Photo: Quantrell Colbert/Paramount/Everett Collection
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Scary Movie (and a couple dozen other horror films).
The Scary Movie franchise has always been a game of “spot the reference.” The first film, released back in 2000, is a parody of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer that lifts so much from both movies that it borders on plagiarism. Your enjoyment likely hinges on how much you appreciate lightly tweaked re-creations of the films it pulls from. In Scary Movie’s defense, it’s hard to satirize a satire — Scream was already a darkly funny deconstruction of the slasher movie, too self-aware to effectively lampoon. And while subsequent Scary Movie sequels branched out a bit with bigger-picture parody, the joke is still more about making the reference than making the reference funny.
The 13 years since Scary Movie 5 — and 25 years since Scary Movie 2, the last installment with the Wayans family’s involvement — have provided ample horror material to mine for a sequel. The only real surprise is that it took this long. The new Scary Movie (like Scream, the reboot comes without a number attached) is laden with the deeply specific references and early-aughts homophobia that made the series a hit. Sure, much of it already feels dated, given that the plot is derived from a four-year-old film, and that the culture has largely moved on from the slasher requel era. (We’ll have to wait for Scary Movie 7 to tackle the rise of YouTuber filmmakers. Free joke: Ray gets confused about what “the backrooms” refer to.) For anyone who has been paying attention to horror over the last decade-plus, however, there’s still plenty to Leo-meme point at.
With that in mind, here’s an exhaustive list of every film that the 2026 Scary Movie references and parodies.
It makes sense that Scary Movie would most directly parody the 2022 Scream, the film that popularized the term requel for a legacy sequel that brings back OG franchise characters while introducing new ones. Scary Movie identifies itself as a “rebootiquel” and does feature almost all of the first film’s cast, led by Anna Faris as Cindy Campbell and Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks.
The plot mirrors Scream’s to a T. Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif), a stand-in for Tara Carpenter, is attacked but not killed in the cold open. This lures back her estranged half-sister, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan), and Sara’s creepy, definitely-not-Ghostface boyfriend, Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts), whom you might recognize as Scream’s Sam and Richie. In fact, all of the newcomers are modeled after Scream characters: Dei (Sydney Park) and Brad (Gregg Wayans) are Mindy and Chad, Jess (Benny Zielke) is Wes, and Elle (Ruby Snowber) is a combination of Amber and Liv.
There’s no need to detail the way that nearly every Scary Movie plot point is pulled directly from Scream, from Doofy’s (Dave Sheridan) hospital hallway death to the house-party climax, in which Elle and Jack are revealed to be the killers. But if you’ve been waiting since 2022 for someone to point out that Amber’s “welcome to Act 3” line in Scream was maybe a touch too meta, your moment has finally arrived.
The fake-out cold open of Scary Movie features Teyana Taylor as Teyana Taylor re-creating the cold open of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving’s Laura gets lured into an alley by her supposed date and stabbed to death. Here, Teyana survives because she’s too ripped to be stabbed in the stomach (“My abs got abs”) and then calls for backup. After Ghostface mocks her for losing the Oscar, she bludgeons him with her Golden Globe.
Later, Scream VI is referenced as the one without Neve Campbell. True! Mindy surrogate Dei is also stabbed on the subway in a scene straight from Scream VI, but with far more jokes about they/them pronouns.
The Teyana Taylor scene turns out to be a film-within-a-film — it’s really the cold open to Horror Movie, a stand-in for Scream’s Stab and the movie Tuesday is watching before she’s attacked. This is exactly how the opening of Scream 4 plays out, though in that case, it ends up being a film-within-a-film-within-a-film. Layers!
At the end of Scary Movie, the true core four — Cindy, Brenda, Ray (Shawn Wayans), and Shorty (Marlon Wayans) — burn down the house where the murders took place in the original film. It’s almost certainly just a coincidence that this is what happens in the cold open to Scream 7, when Ghostface inexplicably torches Stu Macher’s home, but I’ll give it to Scary Movie anyway.
When we first see Cindy again, she’s styled exactly like Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in the 2018 Halloween, another (sure, let’s go with it) rebootiquel that uses the original movie’s title. Like Laurie, Cindy has become something of a doomsday prepper and alienated her family as a result of her traumatic teenage experience. (Of course, the line “I am Cindy fucking Campbell, I’ve got millions of guns” is a riff on what Sidney says in the 2022 Scream.)
Cindy’s booby-trapped home is also a reference to Iris’s fortified cabin in Final Destination Bloodlines. The little boy who gets crushed by a roller-coaster car and the lucky penny are lifted from Bloodlines, too, and in case you didn’t catch that, the amusement park where Sara and Jack work is called Final Destination Xtreme Theme Park.
The roller coaster itself is likely a callback to Final Destination 3 and its opening disaster.
Sadly, the memory-holed 2025 I Know What You Did Last Summer is mentioned solely for a joke about how no one knows it exists. Tough but fair.
Brenda is styled so much like the title character in Ma that she’s called out for resembling Octavia Spencer. She also demands that everyone calls her Ma, and later explains that she’s been getting high-school kids drunk and high to feel young. It’s not exactly subtle, but then, neither was Ma.
Tuesday, meanwhile, is styled to look like Jenna Ortega in Wednesday, which is a TV series and not a movie, but close enough. You might also notice a subtle connection between the names Tuesday and Wednesday, a nod to the fact that Ortega played Tara in Scream and Scream VI.
The biggest horror hit of 2025 is referenced repeatedly in Scary Movie, first with a church that looks an awful lot like the one in Sinners. (Ray proclaiming “I’m not gay no more” from the altar is a less timely reference to a 2014 viral video.) Later, at the Halloween party, Sara, Jack, and Tuesday show up dressed like Sinners’s Irish vampires. They ask to be invited in (per vampire rules) and then perform a gentrified version of The Jeffersons theme song. And at the same party, Shorty teaching his nephew Brad how to perform cunnilingus brings to mind Stack imparting that lesson to Sammie. But while Stack compares it to ice cream, Shorty likens it to rolling a blunt.
It’s been nearly a decade since Get Out hit theaters, but there hasn’t been a Scary Movie since then, and the Wayans weren’t going to not mention it. First, Shorty sees a man running at him on the lawn, just like Chris does in Get Out. Then he goes inside and gets forced into a hypnotherapy session, with Ghostface stirring his tea just like Catherine Keener’s Missy. Though this is ostensibly designed to help him quit smoking (weed, in this case), Shorty cries literal buckets before falling into the sunken place.
Shorty thinks the sunken place is a K-hole, but it’s really a K-pop hole. Suddenly, the sequence is animated to look like KPop Demon Hunters — they’re hunting demons, so yes, this counts as a horror-movie reference — and we get a parody of the Academy Award–winning song “Golden.” Sample lyrics: “We about to be tokin’ / Gonna be, gonna be smokin’.”
In one of Scary Movie’s laziest moments, Sara flashes back to Cindy taking her to see a mall Santa, who turns out to be Art the Clown from the Terrifier series. There’s no real joke here: Art poses as a mall Santa in the Christmas-set Terrifier 3. In that movie, he gifts the children disfiguring explosives. Here, it’s severed body parts.
Cindy keeps seeing people creepily smiling at her and is convinced it’s some sort of curse. This culminates in a scene at the hospital, where she sees her dead ex-boyfriend, Bobby (Jon Abrahams), grinning demonically at her. Once she hits him with a used bedpan, she discovers that it’s not really Bobby, just a cheerful mental patient.
Much like Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers in the 2022 Scream, Cheri Oteri’s Gail Hailstorm doesn’t get nearly enough to do in Scary Movie. But at least she has a memorable death scene inspired by The Substance! Ghostface takes advantage of Gail’s desire to look younger and injects her with the Stuff. She then collapses on the ground, where her back splits open and births one of the titular White Chicks. Also, the Epstein files.
In a different scene, Sara tells Tuesday to stop trying so hard to win an Oscar with her acting. “It’s a horror movie; it’ll never happen,” she sneers. “Just ask Demi.” And, yes, Demi Moore did lose the Best Actress trophy to (former Ghostface!) Mikey Madison, but the joke is weirdly outdated. Keep in mind that this is the same movie that opens with a reference to Teyana Taylor losing the Oscar to Amy Madigan for Weapons.
In a sequence that feels oddly removed from the rest of Scary Movie, Chris Elliott returns to the franchise as his tiny-handed character, now called Shorthand as a nod to Longlegs. He’s also almost as pasty as Nicolas Cage in that movie. Heidi Gardner’s stoic psychic FBI agent, Berger, is obviously a parody of Lee, the character played by Maika Monroe in Osgood Perkins’s film. Over the credits, we get an interrogation scene in which Shorthand celebrates Agent Berger’s birthday, then bashes his face into the table repeatedly. Again, this isn’t a joke so much as what happens in Longlegs.
Shorty chants “Candyman” in the mirror and summons the urban legend through a hole in the bathroom wall — except he’s just a regular guy who happens to have really bad skin and a hook for a hand. He’s called Candyman because he’s a dealer selling laced candy. Is this a reference to the 1992 Candyman or the 2021 reboot? It doesn’t really matter.
Brenda ends up handing out tainted candy to trick-or-treaters, who all get very high. The clocks flash to 2:17, the time the kids in Weapons disappeared, and children Naruto run through the streets. (Despite the Scary Movie poster with Ghostface in Aunt Gladys drag, she’s regrettably absent.)
Before Ghostface stabs Dei, he’s dressed up as M3GAN and dances through the subway car just like everyone’s favorite AI-powered doll.
As in Scream VI, there are a ton of horror-movie villains represented in the Halloween costumes on the subway, including Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Chucky, Pinhead, Billy the Puppet, the Babadook, and the Heart Eyes Killer.
Ray talks about tucking and dancing naked in front of the mirror like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and that’s not nearly the most transphobic joke in the movie.
After Cindy says, “I tried to run, too, but it follows,” she explains that they aren’t going to do a cutaway gag parodying It Follows because that movie is too obscure. Nevertheless, Ray’s memory of his mother (I’m so sorry) killing a man with her excessive squirting does appear to contain a visual allusion to the car scene from It Follows.
If you stay through the credits, you’ll get to see a fake trailer for a parody of the 2024 Nosferatu, featuring a Black Nosferatu named Brosferatu.
Walk with me here. Shorty’s livestream is sponsored by Angry Orchard, which also happens to be the hard-cider company responsible for Sweet Revenge, a spon-con short film that is (unfortunately) the first Friday the 13th movie since the 2009 reboot. Look, the use of Angry Orchard in Scary Movie is definitely just product placement, but because it’s a brand I associate with Jason, I’m including it here.
It probably goes without saying that all the prior Scary Movie entries get referenced throughout the new one. Carmen Electra cameos in the cold open and mentions her role as the opening kill in the first film. We see Greg Phillippe (Lochlyn Munro) and his small penis, both attached to and severed from his body. Cindy and Brenda get called out for appearing in Scary Movie sequels after the Wayans had been booted. Franchise alums Anthony Anderson (Scary Movie 3 and 4) and Shaquille O’Neal (Scary Movie 4) are revealed as additional Ghostface killers.
There are several more films referenced in Scary Movie that fall outside the genre. We don’t need to go over all of those, but while we’re here, they include John Wick (and Ballerina, as a movie no one saw), Everything Everywhere All at Once, Brokeback Mountain, Michael (Kenan Thompson plays Jermaine Jackson in a parody trailer), The House Bunny, 12 Years a Slave, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and, of course, Kazaam.
