WARNING: SPOILERS ahead for The Waterfront.

The use of violence during certain scenes in Netflix's family crime drama series makes a lot more sense considering who the show's creator is. Since premiering all eight episodes on Thursday, June 19, 2025, exclusively on Netflix, The Waterfront has shot up to the number one spot on the U.S. TV streaming charts. Holt McCallany leads the cast of The Waterfront as Harlan Buckley, a prominent businessman in the fictional coastal town of Havenport, North Carolina. While the Buckley name holds weight in the small idyllic community, it also harbors several dark secrets, including a drug-smuggling operation that keeps the family afloat.

While The Waterfront can veer into melodramatic territory, there are a handful of surprisingly violent scenes that depict death, torture, and other R-rated gory scenarios. Although The Waterfront is certainly not family-friendly by any means, the series does have certain qualities, like Netflix's other recent small-town family drama series, Ransom Canyon, which suggests at face value that it could be suitable for younger audiences. With the arrival of Topher Grace's outstanding villain character, , also comes several violent and bloody scenes that may take viewers by surprise.

The Waterfront's more violent, horror-esque scenes can be easily rationalized considering that the series creator is none other than Kevin Williamson. While Williamson has been celebrated for his teen dramas such as Dawson's Creek and The Vampire Diaries, he actually got his start as a prolific horror writer in the 1990s. He's responsible for sourcing two horror franchises, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream., followed by 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer. He also wrote 1997's Scream 2 and the cult 1998 classic The Faculty.

and the 2005 Wes Craven horror film Cursed. He recently developed the psychological thriller series Tell Me a Story, which ran for two seasons from 2018 to 2020.

As shown by his other projects like The Waterfront, Williamson doesn't only write horror movies and TV shows, even though he is credited for creating the iconic horror villain and Halloween costume, Ghostface. Given how violence lies at the heart of his horror projects like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, which is being rebooted in July 2025, .

The gruesome deaths and torture scenes in The Waterfront are quiet nods to Williamson's impact on the slasher horror genre. They are notably quite gory, especially for a Netflix show, but not enough to ever steer the crime drama series too far into the horror genre. One of the first surprisingly violent scenes was when Grady had one of his guys fire a machine gun at one of his former employees who had badmouthed Harlan, leaving his body mutilated. This came after the surprisingly gory scene in which with a screwdriver.

Another unforgettable moment of violence was when Harlan was being . This actually makes Grady seem more like a horror villain, who is purely unhinged, unpredictable, and deceitful, much like the various characters who were revealed to be Ghostface in the Scream movies. Grady's death at the end of The Waterfront is also shockingly gory. All this considered, it seems like Williamson couldn't help but make these violent scenes in have horror qualities based on his filmography.