Twenty-six years ago, a low-budget spoof made by a family of comedians turned the horror genre into a punchline and became a phenomenon. Then the people who created it walked away, and the franchise limped on without its soul. Now, at last, the band is back together. “Scary Movie” hits theaters on June 5 as a full reboot, and the headline isn’t the jokes or the gore gags — it’s that the Wayans family has finally returned to the series they built and then lost, for the first time in a quarter of a century.
To understand why that matters, you have to remember the origin story. The original “Scary Movie” arrived in 2000, created by Keenen Ivory Wayans and starring his brothers Marlon and Shawn, a gleeful, raunchy, no-target-is-safe demolition of the slasher boom that “Scream” had kicked off. It was a smash. But after the sequel, the Wayans exited amid creative conflicts with the producers, and the franchise carried on without them, drifting through several increasingly tired installments that never recaptured the anarchic spark of those first two films. The series kept the name and lost the voice. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for “Scary Movie” and which recent horror hits it sets in its crosshairs.
Twenty-six years ago, a low-budget spoof made by a family of comedians turned the horror genre into a punchline and became a phenomenon.”
This reboot fixes that at the root. Keenen, Marlon, and Shawn are back as writers, with Marlon and Shawn returning on screen, and Michael Tiddes — a frequent Marlon Wayans collaborator — directing. Even better for longtime fans, Anna Faris and Regina Hall are reprising their signature roles as the accident-prone Cindy Campbell and her sharp-tongued friend Brenda Meeks, the comedic heart of the original run. Getting those two back is a genuine coup; Faris in particular became a comedy star off the back of Cindy’s wide-eyed idiocy, and her return anchors the reboot in the era fans actually loved.
The plot is pure “Scary Movie” nonsense, and that’s the point. Twenty-six years after surviving the original masked killer, Cindy and her friends find themselves targeted all over again when the same maniac resurfaces, dragging the surviving gang back into a world where nobody makes a sensible decision and every horror cliché gets its ankles broken. The connective tissue, as always, is a loose riff on “Scream,” the franchise’s forever-favorite target, giving the movie a spine to hang its gags on while it sprints from one parody set piece to the next.
What makes this reboot genuinely well-timed is the buffet of modern horror it gets to feast on. The genre has completely transformed since the last time the Wayans were involved, exploding into a golden age of so-called “elevated horror” and box-office monsters. The film reportedly takes aim at a murderer’s row of recent hits — Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and “Nope,” the killer-doll sensation “M3GAN,” the unnerving “Longlegs,” “Heretic,” and even very recent phenomenons like “Sinners” and “Weapons.” There’s a decade-plus of pretentious, blockbuster, and viral horror ripe for skewering, and nobody deflates self-serious cinema quite like the Wayans.
That’s the sneaky-smart argument for this reboot existing at all. Parody thrives when its targets are big, earnest, and everywhere, and horror right now is exactly that — the most culturally dominant, critically celebrated it has been in years. A spoof that punctures the genre’s current self-importance, that reminds everyone these movies can be gloriously stupid fun, arrives at the perfect moment. The best “Scary Movie” gags always worked because they came from a place of affection for the very thing they were mocking, and there’s a mountain of beloved modern horror to lovingly trash.
There’s risk here, of course. The spoof-comedy format has fallen out of fashion, buried under years of lazy imitators that gave the genre a bad name, and comedy is brutally subjective. What one viewer finds a riotous send-up, another finds an exhausting parade of references. But the difference this time is the pedigree. This isn’t a cynical brand extension cranked out by hired hands; it’s the actual creators returning to reclaim their creation, with the original stars in tow, clearly motivated to prove they can still do it better than anyone who tried to replace them. That energy tends to show up on screen.
So the mask is back on, the gang is back together, and horror’s current crop of untouchable prestige hits are about to get a pie in the face. Whether “Scary Movie” recaptures the lightning of its turn-of-the-millennium heyday or feels like a nostalgia trip past its prime, there’s something satisfying about seeing the Wayans finally take back what was theirs. The franchise they invented and lost is theirs again. Now we find out if the funniest people to ever mock a slasher still have it.
What Do You Think? Does having the Wayans family back, along with Anna Faris and Regina Hall, instantly make this the “Scary Movie” reboot fans actually wanted? Is the current golden age of “elevated horror” — Peele, “M3GAN,” “Sinners,” “Weapons” — the perfect target for a spoof, or is some of it too good to mock? And has the parody genre been dead so long that its return feels fresh, or has that comedy style simply run its course?
See you on the next binge!
