One of the very first things that comes to mind when you think of a Scream movie is its opening scene. Ever since the very first Scream came out in 1996, each film works hard to come up with something new, creative, and to subvert audience expectations in the opening pre-title card scene which often act as their own contained little shorts. Here are the best opening scenes, ranked from worst to best.
6. Scream 3 (2000)
The rankings of some of the scenes higher up on this list may generate some debate, but last place is as clear cut as a stab wound from Ghostface. The third Scream installment uses the opening scene to introduce some new elements, including a voice changer that, rather improbably, perfectly mimics other people’’s voices. It’s not only unrealistic but feels a bit like a cop-out in terms of storytelling. Even more importantly, the opening scene doesn’t feel meaningful or clever at all, featuring characters that no one really cares about, and doesn’t even have any fun cameos. Liev Schreiber’s death is technically connected to the story but has no real impact, and there is nothing memorable about this opening scene. Thankfully, this is the only bad scene on this list.
5. Scream 2 (1997)
The first Scream stood out in a number of ways, including how overtly referential it was in talking about and paying tribute to horror movies, but the sequel is when things started to get truly meta. The opening scene has Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith (two of the biggest black Hollywood actors at that time) going to the movie theatre to watch Stab, a movie based on the events of the first film. We get to watch parts of the movie-within-a-movie (featuring Heather Graham and Luke Wilson, and directed by Robert Rodriguez), and it’s not only fun to watch reenactments of the first movie, but also how a movie audience would react to it. This is the first mention of Stab, which would go on to play an important role in the rest of the franchise. Pinkett-Smith tries to outsmart the movie (like most of us think we can), but the movie’s message to her, and to us, is that we can’t escape its clutches.
4. Scream 4 (2011)
The opening scene in Scream 4 is a combination of the first three movies’ opening scenes. There is a phone call scene baked into a Stab movie, with plenty of discussion around other horror movies that were popular at that time, like Saw and Jigsaw, as well as references to Aliens, The Ring, and Twilight Zone. It’s definitely a snapshot of a moment in time, when landlines were being phased out, social media and Facebook were booming, and there’s talk of being Punk’d. Structurally, it is a series of gotchas that feel like it’s written by J Walter Weatherman: it’s a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie, and freshening up the formula by adding another girl in the house (featuring Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell, Aimee Teegarden and Britt Robertson). It can feel a little extra (especially compared to the pared down alternate) though that is the point: some of the characters talk about how cliched and played out the Scream opening scenes are by now, but Wes Craven proves they are anything but.
3. Scream 6 (2023)
Radio Silence continues the tradition of updating the opening scene to match the times, in giving scream queen (get it?) Samara Weaving the role of film professor Laura Crane meeting someone from a dating app for the first time. Her date calls her, claiming that he can’t find the restaurant, and over the course of a short conversation about horror films, she finds herself in an alleyway (the rest of the film continues its concerted effort to use the New York setting as much as it can). The biggest twist, though, is that after she gets killed in the alleyway, instead of the expected smash cut to the title card, Ghostface pulls off his mask to reveal Tony Revolori – the first time the killer has been unmasked and revealed to the audience in the opening scene. As if that isn’t enough, we follow him back to his college apartment, where he gets a phone call… from another Ghostface killer – the one that ends up being the actual villain of the film.
2. Scream 5 (2022)
It can be increasingly hard to construct an effective phone call scene when landlines are irrelevant and no one picks up phone calls anymore. After the huge lengths that Scream 4 went to to play with audience expectations, Director duo Radio Silence went back to the basics in picking up the franchise from Wes Craven. They essentially recreated the opening scene from the very first movie, with Jenna Ortega cementing her reputation as the current generation’s undisputed scream queen, only this time her knowledge is about A24 genre films like The Witch, The Babadook, and Hereditary. Ortega is alone at home, and all the tension comes from her being on a phone call (with a few new technological updates). In a lot of ways this is the darkest opening scene since the first one, cutting out the meta references and eye-winking in-jokes. It also brings in some fresh stuff as this is the first opening scene where no one dies. As an added bonus, this one also spawned some of the best letterboxd reviews.
1. Scream (1996)
The best opening scene in the Scream franchise is still its first – the original, the iconic phone call. It’s possibly the first thing you think about with Scream, the one that’s inspired countless parodies. The story is famous by now – originally slated to play the main character of Sidney Prescott, Drew Barrymore was the most well-known of the actors in the film and was marketed as the star. Those first 13 minutes of the film are casually terrifying, exceedingly violent, and the epitome of suspense, and is a reminder of how incredibly difficult quality phone acting is. It’s a perfectly constructed scene, from the pacing, the camera movements, the set design, the score – every detail is perfect. The magical part is that it retains its fist-clenching shock factor even though you know what is going to happen upon the nth rewatch. This scene set the tone for the rest of the movie (and indeed the franchise), putting the audience on notice that anything could happen, and that no one is safe.