20 Best Kills In The Scream Franchise - Ranked

C'mon - you knew who would be #1, because there's no competing with the death scene that instantly put Scream on the map.

Casey Becker's (Drew Barrymore) death at the start of the first film is absolute perfection.

For starters, we've got the whole drawn-out phone call with Ghostface himself, leading up to the reveal that Casey's boyfriend Steve (Kevin Patrick Walls) is tied up on the patio. Ghostface then forces Casey to take part in a trivia game, and after she gets a trick question wrong, Ghostface promptly guts Steve, before turning his attention to Casey.

Casey certainly puts up a solid fight, but is ultimately caught and stabbed to death before she can reach her arriving-home parents. They get to hear her final moments over the phone before heading back outside and finding her disembowelled corpse hanging from a tree.

This sequence is just magnificent in every fiber of its being, from the instantly iconic "Do you like scary movies?" to the clever bait-and-switch of killing off the film's most famous actress right away.

It sets a mood of intense unpredictability from the very beginning, and impressively the rest of the film actually lives up to it.