Wes Craven's Scream 2 featured one of the most iconic car crashes in horror movie history but its impact wasn't realized until the 2000s when another successful franchise paid homage in the most gruesome way. The scene depicts a bundle of pipes sliding through the car's window and the back of a police officer's skull. Here's every movie that copied Scream 2's car crash.
In 1996, Craven released the first of the four movies he'd direct in the Scream franchise starring Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are set to direct the upcoming fifth movie in the franchise, titled Scream after the original. The two directors worked together previously on V/H/S, Southbound, and Ready or Not. Each installment of Scream to date follows Sidney Prescott as she deals with the aftermath of the original Ghostface killers, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). Scream is known for being a meta horror franchise due to its overt recognition of horror movie rules and tropes—as detailed by Jamie Kennedy's character Randy Meeks—some of which were even created by Wes Craven himself through the director's other horror movies.
Scream 2 takes place a year after the events of the first movie when copycat killers seek to take Sidney down for good. In the midst of uncovering who the killers are, Sidney and her friend Hallie McDaniel (Elise Neal) are involved in a car crash that's been orchestrated by Ghostface. When the movie initially released, this kind of gruesome, vehicular kill had never been done before. As a result, movies such as Final Destination 2, The Descent, and Baby Driver have copied it. While it's become more recognizable in other movies than its source, it's important to recognize that Scream 2 was where this enduring horror movie (and even outside of the genre) kill started.
Final Destination 2 begins, as most of the movies in the franchise do, with a massive accident. Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) has a premonition that there will be a terrible accident on the highway when a chord snaps on a truck carrying very large logs of wood. As they fall from the vehicle, one smashes through a police car and kills the driver instantly. It is a very obvious reference to Scream 2's car crash. Just like in Craven's movie, a cop is killed when a pole shaped object goes through their head and, in Final Destination 2's case, an entire car. This scene has become one of the most instantly recognizable in the Final Destination franchise, and has had a lasting impact on horror fans, despite not originally being from a Final Destination movie.
When Neil Marshall's The Descent begins, a couple is involved in a car accident where copper pipes go through their windshield. Paul (Oliver Milburn) and Jessica (Molly Kayll) do not survive. After the copper pipes break through, one goes directly through the middle of Paul's head, but the carnage is viewed through where the object has exited. The police officer in Scream 2 has a similar pipe go through the back of his head. It reflects the original car accident by placing the main focus on the pipe on the back of Paul's head and the use of construction materials for the scene.
Baby Driver is the most recent movie to copy the car crash from Scream 2. After Baby (Ansel Elgort) is forced to participate in a bank robbery as the getaway driver, he drives into a construction vehicle, killing Leon "Bats" Jefferson III (Jamie Foxx) with a metal pipe. In this scene, Baby mirrors Ghostface in his thinking. Both characters drive their car into a construction vehicle with deadly pipes that kill an individual in or on the car. Final Destination 2, The Descent, and Baby Driver copy Scream 2's car accident and, while they have their own twist to the original, they are almost exact replicas of the original scene.
