TeaScary movie series have always depended on timing. It’s not necessarily in its gagcraft, which oscillates between occasional sharp jabs and several broad strokes, but rather in its positioning on the release schedule. This was especially true of the first installment, which hit theaters just a few months after the release of Scream 3 in 2000, taking advantage of the new wave of slashers by staging a fake Viking funeral for the recently concluded trilogy. A quarter of a century later, the horror endures and there’s no reason to think spoofs can’t stand parallel to it as Backroom and Obsession ruled the early summer box office.
The sixth horror movie, rehashing the first film’s countless titles as a simultaneous gesture and act of reboot branding, is being released too soon after those surprise smashes to add them to its litany of gags (not even some last-minute ADR references, guys?). It’s stuck much further back, tying for a fifth and sixth Scream films in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The recent Scream 7, on the other hand, has largely abandoned its self-referentiality entirely, with Scary Movie as the last horror-comedy to carry the torch of jokes that its self-serious cousin can’t be bothered with.
There isn’t even that much behind-the-scenes mismanagement to work on in Scary Movie. The studio has re-hired co-writers and co-stars Marlon and Shawn Wayans after Weinstein snatched the series from them for the third, fourth and fifth entries. They’ve also brought back Anna Faris and Regina Hall, who stuck around for the fourth film, and enlisted various old and new players for cameos, starting with an opening sequence that photocopies Scream 6’s city-set opening and leads into Scream 4’s super-meta opening. Got all that?
You don’t really need it. 2026’s Scary Movie is primarily based on the now-familiar Next Generation reboot, starring Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), the estranged daughters of previous heroine Cindy Campbell (Faris), who are pursued by another masked assailant. Cindy reunites with her former partner Brenda (Hall), Brenda’s stoner brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans), and the forever tough Ray (Shawn Wayans) to protect the younger generation against this killer. The series has abandoned pretending to serve as pastiche and referred to the mysterious villain as Ghostface, just as the actual Scream villains are colloquially and collectively known.
In fact, despite the recent horror boom, Scary Movie is arguably the scariest installment to date. The original Scary Movie paid homage to I Know What You Did Last Summer in a similar way to Scream, and later films ventured outside slasher lane, parodying various recent horror hits and the occasional classic. Here The Fifth Scream in particular provides a lot of structure, as well as many scenes and lines to be revised. Are the Wayans respecting the flexibility of that series, or do they consider themselves equal to it? With this triumphant revival of the Scary Movie franchise, it seems clearer than ever that Wayans’ genuine interest in the horror genre is more a professional obligation than deep fan or wicked satire. They can’t even make a passing comment about the mess behind the scenes of Scream 7, let alone a weak comment about Neve Campbell not being in Scream 6.
Yes, there are some great visual gags – an extended shout-out to the Final Destination series appears mainly in the background – and funny references, like a joke about “advanced comedy” (though it’s pretty silly that the highbrow, non-laugh-out-loud writer Wayans targets is… Judd Apatow). And horror spoofs go beyond the scream-world, even if they sometimes require non-sequiturs to do so. Sometimes, filmmakers hit an immovable object: for example, the Terrifier films already go so far that they undermine Wayans’ strategy of copying a familiar scene and making it more disgusting or more ridiculous. All they can do here is essentially quote back to Terrifier 3. But other standalone titles, including Sinners, Longlegs, Smile, Ma, Terrific and Nosferatu, turn the attention to better, more entertaining effect – a neat homage to the wide variety of horror hits of the last several years.
However, it is telling that when the film leaves an obvious space for the It Follows riff, Brenda impatiently points out that they won’t do it because it’s too ambiguous. However, the film features an elaborate and climactic John Wick parody. It still actually counts as one of the more disciplined entries (Scary Movie 2 took the time to ruin… Save the Last Dance?!), but it still doesn’t make much of a case for anyone interested in horror, how it works, or what’s absurd about it. If the widest possible audience won’t immediately know that it follows, then to hell with it; It’s cheap seats or nothing. Each of Wayans’ subsequent films essentially has the same function: an easily recognizable bathroom wall where they can write insults about who is a slut, who is secretly gay and who suddenly deserves to be hit by a car.
Some of these hit films are still running; There’s Naked Gun-like devotion to how many times in the movie a character calls out “You came!” ‘s innocent cry has been misinterpreted. But even in a 96-minute comedy that reaches the end credits around the 85-minute mark, Wayans, his co-writer, and director Michael Tiedes find ways to ground certain scenes, which is a tired horror film tradition. Now that the series has been on for 26 years, it’s a little disappointing that Shawn seems so reluctant to play any role other than a man who insists he’s not gay, but is obviously full of gay-snouted jokes about sexual assault. Each scene seems to last a full 27 minutes.
Marlon does better in reviving his scruffy fool Shorty, who exists outside the action and somehow remains at the center of it. Meanwhile, Faris and Hall can still sell an extremely silly joke, and the way Keegan, playing Faris’s daughter, looks and acts like a cross between Mickey Madison (the Oscar winner who co-starred in Scream 5) and ex-SNL player Abbey Elliot, there’s a strange warmth to her and she’s doing the Faris impression. Despite all the expected (if not all that pointed) derision of the Legacy sequels, there’s a certain comfort and joy in seeing these cast members reunite in search of silent laughs, even if the previous films weren’t particularly good either. Yet as Scary Movie goes on, there are also growing notes of sourness – a lack of generosity toward the younger generation, who go beyond playful ribbing and sometimes feel downright hostile toward the existence of anyone who dares to follow them. Wayans would probably describe it as a classic take-no-prisoners comedy, one that prioritizes belly laughs above satire, horror or any sense of propriety. But honestly? They also seem a little scared.
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