It’s been 13 years since the last Scary Movie and 26 years since the Wayans Brothers released their satirical, unapologetic parody on the horror genre. It’s a joy to see the gang back together in this family affair, with a script by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans, and Rick Alvarez. They even point it out in the movie, one of many moments where the fourth wall breaks.
With Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Marlon Wayans, and Shawn Wayans reprising their roles alongside Cheri Oteri, Chris Elliott, Dave Sheridan, Lochlyn Munro, Jon Abrahams, and Anthony Anderson, it feels like we are in the ‘00s all over again. But how does this hyper-referential horror comedy land in 2026?
Like its predecessors, the plot and visuals are carbon-copied from popular films of the moment and fed through the Wayans machine of unhinged comedy. That formula worked in the first couple of installments before fizzling out in 2013. Now, in a post-COVID world of short attention spans, divisive rhetoric, and an influencer-fueled economy of outrage, Scary Movie is a different creature entirely.
This installment pulls the majority of its material from Scream 5 and Scream 6 — many scenes look like the Temu version of the originals. But the Wayans family also went all-out with nods to Weapons, Longlegs, The Substance, Sinners, and a “golden” KPop Demon Hunters moment involving a lot of cannabis.
Watching Faris and Hall reunite as Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks is an absolute delight, and having Wayans family comedy back on screen — with a long-overdue spotlight on the fantastic Kim Wayans — is a genuine treat. More than that, the film, directed by Michael Tiddes, has the audacity to be deliberately nonsensical and absurd in a sea of Hollywood’s desperate reach for ⭐CINEMA!⭐
Scary Movie leans on its old tricks: sight gags, callbacks to previous installments, inappropriate one-liners, timely news skewering, and pure comedic chaos. It fits a slow-building trend of big-screen ridiculousness that includes last year’s Naked Gun reboot, and the upcoming Stop! That! Train! (the first feature in the Drag Race cinematic universe). All these films lean into the absurd and don’t tether themselves to the plot.
Scary Movie hangs its humor on ripped-from-the-headlines material: the unredacted Epstein files literally hatching from Cheri Oteri’s body in a Substance moment; queer humor; jabs at influencer culture, the #MeToo movement, pronouns, COVID-era behavior. As for the trans and gay jokes, I still don’t know how to feel about them. If anything, I appreciate that Marlon Wayans drew from his own personal journey with his son.
Scary Movie has to compete with an era of media so fleeting that its relevance evaporates the moment it hits the raging rapids of social media. The style of pop culture irreverence that made the franchise work doesn’t land the same way it did a decade ago.
Gen X and millennials will eat up the references and ratchet-ass tom foolery. But the film is too reminiscent of its predecessors to fully connect with Gen Z — and as the ending suggests, maybe it doesn’t care to.
Comparing Scary Movie to Naked Gun and Stop! That! Train! (in theaters June 12, BTW), those films prioritize joke frequency and delivery, with gags carrying the weight. Scary Movie is the opposite — it’s a festival of parody with balls-to-the-walls jokes (sometimes literally). At times, these references feel tired. Even nodding to films as recent as Get Out and Longlegs felt dated. The demonic Santa scene went right over my head until I realized it was a Terrifier 3 parody. I was halfway through before I clocked that Brenda’s haircut was spoofing Ma (2019). There may simply be too many references for today’s average moviegoer — not because they’re not smart, but because they’re not the audience who saw these movies in the early 2000s.
There is no more mainstream. Scary Movie is beating the dead horse called monoculture.
In an interview in PopMatters , noted Village Voice journalist and music critic Robert Christgau differentiates the terms “canon” and “monoculture”.
“It’s larger and more inclusive than the canon,” he said. “The canon has a hierarchy of taste that doesn’t exist in the monoculture. The monoculture is more hegemonic and shows a certain amount of instinctive, intuitive, reflective influence of its creation, whereas the canon tends to be somewhat more conscious.”
He goes on to say that there have been many divisions in music and how “Balkanization operates invidiously to separate us.”
I was a little surprised to see that the article was written in 2006.
With the end of monoculture came the end of “water cooler talk”. As the advent of streaming and social media began to fracture the landscape, silos of media consumption began sprout
In an article in The Guardian written by Simon Reynolds he describes how YouTube and file-sharing in the early 21st century allowed for the creation of “an open-access archive of pop culture. Reynolds said that this “mingled promiscuously with current releases to create an effect of atemporality”.
As technology and media rapidly advanced, streaming platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and Prime Video started to become more common. “Rather than simply usurping the place of the old mass-media monoculture, these gigantic platforms have a curious effect of simultaneously unifying and fracturing,” he wrote. “Instead of inviting consumers to tune into a shared cultural experience at a designated time, they encourage individualised trajectories through teeming repositories of art and entertainment. Slowly but surely, streaming is killing the idea of a mainstream.”
I agree with Alison Herman of The Ringer when she wrote in 2017 that Game of Thrones was “the last vestige of the monoculture, a dying and distinct model with its own advantages and blind spots. In its stead, we’ll be left with the fractured, micro-targeted landscape to which Thrones is the glaring, currently only, and possibly final exception.”
Long gone are the days of bonding over Coach Taylor and Friday Night Lights or discussing Lost fan theories with the masses. The mainstream has become modular and so customizable that it has eliminated monoculture – for now, at least.
Scary Movie is gloriously inane and ideal weed-watching. But it made me realize I’m grieving the loss of a shared pop culture. Surprisingly, not everyone has seen Get Out, Ma, or Weapons. Out of context, the parodies are still funny — but if the whole audience recognized the source material, it would be a collective comedic experience. That’s the gap. As monoculture fades, movies built on shared references become more archive than comedy.
The biggest laugh of the night came from the parody of the Michael Jackson biopic — except here it’s Jermaine, played by Kenan Thompson. The collective reaction is proof that Michael Jackson is one of the few remaining pillars of monoculture that still reaches across every generation.
Recently, I was having a conversation with a couple young folks in the film, TV, and media world. In these settings, you can usually nerd out and talk about film freely without having to explain your references. However, when I mentioned the movieThe Craft, no one knew what I was talking about. I let that slide, but when I mentioned John Waters and they asked me “Who’s that?” It took everything in my soul to not flip the table.
Scary Movie is doing more than reviving a franchise. It wants to be a beacon of hope — proof that monoculture can come back from the dead. As much as I want that too, I’m not holding my breath.
