10 Times You Totally Thought Horror Movie Characters Were Dead (But They Weren't)
2. Tara Carpenter - Scream
The recent fifth Scream film opens with a thoroughly entertaining homage to Wes Craven's original, with an opening "kill" mimicking the iconic opening death of Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker in the first film.
This time the victim is Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), who similarly engages in some playful phone banter with Ghostface before things turn ugly and she's attacked.
Tara puts up one hell of a fight but suffers severe injuries, including a broken leg and being stabbed seven times, and the sequence then concludes with Ghostface performing an apparently fatal slash to a helpless Tara.
Even though we don't see the life-ending slash, given that Jenna Ortega wasn't featured in any other scenes in the movie's marketing, there wasn't any reason to be suspicious - she was dead as dead, surely.
Except, a single scene later we learn that Tara in fact survived her encounter with Ghostface, and is now in the hospital recuperating from her extensive injuries.
Better yet, Tara ends up playing a major role in the rest of the movie alongside her sister Sam (Melissa Barrera), and in addition to surviving to the end, even gets to shoot one of the killers, Amber (Mikey Madison), dead.