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Shawn and Marlon Wayans — creators of the first two films in the franchise — return to the creative chair with Scary Movie, the series’ comeback after all these years. Michael Tiddes, whom we know from previous collaborations with the Wayans Brothers, takes the director’s seat. This reunion, coming after a 26-year gap, takes franchise fans on a nostalgic journey. The film, opening in Turkey on June 5, stars core alumni Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Shawn Wayans, and Marlon Wayans.
Cinema’s collective memory, etched into minds over the years, carries traces from various moments of most people’s lives. At what age one watched something, with whom and where, under what circumstances — all of this is branded into our memories like a seal. For some, the continuation of a franchise means filtering childhood memories through a sieve; for others, it means remembering a past or ongoing relationship. Over the years, much has been written about the insistence on sequels to blockbuster films. There is undeniably a power mechanism by which these franchises can spark something against the periodic volumes of human life. The industry’s persistent desire to capitalize on this nostalgia wave is precisely because it is aware of this effect. Indeed, most products today are able to ride the wave of high expectations and growing enthusiasm among people.
Therefore, when we consider Scary Movie‘s 26-year journey from the early 2000s, its impact on an era is undeniable. Whether one boards the expectation-and-nostalgia roller coaster spawned by that impact is a matter of when one’s path crossed with it. Because at this point the following question must be asked: can a person laugh at the same kind of humor at every age? This is, in truth, a question that varies from person to person. But setting out from here, if behind the humor there is someone else’s pain, can a person look at what they are watching in the same way at every stage of their life? When speaking of Scary Movie‘s impact on a generation, perhaps these are the questions from which to begin. Because what is “entertaining” or disturbing here is a matter of at what stage in life, with what awareness, or with what expectations one turns one’s eyes toward the silver screen.
Who’s the Killer?
After the franchise passed to Jim Abrahams and David Zucker — known from ZAZ comedies — with the third film, the Wayans Brothers here choose to return to the tone of the first two entries in the series. By introducing “new generation” characters alongside the core cast, they create a generational clash. While doing so with a fairly large ensemble, they construct a familiar script dynamic for fans of the series through surprise cameos and film references.
At times, we also encounter elements frequently seen in Zucker and his team’s comedic sensibility. They break the fourth wall repeatedly, keeping viewer interaction front and center. Just as in the first film, Ghostface from Scream returns as the main villain; and references abound to Weapons (2025), Sinners (2025), One Battle After Another (2025), KPop Demon Hunters (2025), Longlegs (2024), The Substance (2024), M3GAN (2022), Get Out (2017), Terrifier, Wednesday, and many more.
The film advances through a constant stream of sketches, keeping its tension level considerably lower than its predecessors and contenting itself with merely housing horror film characters. The iconic Shorty character brought to life by Marlon Wayans, with his dated characterization persisting from 26 years ago to the present, is one of the film’s relatively better aspects. The scenes where the old crew reunites, along with jokes referencing the franchise’s earlier films, aim to tap into the nostalgic vein of those who know the series.
Scary Movie advances its parody through the perpetually recurring “What’s your favorite scary movie?” question and the slasher film riddle of “Who’s the killer?” Along the way, it tries to present its indifferent attitude as a kind of differentiation and strength. At the film’s end it turns this indifference into an industrial critique. Yet all of these ideas feel both inherently messy on screen and like a pile of wasted jokes. The pacing problems between scenes compound this. While humor is the only determining element in a film that tries to operate without a proper script, the satirical tone remains stuck in a nostalgia that has grown stale.
“We’re Canceling Equality”
In cinema, parody’s collaboration with horror can serve as a mirror to better understand an era’s suppressed cultural norms and social manias. Concepts such as paranoia, dread, the uncanny, and the unknown contained within fear actually crack open a sense of unconscious catharsis. When humor enters the equation here, we cannot speak of it as a fixed phenomenon. The elements that determine what kind of subtext a joke is delivered with change ceaselessly across days and years. And perhaps the most important thing that keeps changing and holds meaning for us is the socio-political climate from which the humor deployed draws its power.
The point to which Scary Movie speaks in 2026 encompasses a period in which the audience’s intellectual accumulation and sensibilities have changed — a period in which certain gains have been achieved. At this point, Marlon Wayans‘s setting out under the slogan “We’re canceling cancel culture” is in truth a symptom of the era’s conservative and stagnant thrashings. This slogan is, under the guise of free expression, a hate speech in its own right.
The concept of “woke” — born from the instinct of Black communities in America to remain alert, having suffered various forms of systematic discrimination, physical violence, and abuse since the early 1900s — became an integrated concept in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd‘s death through police violence. This concept, which grew alongside sensitivity and expressed “staying alert,” has become the voice of all rights struggles: environmental rights, feminism, anti-colonialism, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and more.
At this point, it is impossible to think of the “anti-woke” rhetoric embraced by director Michael Tiddes and the film’s team separately from state policies. The understanding of canceling the gains made by people who have been subjected to discrimination, inequality, and every form of violence for centuries — for the sake of a film, and drawing humor from it — is nothing other than a desire to re-legitimize inequalities. This perspective, behind the scenes, normalizes every form of emotional, physical, and systematic violence experienced by gender identities and minorities.
The “End Woke and Cancel Culture” Rhetoric
Marlon Wayans‘s repeatedly voiced claim that “cancel culture killed comedy” is, in reality, nothing more than an effort to construct victimhood. The film presents its own offensive, demeaning, and uncomfortable comedy as if it were the “savior of humor.” Under this packaging it then sets out to draw audiences into theaters. At this point, those who object to its jokes — jokes that legitimize inequalities and aim to normalize them — are declared “woke police” who obstruct freedom of expression.
Scary Movie follows a humor that extends from racism, police violence, and the Epstein files to the #MeToo movement, pronoun jokes, and climate activism. It does not aim to create awareness or difference from any of these points. It adopts a language that serves to reinforce these important struggles waged on behalf of humanity and the crimes that fuel violence. After delivering typical jokes about a character’s sexual orientation, it can even dare to say “Your new gender will be dead.” Or it can make us watch a woman being stabbed repeatedly by various men on the subway.
At this point, rather than the question of whether humor has a limit, the fact that comedy wants to hurt its subject by adopting a language of violence is a deeply disturbing and triggering situation. When we return to fundamentals: how can a film presented in the comedy genre, released worldwide, having a language that wants to hurt its subjects, correspond to any comedic response? What is being displayed is nothing other than the use of people’s differences and identities as weapons. In these scenes, attitudes and behaviors that are masked in everyday life meet with laughter. The bullets from the gun are fired from the screen toward the audience, causing masks to fall and all suppressed impulses to find voice.
The pronoun jokes in the film address a significant and valuable expressive gain of our time. But this, too, is expressed with a quite aggressive stance. The subway scene in particular reaches a dimension that can be analyzed through the lens of “transmisogyny” — the intersection of transphobia and misogyny experienced by trans women and transfeminine individuals. The film frequently builds its humor on this subject from the following premise: that the categories of woman and man are biologically immutable and that both represent two absolute poles.
Scary Movie makes jokes that try to turn the existence of trans, non-binary, and gender-fluid individuals into a plaything for its humor, underlining the absoluteness of male and female. These demeaning and disturbing jokes contain not only the laughter of the audience they address but also an emerging expression of contempt toward the demeaned group. What is said is covered as a “joke” rather than a statement. These elements are in fact incredibly facilitative arguments for the externalization of suppressed anger toward the target group. Statements made about groups that have been othered, that have struggled for centuries with systematic difficulties and pain, gain legitimacy in the cinema hall through laughter. Here one laugh begets another. As much as is suppressed in the hall, that is how much breath is inhaled and exhaled. When the black screen appears, people return to their everyday lives with the breath they left behind in the cinema hall.
Scary Movie‘s “ending woke and cancel culture” rhetoric is, beyond being a cinema marketing strategy, the ideological mouthpiece of conservative and stagnant desires that arise reactively in the name of women’s rights, social justice, gender equality, and all the gains made. Interpreting this demeaning use of humor as nothing more than harmless free expression is to turn a blind eye to many more social pains yet to come. On the contrary, existing prejudices are normalized and legitimized under the guise of humor, positioned as a tolerance-increaser. What the Wayans Brothers claim they will destroy is a path leading to the questioning of the gains made by all minorities and groups subjected to every form of violence and discrimination in their pursuit of equality.
The direction of the “attacks” Scary Movie tries to make humor from is not a “woke dictatorship” restricting free expression or weakening comedy — it is always the side that defends equality. Enjoying the film references, slapstick, or the sections where absurdist comedy is foregrounded is a personal choice. But the parts that demean every human constituency prevent those elements from being assessed independently of the film’s overall use of them. Viewed in this context, it cannot be said — as the producers and team claim — that an incredible revision has been accomplished here. On the contrary, what is most visibly apparent is an advocacy, under the roof of entertainment, that is oriented toward the past’s exclusionary attitudes and guards a structure consisting of two privileged poles.
To read more articles by Ahmet Duvan, click here.
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