The new Scary Movie ends a horror era so dumb even Scary Movie figured it out

Scary Movie 6 is only “high art” if you’re making a marijuana pun, yet for all of the film’s tasteless jokes and other shortcomings, it’s kind of nice to see Scary Movie remember what it’s supposed to be about. Primarily a spoof of the fifth Scream, the first of the Scream legacy sequels (and titled Scream, much like this new film is titled Scary Movie), the film reveals that Cindy and Brenda have kids who are dealing with a new Ghostface killer, so of course the moms are drawn back into the action too. It’s telling that Scary Movie‘s return to theaters is also a return to mocking the Scream franchise, but more than being a tacit admission that Scary Movie is ultimately just Scream‘s sloppy seconds, the movie lacks any pretension about the legacy of the legacy sequel trend. The 2022 Scream was fittingly meta about how it was a legacy sequel; a return to a franchise after a long period since the last movie that both brought back the original stars and featured a hot new cast of characters. Scary Movie is, in its own words, a “rebootquel.” That it’s a totally unnecessary franchise continuation that nostalgic fans will nonetheless be eager to see is kind of the whole point.

For the first time, a Scary Movie is actually able to use its status as an irreverent spoof to make a satirical point. At the film’s climax, Faris and Hall find out that fellow original Scary Movie cast members Shawn and Marlon Wayans have been the killers all along. (Anthony Anderson, who appeared in 3 and 4, is also a killer, as is Shaquille O’Neal, who appeared in 4‘s Saw-spoofing cold open.) Confronted with these twists, the pair ultimately decide to join forces with the Wayans and leave the next generation of Scary Movie leads—Olivia Rose Keegan and Savannah Lee Nassif playing stand-ins for Scream‘s Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega—to burn to death. For once, a legacy sequel is telling the truth about its audience’s expectations: fuck them kids. Obviously, fans are here for nostalgia, not the new cast. 

The actual Scream sequels make this same point, albeit unintentionally. Scream introduced Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega as Woodsboro’s next generation, though naturally Courteney Cox and Neve Campbell were part of the action, too. When Campbell’s Sydney was absent from the sixth film because of a pay dispute, it seemed like the Scream movies were committed to moving forward with the younger cast. But after Barrera was fired from the seventh film for posting in support of Palestine, and Ortega subsequently dropped out, Campbell’s Sydney returned as the main character. Guess what happened? Despite the negative press, bad reviews, and two fewer young stars, Scream 7 became the highest-grossing film in the franchise.

Other franchises have had similar struggles with balancing their original cast and new characters in legacy sequels, like last year’s forgettable I Know What You Did Last Summer (the subject of one of the new Scary Movie‘s most cutting insider jokes), the OG Ghostbusters boxing the Ghosterbusters: Afterlife newbies out of frame in the dreadful Frozen Empire, and The Exorcist: Believer‘s eye-rolling end-credits cameo. No matter what it does to the quality of the film itself, fans just want to see their old favorites. Scary Movie is simply crass enough to tell this one truth like it is, without the self-importance other legacy sequels wrap themselves with. 

Outside of this one genuine insight, the new Scary Movie is like its predecessors when it comes to satirizing the rest of its genre contemporaries, in that it doesn’t. Sure, there are references to other horror movies that have come out in the 13 years since Scary Movie 5, like Terrifier, Longlegs, Get Out, Sinners, and Weapons. (The lack of Aunt Gladys in the Weapons bit, combined with a joke at Demi Moore’s expense about how actresses never win Oscars for horror movies, pinpoints more or less exactly when Scary Movie 6 was written.) And, yes, there are still a few parts parodying non-horror titles, like a faux-trailer for a Jermaine Jackson biopic and a bafflingly unfunny KPop Demon Hunters moment. But these jokes are Family Guy-style cutaway gags without any weight behind them as the franchise makes up for lost time—a functional choice that acknowledges that you could strip the jokes about Sinners, Longlegs, and Get Out and not lose anything from the meat of the movie. 

At a moment in movie history when original horror is dominating, Scary Movie is ironically mistimed. The success of Scream 7 notwithstanding, Obsession and Backrooms (movies that are part of a trend Scary Movie doesn’t even attempt to tackle) show that horror audiences are excited about something new. The era of pompous, nostalgia-bait legacy sequels that Scary Movie is skewering might actually be drawing to a close. In that case, we can at least celebrate the spoof as a nail in the coffin of an era of horror so brainless that even Scary Movie figured it out.