After a long time in the comedy wilderness, Scary Movie is back to skewer modern horror. Does it however, at the same time, go too far into the political spectrum? We take a look… Maybe the most predicable element of the 2026 Scary Movie remake is that it isn’t very funny. Comedy is always subjective, ... Scary Movie | Rapid-fire MAGA baiting is surely not what parody needs
After a long time in the comedy wilderness, Scary Movie is back to skewer modern horror. Does it however, at the same time, go too far into the political spectrum? We take a look…
Maybe the most predicable element of the 2026 Scary Movie remake is that it isn’t very funny.
Comedy is always subjective, so it won’t be that nobody finds it funny. On the metric of the largely packed Saturday night audience who came out to see it in my showing, it isn’t very funny. There was nary a titter throughout and perhaps one solitary, muted belly laugh toward the end.
As we know, a Hollywood comedy without many good jokes is nothing new. Even the trailer for the upcoming movie Spa Weekend before the film started proves that (the horror, the horror…)
Scary Movie nonetheless comes with a sizeable legacy. Spawning four sequels of varying and generally diminishing quality, the original in 2000 helped form the zeitgeist of the 00s with a welter of pop culture references, crude jokes and celebrity cameos.
There is a debate to be had as to whether the original Scary Movie helped to revive or destroy the parody genre. In fact, we have that debate on Film Stories’ dedicated parody podcast, Don’t Call Us Shirley!
The success of the Wayans brothers’ horror-skewering film helped pave the way for a surfeit of parodies across the 2000s, but it also birthed the Friedman and Seltzer stable of lowest-common-denominator spoofs such as Meet The Spartans, Epic Movie and the like.
Either way, Scary Movie has almost as long a cultural tail as the post-modernist horror boom of the late 90s, fronted by the Scream series. Which is why returning after over a decade’s distance to take aim at horror in the mid-2020s makes sense. Horror has perhaps never been in finer fettle as a genre full to the brim of innovation which audiences are reacting to at the box office. Backrooms had an even more packed audience at the showing I attended last week, while Obsession also recently cleaned up (and continues to do so).
Should Scary Movie continue as a series, Obsession and Backrooms would surely become targets of lampoon in the way director Michael Tiddes’ latest comedy skewers popular horror pictures of the last decade, such as Get Out, The Substance or Longlegs (and one of its better jokes makes fun of how It Follows didn’t do well enough to warrant a proper take off). Indeed, Scary Movie 2026 is at its best when it takes time to directly lampoon those films, albeit through the Wayans’ prism of scatology or innuendo.
The problems surface when they hover back to the primary target of their satire.
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The Scream franchise is, of course, ripe for mockery given it has now moved into a ‘legacyquel’ series, mining the now middle-aged lead players for generation-dividing slaughter. Ghostface was always key to Scary Movie, so it makes complete sense to square the focus of its own revival around Scream, and indeed spoof the idea of middle-aged actors reclaiming past glories.
Lead star Anna Faris makes good play with Cindy Campbell now being a slightly unhinged survivalist, obsessed with Ghostface returning at the expense of the relationship with her daughter Sarah, who is almost as mentally damaged as she is (an idea seemingly inspired by David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween reboot).
So the frustrating factor with Scary Movie 2026 is that it has some interesting core comedic ideas, but the Wayans’ are slightly obsessed with the meta-commentary of what they’re spoofing and how the actors playing these characters are positioned in the mid-2020s.
Jokes are made about Faris taking the money and running for Scary Movie 2 to 4, for instance. Lots of gags revolve around how horror is positioned in Hollywood, whether the ‘elevated’ conversation or how they still won’t win an Oscar – “just ask Demi Moore.” All fair enough.
The problem stems from how relentlessly the Wayans’ double down on jokes not just about race, but broadly about the current American response to race in the era of Trump 2.0.
Even for a parody, and such movies by their very nature often flood the screen with scattershot jokes and one-liners, Scary Movie 2026 unloads a barrage of gags through predominantly performers such as Marlon Wayans (playing Shorty) or Regina Hall (as Brenda). Specifically, gags designed almost expressly to bait the MAGA crowd.
It feels intentional and it is a hand that is obsessively overplayed, even if many left of centre audience members will agree with the tenor of the comedy.
There are striking moments. A set piece when FBI agents go to arrest Longlegs, for instance. He’s surrendering and basically fessing up, but the Wayans brothers bring a Black man into the scene, and guess who the FBI go and tackle? Even with Longlegs standing there. For every one that lands though, there’s another that, well, just doesn’t. And they keep coming. And they keep missing.
This isn’t to suggest that the Wayans don’t see the irony of being bankrolled by white executives to make a decent-sized budget comedy which takes aim significantly at white American middle classes. There is often a sense that they are just as keen to skewer their own culture as they do another. Yet Scary Movie still feels divisive. It still feels aggressive. It seems just as determined to make A Point about the broader political and cultural American ecosystem right now as it is telling good jokes about modern horror movies.
I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be an overlap between these things. When fans say “keep politics out of it”, they’re often ignoring the fact that most art is political. Scary Movie in 2000 was no exception to that.
But even that film, perhaps understandably given the unipolar nature of politics at that time, was less febrile.
Scary Movie 2026 would do more for comedy, and especially more for parody, if it had achieved more equilibrium between telling jokes about horror – which you could argue is doing so well because it is reflecting modern cultural and social anxieties – and telling jokes about politics.
If we do end up with Scary Movie 2, or 2.0, and given the healthy initial box office there is every chance we might, let’s hope we get a parody that is less terminally online and does a better job of striking a balance between effective horror pastiche and making a point about the context around it.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts (including discussing Scary Movie 2026 on Don’t Call Us Shirley!) and books, via Linktr.ee here. Don’t miss him on the Film Stories Podcast Network too.
