The Least Realistic Death in the ‘Scream’ Movies Has an Unbelievable True Crime Precedent
Truth is stranger than fiction.
The Scream movies have always walked a fine line between comedy and horror. Many people saw the original screenplay as a comedy before Wes Craven signed on to make it into a gruesome horror movie. But there are definitely places in the franchise where humor is prioritized over scares. One of those times is the death of police officer Anthony Perkins in Scream 4 (2011).
As a reminder, Scream 4 is about Sidney Prescott’s return to Woodsboro as part of her book tour. Ghostface murders two Woodsboro high school students and as a result, Sidney is assigned two police officers to stand guard outside the residence where she is staying with her aunt Kate and niece Jill. Those officers are Anthony Perkins (Anthony Anderson) and Ross Hoss (Adam Brody).
The casting of Anderson and Brody is already Easter egg heavy. Anderson had been in several of the Scary Movie films that satirize Scream. He also played a cop in The Departed (2006). His character is, of course, named after the actor who portrayed Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). Adam Brody’s character makes a comment about how it sucks to be a cop “unless you’re Bruce Willis.” Brody and Willis starred in a cop movie, Cop Out (2010), together the previous year. Another fun fact is that Hoss’s character was a potential killer in one of the script’s early drafts.
Outside the Roberts’ home, both Hoss and Perkins are killed by Ghostface. In particular, Perkins’ death is played for laughs as he is stabbed in the head but still manages to get out of the squad car, walk and speak (“F-ck Bruce Willis”) for a few moments before dying. Here is the scene:
Of his performance, Anderson joked “NAACP Image Award contention. We’re going to go beyond Oscar and Emmy and Golden Globe; we’re going to go straight to the Image Awards.”
It was written that the killer just comes in and pins him to the seat… I had seen this thing on television, this documentary about somebody being stabbed right through the head and they actually showed the X-ray… and the guy walked into the emergency room, so I thought it would be extraordinary if somebody was stabbed in the head and still be alive for a while.
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This scene has been controversial among fans as some feel it takes comedy too far and “jumps the shark”. However, it’s not that far-fetched. While the scene wasn’t in the script, Wes Craven decided to shoot it after being inspired by a real life case where a man walked into an emergency room after being stabbed in the head.
Unbelievable survival stories abound in true crime, and what happened to officer Perkins is nothing compared to the real life case of Peter Porco.
Porco was a 52-year-old court clerk who lived with his wife in Delmar, New York. They had two adult children, Christopher and Jonathan. On November 15, 2004 Peter Porco got up as usual and set about doing his morning chores, he got the newspaper, made lunch and loaded the dishwasher. The issue? Hours earlier Porco received massive head injuries as a result of his son Christopher attacking he and his wife with an ax. Due to his head injury, Peter did not notice the pool of blood he woke up in or his wife bleeding next to him. He simply followed his routine in a daze until he succumbed to his injuries.
Miraculously, Peter’s wife Joan survived after losing an eye. She is facially disfigured and has spoken in her son’s defense as recently as 2022. Peter’s murder was the subject of the “Family Ties’ episode of Forensic Files, which aired two years before Scream 4 was released.
Truth is stranger than fiction. Few horror fans would find a movie about Peter Porco’s death to be believable, but it really happened.
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