Scary Movie (2026)

When Kevin Williamson pitched a meta slasher called ‘Scary Movie’ to Miramax, the suits felt the title was too flippant for a horror film and changed it to Scream. The rejected title didn’t go to waste, and was stuck on the Wayans family’s parody, which founded a parallel franchise. The Wayanses’ involvement ended after Scary Movie 2, and Scary Movie 5 was the last entry, in 2013. Until now: with Scream relaunching through 2022’s ‘requel’, it was inevitable that Scary Movie would be back with this ‘rebootycall’. And the Wayanses are back with it.

Just as the first Scary Movie was more a remake of Scream with gross-out comedy footnotes than an actual parody, this sticks close to the plot of Scream (2022) — simply restaging scenes with the odd wink to camera about how obvious the mystery is or dig at the modern-day Scream films’ ‘woke’ tendencies. Besides Wayanses old and new — there’s a joke about how many of them there are — pretty much all of the cast of the first Scary Movie return, still hammering their running jokes into the ground. Shorty (Marlon Wayans) is still stoned, and Ray (Shawn Wayans) is still pretending not to be gay, while talented comedians Anna Faris — who takes a ribbing for being in Scary Movie 3 and 4 — and Regina Hall do their best with not-exactly A material. Olivia Rose Keegan, Savannah Lee Nassif, Cameron Scott Roberts and Sydney Park — one of many 1997 babies who might have been named after the Neve Campbell character in Scream — are shrill stands-ins for Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid, and Jasmin Savoy Brown from the requel — which is, by now, two Screams ago.

Scary Movie tradition is to refer to job-lots of other films in scenes which only barely qualify as send-ups. It’s also series tradition to be just behind the curve, so nods to Terrifier, Sinners, Get Out, Weapons, Longlegs, M3GAN, Candyman, The Substance, and Nosferatu will be old news to audiences who’ve moved on to Backrooms, Obsession, and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (the likely targets of a seventh instalment). There are okay-ish jokes about the OG SM crew being stuck in the early 2000s, but the film at least references some current concerns — ICE raids, insistence on preferred pronouns, a history curriculum predicated on slavery not being a bad thing. The last ten minutes before the extended end-credits almost start to be funny, playing on tension between the cast holdovers from the first Scary Movie and the younger generation — but it’s a long haul to get there.