10 Horror Movie Deaths That Could've Been WAY Better
These deaths had so much potential.
Even terrible horror movies can skirt by if they can manage to pull off a few imaginative, fun, or just basically gory death scenes.
A few well thought-out cinematic deaths can make the gore-hounds forgive a whole lot of terrible writing, flat direction, and hokey acting. So, it's always a massive letdown when films screw up death scenes which are clearly filled with so much potential, due to the execution just being totally off in one way or another.
And that, sadly, is the case with each of the following ten horror movie deaths, which fell way short of the mark and in turn left audiences lamenting how they could've quite easily been way better.
From death scenes that didn't quite make sense logically, to those that failed to deliver the technical goods, and a few that bafflingly took place off-screen, these deaths could've been immeasurably improved with a few simple tweaks.
While there are likely reasons that things turned out as they did - making movies is damn difficult, after all - these scenes nevertheless left most hugely underwhelmed and wondering quite what went wrong...
10. Dewey Riley - Scream (2022)
In theory, Dewey's (David Arquette) brutal demise in the fifth Scream could've been an all-timer moment for the slasher franchise, which up to this point had allowed its three central characters - Dewey, Sidney (Neve Campbell), and Gale (Courteney Cox) - to emerge unscathed each and every time.
Dewey's death at the end of Scream 2022's second act was certainly inherently shocking, yet also left many fans underwhelmed by its ultimately lackluster execution (pardon the pun).
The problem? The scene requires Dewey to act with uncharacteristic stupidity, neglecting to shoot Ghostface in the head at the hospital and so deciding to go back to finish the job, at which point the killer manages to get the drop on him and gut the fan favourite hero.
Yet there was a ripe opportunity here to do something far more interesting and surprising. What if, when Dewey went back and aimed his gun at the fallen Ghostface, he was then attacked from behind and killed by the second Ghostface?
This would've intriguingly subverted expectations by revealing the presence of a second killer early - rather than in the third act as usual - and made Dewey's death feel a little less dopey, given the more unpredictable element of surprise involved.