10 Horror Movie Endings You Can No Longer See

Wes Craven's Scream franchise remains a bit of an oddity among horror films given that, for the majority of its tenure, the three central characters just kept surviving.

Sidney (Neve Campbell), Gail (Courteney Cox), and Dewey (David Arquette) kept making it out alive, while those around them weren't so lucky, yet this wasn't actually the original plan.

The script for the first Scream actually had Dewey die after being stabbed in the back by Ghostface in the third act, and this was indeed how Craven shot the film.

However, as an insurance policy, seemingly feeling that Dewey could be a breakout character, Craven shot an alternate closing scene in which Dewey is revealed to be alive and carted off into an ambulance in crowd-pleasing fashion.

Test audiences were originally shown the version in which Dewey died, yet when they expressed disappointment at his death, Craven was given the go-ahead to add the survival scene into the movie.

It's never been confirmed precisely how Dewey's death was dealt with in the original cut, but it's safe to say that it would've been referenced at the end of the movie, either through dialogue between Sidney and Gail or from seeing his corpse carted off.

Ironically, the opposite scenario happened on the most recent fifth film, where Dewey's demise finally came, yet the nervous studio instructed the filmmakers to shoot an extra alternate scene in which he survived - y'know, just in case it went down like a lead balloon.

In that case, though, they didn't need to break out the insurance policy.