10 Horror Movie Villains Killed By Characters Nobody Expected
Nobody saw the deaths of these evil characters coming.
Most horror movies, at their core, follow a very simple formula.
There's a brave hero; there's an evil monster; they fight; the baddie gets the upper hand; the goodie overcomes the odds and slays the beast. Although, increasingly, the monster destroys the hero, because horror filmmakers love nothing more than to depress their audiences.
This template has served tellers of scary stories for hundreds of years, but as with every set of rules, there's fun to be had in breaking them. Horror stories will sometimes go in a completely different direction, giving the big kill to someone totally out of leftfield with no prior warning.
This is often done to surprise the audience, who have become used to the standard tropes of horror cinema. Just ask anyone who saw any of the following ten films, who were thrown a curveball when the bad guys were killed off by highly unexpected candidates.
It's a big risk to take this path, as it can sometimes disrupt the flow of the narrative or provide an unsatisfying ending, but, for the most part, these ten flicks all pulled it off with aplomb.
10. Amber Freeman - Scream (2022)
After 11 long years on the shelf, the Scream franchise made its glorious return with a movie called… Scream. Because that’s not confusing at all.
Scream 2022 let loose the latest incarnation of Ghostface to terrorise characters old and new, with some of that classic series intrigue surrounding their identity. Similar to the original movie, it’s revealed that there are two killers at play, Richie Kirsch (Jack Quaid) and Amber Freeman (Mikey Madison), who are obsessed with the Stab movies, the in-universe parodies of the Scream films.
Richie is killed by Sam Carpenter, a new character who is revealed to be the daughter of Billy Loomis, whilst Amber is shot by Gale Weathers, which causes her to fall onto a stove and catch fire. That’ll teach her to kill Dewey.
However, in a proper bait-and-switch moment, Amber, who survived being burnt, rises up to attack our heroes, only to be shot in the head from off-camera. The shooter? Tara Carpenter, played by Jenna Ortega, who gets a decent amount of screen time, but is no by means a main character.
Don’t mess with Wednesday Addams. Especially when she has a gun.