni Revolori was a fascinating choice for a Scream character, particularly the first-ever Ghostface killer to be unmasked in the opening act of a Scream movie. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t the only one trying to engage in new killings and was quickly taken out after his opening kill by the Ghostface killers that Scream 6 focused on.
Taking a fairly traditional route after unmasking himself to becoming an opening scene victim in a Scream movie, Jason Carvey arrives home and gets a phone call. Mistaking the killer for his friend and accomplice Greg, before finding Greg cut up in the fridge and getting taken out himself, Jason provided a great opening gambit for the movie to do something unique before getting taken out, but his death wasn’t overly sad either.
6 Quinn Bailey
The trio of Ghostface killers in Scream 6 doesn't make for particularly emotional deaths for the audience to watch. However, Quinn Bailey gets the unique pleasure of having had two death scenes in one movie. Her first “death” was sudden and meant for shock value as Ghostface invaded the apartment Sam and Tara shared with Quinn.
However, this was a fake death, so suspicion couldn’t fall on Quinn. She was later revealed as a killer alongside her brother and father. Her real death was equally sudden, as Sam shot her in the head before confronting her father in the Ghostface mask tribute cinema. Quinn was an interesting character but unfortunately didn’t get to be the focus of either of her own death scenes.
5 Ethan Landry
Suspicion for Ethan being the killer was there from the get-go, as Mindy questioned him being Chad’s conveniently awkward roommate. Ethan was revealed in the finale to be Quinn and Richie’s brother and Wayne’s son and one of the three killers in Scream 6. While he also died in the finale, it was in a more fun throwback way than his sister.
Ethan was taken out of the fight when Tara stabbed him brutally, but he managed to come back at the very end, as Scream killers often do. Fortunately, Kirby was there to take him out once and for all by pushing the TV, which killed Stu Macher onto him. Again, this death wasn’t particularly sad for the audience, but it was a great throwback and a solid ending for a character that everyone suspected from the beginning.
4 Laura Crane
Samara Weaving is a great scream queen in her own right, with appearances in movies like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, and Monster Trucks. This made her an excellent choice for the Scream franchise’s traditional “notable actor who dies first” trope. This stretches back to when Drew Barrymore was assumed to be the lead in the original Scream. In this case, Laura Crane was a film studies professor specializing in slashers, and she was the first to die in a very New York City style.
Namely, Laura was called by Jason Carvey, who pretended to be her blind date. Lured out of the restaurant she was waiting in, Laura was then tricked into entering a dark alleyway and was killed by Ghostface there. This was a great opening scene which had the added value of the audience being unsure if Laura would really die, given Tara’s survival in the opening scene of Scream 2022.
3 Wayne Bailey
Dermot Mulroney’s veteran detective character was a great reveal as the mastermind behind the current killings in Scream 6. The further surprise that he and his children were all related to Richie from Scream 2022 was a major shock. However, Wayne’s death was also one of the most impressive in the movie.
After his children are picked off by Tara and Sam in the fight at the Ghostface cinema, Wayne awakens and is called by Sam. Wearing her father’s Ghostface mask and using the voice changer on the phone, Sam lured Wayne out and brutally stabbed him to death. Not only did this further tease the darkness that Sam had been dealing with all movie, but it was also a cathartic moment for the Carpenter sisters, as they ended the family of their original tormentor in Richie.
2 The Bodega Scene
Brutality was promised in the trailers and promotional material for Scream 6. While the stakes of the movie may have been lowered slightly by a refusal to kill off many significant characters, there were some moments when the brutal promise of the film was truly fulfilled. In the scene where Sam and Tara first confront the new Ghostface, they are chased by the killer into a bodega.
There, audiences could safely assume, with four or five people around, that the sisters would find refuge. But even the city could not protect them here, and Ghostface would run in, murder everybody in the store and chase them with a shotgun in one of the most exhilarating scenes in the franchise. This itself was a great step in evolving slasher movies, which the Scream movies have always sought to do.
1 Anika Kayoko
The biggest loss in the movie, and possibly the greatest scene in Scream 6, was when Mindy’s new girlfriend, Anika, was taken out by Ghostface. After invading Tara and Sam’s apartment and causing huge confusion among the inhabitants, Ghostface trapped some of the cast in a bedroom, and they only had one avenue of escape.
That was to use a ladder to climb across the alley into the apartment of Sam’s new love interest, Danny. Unfortunately, after Sam and Mindy made it across, Anika fell victim to Ghostface and was thrown from the ladder to death on the street below. Definitely the most emotional loss of Scream 6, and one of the most brutal kills to boot since she’d already been stabbed before falling, Anika will go down as a lovable, if short-lived character.
Scream 6 was released in cinemas on March 10th, 2023.