Every Scream Ghostface Killer, Ranked

Scream 7 gives us our first truly atrocious and ridiculous Ghostface in Ethan Embry’s Marco. This random man who works at a mental hospital is—for some literally unexplained reason—running around killing people as Ghostface, and is also inexplicably a former Google employee with mastery in AI deepfakes, thus responsible for the Stu Macher FaceTimes we had been seeing throughout the film. We have no idea why he’s doing anything he’s doing, and he may just be the single worst character in the entire franchise. Honestly, I didn’t even realize he had a name.

There are no photos of Karl Gibbs, the first revealed Ghostface in Scream 7, because he’s hardly a character. He is an escaped mental institution patient and a convicted triple murderer. He is also quite literally not a character in the slightest—but that still makes more sense than “Marco.”

The motivation behind Jessica Bowden, Scream 7‘s lead Ghostface, is thin and strange. She was emboldened to kill her abusive husband after reading Sidney’s book, and got away with it… and then was upset that Sidney was (possibly) able to move past her trauma, and decided to create more for her? It’s a bizarre motivation… but Camp has a lot of fun with the role post-reveal, and gives one of the movie’s best performances. The writing for this character could be way better, but she also gets one of the best deaths on this list as well, taking the “You’ve got to shoot them in the head” rule to a hilarious extreme.

Jason gets a pretty gruesome (and petty) kill in in Scream VI‘s opening scene… and then gets taken out by one of the movie’s real Ghostfaces not long after. Maybe in an alternate Scream universe, there’s a world where Jason and his buddy Greg terrorize Sam, Tara and the Core 4 for an entire movie. But not in this one.

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Charlie (Rory Culkin) was set up as the “new Randy” in Scream 4, and his knowledge of the state of horror movies proved valuable in the early part of the film. However, Charlie was clearly the less impactful of the movie’s two Ghostfaces, and while he certainly did a lot of damage, he was also easily outsmarted and easily disposed of by his other half. Credit to Charlie for getting a good dig in on one of our favorites (Kirby, played by Hayden Panettiere), but also kind of a failure because he couldn’t even finish the job.

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Roman (Scott Foley) was the only solo Ghostface, and did it while directing (or, well, trying to direct) a new Stab movie. That’s got to count for something, right! Well, he lands in this spot because his whole deal is just… kind of a lot. He’s Sidney’s half-brother, and is fairly directly responsible for setting the events of the original Scream (and, thus, the whole franchise) in action. Scream 3 also has the whole voice-modifier thing, which I don’t know if we can ever forgive. It’s a fun movie! But Roman as Ghostface lands here.

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Quinn (Liana Liberato) is an interesting case as Ghostface. She spends the majority of the movie believed to be dead, so we never really even get the chance to suspect her all too much. But, at the same time, she’s under the hood for Scream VI‘s fantastic Gale Weathers chase sequence (not long after easily taking down Gale’s boyfriend, muscles included, on her own), is part of the movie’s biggest twist, and is quite cartoonishly deranged in the final showdown sequence. Fun time at the movies!

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It’s not entirely clear which (if any) kills in Scream VI Ethan (Avatar star Jack Champion, looking completely unrecognizable from his role as Spider) was responsible for. After all, his alibi—he was in Econ!—checked out. The movie has a lot of fun with suspicion around him; Chad is a good friend until he has reason to be suspicious, and Mindy suspects him over and over again, before (wrongly) changing her mind after she was stabbed on the subway. But Champion plays the post-reveal with such an awkward, strange excitement, and it’s really fun to watch. Not to mention you can really buy him as Richie’s brother. Maybe the Jacks (Quaid and Champion) can team up in something else in the future.

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Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney) is the closest thing to a “mastermind” Ghostface that we get in Scream VI, and he gets the closest to a big villain monologue, and he’s part of a big twist, and he ultimately gets an absolutely brutal and grisly death. So, for all that, he lands as our top Scream VI Ghostface. It’s also not clear if his cheesy cop dialogue (“You mess with my family… YOU DIE!”) was intentional, but it made his character pretty entertaining in a campy slasher kind of way even before the big reveal.

We realize we have four killers from Scream VI in the bottom half of our list, but don’t take that the wrong way—the movie is one of the best Scream sequels. It’s just built to be stronger in terms of its chase and action sequences than the ultimate killer reveals.

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When there are multiple Ghostfaces, there tends to be a pretty familiar dynamic: one brain of the operation, and one total loose cannon who’s kind of just along for the ride. In the case of Scream 2, Mickey Altieri (Timothy Olyphant) falls firmly in the latter camp. But while Mr. Olyphant has become known for his portrayals of badass lawmen—in Deadwood, Justified, Fargo, and even The Mandalorian—he can also really bring it as criminals or villains, in movies like The Girl Next Door, Go, andhere in Scream 2. Even before the movie’s big reveal, Mickey basically seems to have one foot in sanity and one foot out (he mindlessly joins in when Sidney’s boyfriend starts singing and dancing on the lunchtable in the middle of the movie) and is a very great lunatic when the other hammer drops.

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While Mrs. Loomis (Laurie Metcalf) spends much of Scream 2 being called “local woman” by our beloved Gale Weathers, she kind of turns the table in a very surprising way when she reveals herself to be the mastermind of the events of the entire movie in a scatterbrained attempt for revenge on Sidney. It’s a real surprise, and Metcalf sells it like the great actress she is and always has been.

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Mikey Madison is best known now for her Academy Award-winning role as the titular character in Anora, a layered, charismatic, and complex role that she absolutely crushed. Before she became the first Scream cast member to win an Oscar, though, she played Amber, one of Scream (2022)’s Ghostfaces—and a very animated and entertaining one at that. As anyone who had seen Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood already knew, Madison is good at playing extremely, extremely off the rails—and given her ultimate outcome in both Scream (2022) and OUATIH, she was also carving out quite the niche as ‘off the rails maniac who winds up set on fire.’ Amber is a very solid Ghostface—and she got the devastating kill on Dewey, a true Scream fan favorite. Her impact on the series was absolutely felt.

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As the mastermind Ghostface in Scream (2022), Jack Quaid really brings his A-game as surprise Stab superfan Richie Kirsch. If you’ve seen Quaid before, you’ve probably seen him as a pretty classic “Nice Guy,” whether that be in The Boys, the underrated romcom Plus One, or even Tragedy Girls, another solid horror movie. In his scenes with his girlfriend Sam (Melissa Barrera), he’s supportive, pragmatic, and just seems like a solid guy. Which makes his big, evil reveal that much more compelling, and that much more believable. And as much as Quaid can sell the Nice Guy stuff, he really sells the maniac stuff. And we go from hoping he’ll be OK to hoping he gets what he deserves real quick. That’s how you know he’s doing his job well.

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As shocking as the twist in Scream 4 is, I almost feel like to fully grasp just how surprising, subversive, and just all-around great it was, you have to know the context of 2011. This was a time when it seemed like just about every horror movie coming out was either a reboot or a straight-up remake. While Neve Campbell was returning for Scream 4, all the chatter in the lead-up to the movie was how Emma Roberts, as Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill Roberts, would be “taking over the franchise,” and becoming the new final girl. And then you watch the movie, and that twist hits. And Roberts—who, at the time, hadn’t even landed on American Horror Story—just absolutely nails it, having us believe her at first, and fully selling us on her murderous master plan after the reveal. A truly great villain in the franchise.

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We could flip these top two back and forth over and over and over again, but it was never going to be anyone else. The original reveal that Scream‘s Ghostface wasn’t one but two people—and two people we had essentially crossed off our list—is one for the ages. Toss in the fact that Ulrich was essentially cast as a knockoff of a previous Wes Craven character (Johnny Depp’s innocent boyfriend in Nightmare on Elm Street), and he really, really, sold this character. An absolute mastermind maniac, and one the franchise would be trying to match (sometimes coming close) for decades to come.

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Yes, Billy Loomis is the mastermind. But what makes Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) the best Scream Ghostface is the fact that he so doesn’t have to be doing this. Lillard is off-the-rails funny the whole movie (the way he says “I’ll bE rIgHt BaCk” after Randy’s horror movie speech is unparalleled), but it’s only after the movie’s big reveal that he truly goes into another stratosphere. Lillard goes from menacing to deranged to pathetic to hilarious within a few moments notice, and it’s never less than EXTREMELY FUN TO WATCH at any point.

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