First Cuts: Ranking the ‘Scream’ Franchise Cold Opens
Outside of some exceptions, every great slasher film features a killer cold open. That first scene that sets the stage for the blood, mayhem and terror to come. Think Jason Voorhees enacting vengeance on Alice in the beginning of Friday the 13th Part 2. Or the stabbing of Michael Myers’ sister in Halloween. But if there’s any franchise that has made a living in clever, shocking, outright terrifying cold opens, it’s the Scream series.
Director Wes Craven and scribe Kevin Williamson presented Scream in 1996 as a commentary on the state of horror. It immediately hooked fans through its use of genre nods and rewriting of tropes that had become deader than Matthew Lillard‘s character, Stu Macher (he’s dead, I’m sorry). As a result, audiences came to expect unique cold opens from each Scream film that went beyond a simple kill. And for thirty years, the franchise has delivered.
Below, you’ll find my ranking of the Scream cold opens.
Let’s hope that, if nothing else, Scream 7 continues the tradition of surprising opening scenes that leave fans screaming.
6. Scream 3
Due to scheduling conflicts, Ehren Kruger took over writing duties for Kevin Williamson, and it shows. No offense to the talented writer behind The Ring adaptation and Top Gun: Maverick, but Kruger wasn’t quite up to the call on this one.
We pick up with Cotton (Liev Schreiber) on the way home from his new talk show, “100% Cotton”. He gets a call from Ghostface, at first pretending to be a female fan, before revealing their true intentions: to locate Sidney (Neve Campbell). Meanwhile, they’ve broken into Cotton’s home and are stalking his girlfriend.
This cold open captures the horrors of LA traffic, but doesn’t manage to elicit much terror beyond that. Through the in-universe adaptation of events, Stab, Scream 2 poked fun at Hollywood’s insistence on featuring women showering in scary movies. Here, Ghostface stalks Cotton’s girlfriend in the shower without any sense of commentary on the eye-rolling trope. There’s some fun trickery through the introduction of a voice changer that can copy anyone’s vocals—including Cotton’s—but all in all, this is by far the dullest of the cold opens that audiences have become used to with Scream.
5. Scream (2022)
The fifth chapter of Scream marked the first time that Wes Craven would not be behind the camera. Stepping into his shoes were Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (aka, Radio Silence). Whatever you think of the film overall, I’d say they did Craven proud with the cold open.
In it, we meet Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), home alone and cooking some dinner. She gets a call from a man claiming to be a friend of her mother’s before revealing the Ghostface of it all.
While not as clever as others on this list, the filmmakers manage to recapture a bit of that terror from the original. They play on that classic Drew Barrymore scene, with Tara now caught in the middle of a horror trivia game…only this time, it’s about the Stab franchise based on her own hometown. We’re also introduced to technological “advancements” that play to the killer’s favor, such as hacking electronic locks and video calls. All with a fun flavor of added commentary on the next generation’s preference for “elevated horror” (hate that label) over the slashers of old.
Fun fact: this is the only cold open in Scream to not feature a single death.
4. Scream 4
Just when we thought Scream 3 had taken the “film within a film” concept to its furthest extent, the franchise proved us all wrong once again with the cold open for Scream 4.
This time, we watch a pair of teens discuss a Facebook stalker before meeting the knife of Ghostface. Turns out, that was just the opening scene of a Stab film, watched by Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell. Paquin goes off on a hate-o-rade tangent regarding horror films before Bell gives her something worth complaining about. But wait, there’s more! Because that was actually another Stab film opening, watched by a pair of teens, one of whom is over the whole meta thing.
The clever cold open gives us a film within a film within a film, surprising the audience while commenting on the absurdity that long-running horror franchises eventually fall into. Because of the nature of it, it also happens to be the funniest of the cold opens. Unfortunately, that detracts from the terror, as this opening is more clever than it is scary. And with so little time to build the two teens about to meet their end, their deaths come off as much less impactful than others on this list. Still, the scene carries on the tradition of brilliant Scream openings that doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon based on the next entry in this list.
3. Scream VI
I’m not a huge fan of Scream VI, but I am obsessed with this cold open.
Film studies teacher Laura Crane (Samara Weaving) waits for a blind date. Said date calls, saying he’s lost. She follows his directions out to an alley, where he reveals himself to be Ghostface in a brutal alleyway slashing. Typical Scream opening, right? Wrong. Because once ole Ghostface utters a one-liner and slashes at the camera—where we’d usually cut to the title—the scene keeps going. The killer takes off his mask. Walks home. And then finds himself the target of another Ghostface.
It’s no easy task to continue to throw such astonishing curveballs at the fans six films in, but Scream VI manages it with ease through this surprising cold open. It does what the best sequels do and builds off fan expectations, only to rip the rug out from under us. We also get an eerie sort of behind the scenes look at how Ghostface operates as we see our temporary villain, Jason (Tony Revolori) have a friendly interaction with Tara. Just when we think the filmmakers have given away the game early, Jason meets his own end. It’s clever. It’s fun. And it proves that with the right talent in place, the Scream franchise still has plenty of juice.
2. Scream (1996)
As they say, a true classic never goes out of style! Inspired by the likes of When a Stranger Calls and Black Christmas, a psychotic caller wasn’t anything new when Scream first arrived. But, with the invention of the cell phone, Kevin Williamson flipped the script and introduced a killer that could be calling from your front porch. That’s the original part, as Ghostface so sadistically explains to a terrified Drew Barrymore. Liver-alone, man!
I’ll never forget experiencing this opening scene late one night as a kid. The flashing of the title mixed with the sound of screaming and a phone ringing. Roger Jackson’s menacing voice. The theme of horror fandom gone too far. The gut-wrenching death of one of America’s sweethearts at the time, Drew Barrymore’s character, in a Psycho-esque twisting of the knife. It was fresh. It was exciting. And it felt like Wes Craven going back to his roots with something visceral and dangerous and utterly terrifying.
1. Scream 2
Scream 2 had a tough act to follow, but it delivered and then some, especially in the cold open.
We land at a special screening of Stab, the film based on the events of Scream as described in Gale Weathers’ (Courteney Cox) book. Maureen (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Phil (Omar Epps) arrive on a date. The former proclaims disgust by yet another horror film about a bunch of dumb white women that dismisses Black actors. She’s right to want to see a Meg Ryan movie instead, though not for the reasons she lays out.
There’s a whole lot going on in this genius opening. For one, it’s a stark commentary on the blurry line between real-life horror and fiction. Expressing that is the film’s loving tribute to William Castle and the way he projected his movies into the real world through the use of clever gimmicks. More than half the audience dresses in Ghostface costumes. A Ghostface prop soars over the auditorium. We even discover that the film is being presented in “Stab-O-Vision”. Stab itself reflects the way in which the stories of victims are not only cheapened for entertainment, but also how the killers become the famous icons. A studio would cast Heather Graham in the Drew Barrymore role of Casey and have her strip for a good old-fashioned shower scene.
Yet what allows this cold open to reach a shocking power only matched by the first film is the commentary on how horror has treated Black actors. Ghostface slices at Maureen in the midst of a cheering audience. Despite her own cries and splashes of blood, no one in the theater does a damn thing to stop it. Between the horror of a crowd cheering on the death of a Black woman and Pinkett Smith’s gutting wail, I’d argue it’s one of the most powerful cold opens in the genre.
How would you rank the Scream cold opens? Let us know in the comments below! And don’t miss Scream 7 when it hits theaters on February 27th.
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