Scary Movie returns (Mark Kermode’s horror film review).
There is something grimly fascinating about a horror spoof lumbering back from the grave after thirteen years, still wearing the same novelty mask, still making noises at the teenagers, and still convinced that “Wazzup!” is just one strong cough away from cultural relevance.
Yes, Scary Movie is back, although calling it Scary Movie 6 seems to be frowned upon by the sort of studio marketing people who would rebrand a haunted abbey as “premium emotionally responsive paranormal accommodation.” This new instalment brings the Wayans family back to the franchise they helped create, reunites Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris and Regina Hall, and offers itself up as a spiritual sequel to the earlier films, which is industry code for: please forget the bits in the middle where the wheels fell off and rolled into a hedge.
Mark Kermode has now taken his scalpel to the corpse, and the diagnosis is not encouraging. The central complaint is not merely that the jokes are broad, grubby, or occasionally dragged across the floor behind the family SUV. That was always part of the franchise’s charm, assuming one had the correct chemical imbalance and access to cheap popcorn. The bigger problem is that modern horror has moved on, while Scary Movie appears to have spent the last decade locked in a Blockbuster Video toilet, banging on the door and shouting “Is The Ring still big?”
The original Scary Movie arrived at a moment when Scream had turned horror inside out with a knowing wink, and Hollywood was busy producing slashers, urban legends, haunted videotapes and pretty people being menaced by garden tools. The franchise’s odd problem was there from the beginning: it was spoofing Scream, which was already spoofing and dissecting horror with surgical precision. That makes Scary Movie less a parody of horror than a photocopy of a doodle someone once made in the margins of Kevin Williamson’s homework.
This sixth entry apparently knows that, and tries to fold the joke in on itself. There are gags about legacy sequels, returning casts, younger replacements, reboots, requels, and all the other franchise taxidermy now keeping Hollywood accountants warm through winter. Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks are back, Shorty and Ray return, and Ghostface or something legally and spiritually adjacent to Ghostface stalks the old gang and their next-generation offspring. Somewhere, probably in a cupboard filled with discarded Scream scripts, the word “meta” is sobbing into a latte.
The film’s targets include modern horror hits and horror-adjacent pop culture: Get Out, Longlegs, Smile, M3GAN, The Substance, Sinners, Terrifier, Wednesday and the recent Scream films all seem to wander through the firing range. The issue, according to Kermode’s line of attack, is that a spoof needs affection for the thing it is mocking. Mel Brooks could take apart Universal horror because he understood every creaky door, every laboratory switch, every doomed villager carrying a pitchfork with unionised determination. Airplane! worked because the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team had absorbed disaster movies until they could sweat cockpit dialogue.
By contrast, Scary Movie has often treated horror less as a beloved genre to dismantle and more as a convenient hat stand on which to hang rude noises. That can work, briefly. A good stupid joke remains a good stupid joke, and the Wayans family have always had the ability to make the ridiculous detonate when the timing is right. But without a proper feel for why Get Out unnerves, why Longlegs crawls under the wallpaper, or why modern horror audiences now arrive armed with Letterboxd trauma essays and opinions about aspect ratios, the spoof risks becoming a man pointing at a cinema poster and making a fart sound.
The strangest thing is that the Wayans are often sharper when they stop trying to parody horror at all. Their social satire, when it lands, has more bite than the genre spoofing. Race, celebrity, politics, industry hypocrisy and the absurd rituals of modern public life are all much better prey for their comic machinery. When the film steps into those areas, you can reportedly glimpse the old voltage. When it returns to the horror references, the lights flicker and a joke about someone dying first wanders in, unaware that Get Out, Nope and a large chunk of contemporary horror have already dragged that cliché outside and buried it under a tasteful A24 shrub.
There is also the small matter of time. Horror now moves at a speed that makes satire extremely difficult. By the time a studio spoof has been written, financed, shot, edited, test-screened, trimmed, marketed and released, the genre has already mutated twice, spawned a viral analogue-horror offshoot, and been reinterpreted by a 22-year-old YouTuber with a budget of £14 and a corridor that hums. You can feel the film trying to grab the zeitgeist by the ankle as it sprints past, only to be left holding an old meme and a confused cameo.
Still, there is something almost noble about the attempt. The Wayans helped popularise the modern spoof cycle, for better and for several thousand terrible DVD covers. Bringing them back does give this film more legitimacy than another anonymous brand-reanimation exercise. Faris and Hall remain valuable comic weapons, Marlon Wayans has never been short of anarchic energy, and the notion of horror mocking its own current prestige era is not a bad one. There is a clever film to be made about “elevated horror”, grief metaphors, legacy trauma, algorithmic fandom, expensive haunted dolls, and the terrifying modern reality that every franchise now comes with homework.
Unfortunately, Scary Movie sounds less like that clever film and more like a group chat that was turned into a screenplay after somebody dropped the phone down a toilet.
Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we have no objection to low humour. Low humour is the foundation stone of civilisation, somewhere between fire and the invention of custard. The trouble comes when low humour gets lazy. A grand vulgar spoof should arrive with the timing of a thrown brick and the accuracy of a guided missile. It should not simply wave at M3GAN, shout “AI doll!”, and then hope the audience applauds out of muscle memory.
Perhaps the most damning praise is that this may still be one of the better Scary Movie sequels. That is rather like being voted the least alarming clown in the storm drain. It may be true, but you still wouldn’t invite it round for tea.
So, should horror fans watch Kermode’s review? Absolutely. He is at his best when explaining why a film’s bones have been assembled in the wrong order. Should they watch Scary Movie? That depends on their tolerance for nostalgia, gross-out gags, and the sight of a franchise trying to impersonate its younger self under fluorescent lighting.
The slasher may be back, the gang may be reunited, and the Wayans may once again be holding the knife. But the scariest thing about Scary Movie in 2026 might be the possibility that the joke has been dead for years, and nobody had the decency to check the basement.
