Maybe It's Time We Put The Scary Movie Series Out To Pasture
Has the iconic parody franchise outwork its welcome?
It's simply impossible to overstate what a cultural shift it was when the original Scream landed in theaters back in 1996. After two decades of generic slasher-shlock in theaters, Wes Craven’s self-aware satire of the genre’s sillier excesses was a welcome and fresh recontextualization of what had become tired and stale. Unfortunately, the success of Scream didn't lead to a surge in original horror projects, but instead led to wave of cheap imitators like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legends, movies aping the meta nature of Craven’s project.
It's funny then that when Scary Movie hit the scene a few years later, it lead to much of the same – the first movie was an out-and-out parody of the original Scream (with quite a few other targets stuffed in its runtime), which proved popular enough to earn it $278 million at the box office. The film's overnight success spawned a series of five sequels, but it wasn't enough to just keep the parodies in-house — Scary Movie prompted a resurgence of parody movies (Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, etc.), each one more disappointing than the last, until the trend crash landed in the early 2010s. It's been 13 years since the release of Scary Movie 5, but there's a sixth installment in theaters right now… although it might be worth considering whether we need another installment at all.
In the 13 years since the last installment, the franchise has unfortunately not grown up a day.
The biggest initial hurdle that Scary Movie 6 struggles to overcome is it's narrative basis. It returns to the franchise's roots with the return of the original Scary Movie's Ghostface, a bumbling exaggeration of Scream's iconic murderer, but truthfully it's the first indication that the franchise is out of lock step with where contemporary horror is currently. Scream 5, the reboot that Scary Movie 6 bases much of its plot on, is in and of itself a revival of a franchise that had already been dead for 11 years — while that film was a relative success that led to two more sequels, it's also not really a reflection of the kinds of horror movies that have risen in its place. For a franchise that was originally so dialed in to the horror trends of the time, it's an odd choice for a foundation — and the brief vignettes the movie gives us of other movies, like Get Out or Longlegs or Sinners, are mostly throwaway gags that don't get to the heart of the ways in which the genre has changed in the last decade.
Speaking of change, the franchise's signature comedy has not done so at all. The Wayans Brothers, the original architects of the Scary Movie series, have returned in a creative capacity after being pushed out of their series by the Weinstein Company after the second film. It's certainly a victory to see the original creators get to lead the charge of what is arguably their most prominent creation, but the film can't help but escape the reality that much of their humor is incredibly dated — there's an abundance of toilet humor and try-hard offensive jokes targeted at the LGBTQ+ community, from cheap shots at a trans man trying to aggressively fit in with the boys, to a Black woman literally named Dei who meets an incredibly mean-spirited demise. For all the bluster in the film's marketing about trying to upset any and everyone, the problem with the comedy isn't necessarily that it's hurtful, but that it's just lazy, filled to the brim with jokes that probably would have felt just as simple back in 2007.
Anna Farris, however, has not lost a bit of her slapstick comedic edge.
Truthfully, it'd be difficult to ignore the impact that the Scary Movie franchise had on comedy for a decade, but comedy as a whole has just moved past the broad scattershot humor the franchise specializes in. While it's true that Hollywood has been in dire need of more comedies for a while now, you can see the way that other filmmakers and movies have picked up the torch of the parody film — 2022 gave us The Blackening, a film with the same aim of lampshading horror trends but with a much more unique and original approach to that idea. In fact, in the last few years we've had Weird: The Al Yankovich, The People's Joker, and last year's The Naked Gun, which are all movies that live in the parody space while bringing the genre into the present.
The verdict is still out on whether or not the film will be a massive success, but if it is, there's no doubt that there will be many more Scary Movie installments waiting for audiences in the future. If that does become the case, then hopefully the Wayans take a step back to survey the landscape, so that when they next set out to lampshade the current state of horror, they're at least approaching it in a way that doesn't feel trapped in the status quo of twenty years ago.
