Built around horror references, social media jokes, and anti-woke punchlines, Scary Movie 6 (2026) rarely functions as parody, instead becoming a reflection of a culture that keeps recycling old ideas while convincing itself they are still provocative.
While the Scary Movie series is probably near the top of the list of things humanity should have left behind by now, somehow, in 2026, we find ourselves watching another Scary Movie film. What can I say? I suppose we have never lost our ability to create truly great works of art as thoroughly as we have in this era. We seem trapped in a cursed age where old ideas are endlessly reheated and served back to us as if they were something new. In a way, Scary Movie 6 deserves credit for reminding us of this mediocrity once again, exposing just how creatively bankrupt, repetitive, and cheap our cultural moment has become.
At first, Scary Movie (2000) was a genuinely fun idea. The films it parodied were cultural phenomena powerful enough to remain relevant for years. Scream (1996) was not disposable content consumed and forgotten like last year’s Twitter trends; it was a film that changed the direction of horror cinema. But now, in the middle of a dopamine-fueled culture where even the biggest sensation survives for no more than a week, Scary Movie 6 desperately tries to manufacture comedy by making the most obvious jokes imaginable about films such as Sinners (2025), Terrifier (2016), Get Out (2017) and The Substance (2024)—movies that have already passed through the public conversation and, in some cases, are beginning to fade from collective memory.
The problem is that the film has nothing new to say about any of them. The Get Out references amount to little more than recycled “Sunken Place” jokes that have been circulating online for years.The Substance parody ignores the film’s ideas about body horror and beauty obsession, reducing everything to grotesque imagery.
The Terrifier material offers little beyond Art the Clown appearing on screen. M3GAN dances. A Wednesday parody character named Tuesday exists. Ghostface is linked to influencer culture. Social media jokes are scattered throughout the film. None of these ideas generate comedy on their own. The movie constantly asks, “Remember this?” but cannot even explain why the things it wants us to remember should be funny in the first place.
Parody once meant taking a work apart and exposing its absurdities. Scary Movie 6, more often than not, settles for simple recognition. The mere appearance of a character or a movie reference has somehow become the joke itself.
One of the developments that generated the most excitement around the film was the return of the Wayans brothers. Ironically, that was the aspect I found most disappointing. When I love a comedy, I usually describe it as the product of a sharp and sophisticated intelligence. The Wayans brothers’ style of comedy has always occupied the opposite end of that spectrum for me. If Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988) are the Jesus Christ of absurdist comedy, then the comedic tradition represented by the Wayans brothers is its Antichrist. Their return did not excite me in the slightest. If anything, it only irritated me.
What made Airplane! and The Naked Gun great was not simply their absurdity. Those films often contained multiple layers of comedy operating simultaneously within a single scene. One joke worked in the foreground, another in the background, and yet another emerged from the dialogue itself. A visual gag, a wordplay joke, and a character’s dead-serious reaction could all coexist and function at the same time.
In the Wayans brothers’ films, by contrast, I often feel as though an idea stops at the very first point where it could possibly be considered funny. The most obvious version of a joke is chosen, and no effort is made to push it further. Personally, rather than laughing at Cindy using dildos as weapons while fighting Ghostface, I would probably find someone simply slipping and falling funnier and, frankly, more intelligent.
I wasn’t particularly fond of last year’s Naked Gun remake—or sequel, or whatever it ultimately was but at the very least, the filmmakers seemed to have studied absurdist comedy as if preparing for an exam. You could see a genuine effort to reach a certain level of cleverness. Looking back, I cannot help wondering whether I judged that film too harshly.
While promoting Scary Movie 6, the Wayans brothers made comments about “cancelling cancel culture” and seem to be positioning themselves as warriors fighting woke culture while bringing back supposedly free and unrestricted comedy. To me, that mindset does not look very different from Elon Musk behaving strangely on social media and declaring that we need to “legalise comedy.”
At one point in the film, Ghostface stabs a woman on a subway train. One passenger reacts by shouting, “Oh my God, he stabbed her!” The victim then turns around and replies, “My pronouns are they/them,” as though that is somehow more important than the fact that she has just been stabbed. You could easily respond by saying, “Well, they are making fun of excessive sensitivity within woke culture. Maybe you’re offended because you’re one of those people.”
Yes, I am annoyed—but not because of the target of the joke. I am annoyed because a stale punchline I have heard countless times online is being presented to me as if it belongs in the same conversation as Airplane!. The problem is not what the joke is aimed at. The problem is the joke itself. Observing that some people place excessive importance on pronouns is not inherently a comedic idea. It is merely an observation. Comedy emerges from what you do with that observation.
Airplane! and The Naked Gun remain funny decades later not because they touched forbidden subjects or because they were politically incorrect, but because they knew how to build layers on top of even the simplest premise. Here, the entire joke consists of a single observation, and the film never takes it anywhere beyond that.
Even worse, much of the movie operates at exactly this level. The jokes about influencer culture are indistinguishable from internet comments. The social media references feel like a collection of old tweets transferred directly onto the screen. The film’s structure is as scattered as an endless stream of TikTok videos. It constantly imagines itself to be bold and provocative, but in reality, it merely points at the easiest targets that have been circulating online for years. In fact, a critic whose name I unfortunately cannot remember made a brilliant observation: rather than criticizing Hollywood, these films have increasingly begun criticizing their own audience.
For that reason, Scary Movie 6 does not feel like the return of free comedy to me. Quite the opposite. It feels like a culture that has lost its creative spark but still imagines itself to be a dangerous, boundary-pushing artistic movement.
That concludes our review of Scary Movie 6
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