With Halloween just around the corner, you know it’s time for us to gush over all the great horror movies. With another Scream film coming out in 2026, now actually seems like a good time to look back on the franchise to date and see how we’d rank them. Unlike a lot of horror sequels, particularly slashers, the Scream franchise has a solid track record …

With Halloween just around the corner, you know it’s time for us to gush over all the great horror movies. With another Scream film coming out in 2026, now actually seems like a good time to look back on the franchise to date and see how we’d rank them. Unlike a lot of horror sequels, particularly slashers, the Scream franchise has a solid track record of delivering quality sequels, making this list a lot harder to make than one would expect. So let’s sharpen our knives and get out our Ghostface masks, let’s rank the six Scream movies so far! And since these movies are whodunits, I’ll keep everything spoiler-free for your enjoyment!

Scream 3

The only film in the franchise’s Wes Craven run not to be written by Kevin Williamson, Scream 3 opts for a lighter and more comedic tone in the wake of Columbine at the request of the studio, despite the film retaining its R-rating. The idea itself is pretty good, with Ghostface going to Hollywood to kill the cast members of the latest “Stab” movie, but the film ends up feeling cliché and predictable in the end, something the franchise could not be accused of up to that point.

Scream 4

Scream 4 was something of a soft reboot for the franchise. The series has been dormant for over a decade, having wrapped up pretty nicely in 2000 with Scream 3, narratively speaking, but Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson returned to examine the very concept of reboots and remakes and the evolution of the horror genre since 2000 with the return of Sidney and Ghostface to Westboro. It has a really awesome opening sequence that riffs heavily on this and sets the tone for the film overall, and has a solid reveal by the end, I’d say, in terms of both the narrative and the point the film is making about youth culture and the internet. It taps into the mindset of the internet age and finding that viral trend to become famous, making your own movie online instead of waiting for Stab 4 to hog all the glory. From a technical level, this one is a bit rough, thanks to its very sheen digital look and overlit day shots, that said.

Scream VI

Honestly, the preference for Scream 2022 and Scream VI is basically a coin toss, as they’re extremely close in terms of quality. So these two could be interchanged at any given moment. Scream VI works in that it works its ass off to make sure you’re never sure who exactly is behind the mask. It also has an excellent opening sequence. But there are a few instances where characters seem to have plot armour that detracts from the tension. Ghostface is also the most brutal in the franchise thus far. He’s a monstrous, furious tank in this one, a stark contrast to how he’s usually portrayed. The New York setting also makes this entry feel unique among the others, which take place in the fictional Woodsboro town in California.

Scream (2022)

Scream, aka Scream 5, was a reboot/sequel (or “requel” as the film calls itself, thanks to its meta humour), and it was the first film in the franchise in over ten years, and it leaned into that fact quite well. It introduced us to a new cast of characters while bringing back the legacy characters from the original film. I don’t think the new characters are quite as likable as the originals, but they’re fun to watch, with Samantha in particular being pretty interesting to watch as she grapples with some pretty heavy baggage from her past that ties into the original film.

Scream 2

As far as sequels go, Scream 2 is actually pretty solid. It doesn’t fall into the same traps as Halloween II or Elm Street II and ties up the Cotton Weary plotline involving Sidney’s mother from the first entry. It actively pokes into the narrative tropes of sequels, while simultaneously playing up those tropes, but never falling victim to them. It’s also the film that introduced the franchise to the in-universe Stab films, which are Hollywood dramatizations of the Woodsboro events that would become a staple of the Scream films going forward. It’s a great metagag that continues to pay dividends as the franchise progresses.

Scream

The one that started it all. Wes Craven took what he did with New Nightmare, delivering a slasher that was incredibly self-aware of itself and the genre tropes as a whole, and dialled it up to maximum, birthing a whole new franchise at the same time. Scream is simultaneously scary, as the killer could’ve been anyone and lacked any supernatural powers, but it is also quite clever and even funny. It’s a whodunnit slasher film, where instead of a supernatural entity that’s unstoppable, the killer is a clumsy psycho that you just may see every single day. That’s the true horror of this franchise. Where Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween, for example, all leaned into some level of fantastical with their killers, Scream took a barginbin costume and a teenager and made them the face of evil.

And that’s our ranking! How would you rank the Scream movies? Let us know!

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