Wazzup! Every Horror Movie You Need to See Before Scary Movie 6
On a perfectly respectable Monday evening, the Scary Movie 6 trailer dropped online with a message to say “We’re baaaaaack” along with a characteristically groan-inducing gag about pronouns straight off the bat.
Fans of the spoof comedy franchise—or at least, cinema-goers nostalgic for a time when a new one of these was released every two years or so—would be well within their rights to snag on that joke, yet the Wayans brothers' alarmingly successful and influential string of horror comedies have never flirted with respectability—so why start now?
The other (much better) thing that the trailer delivered was a reliably delirious mix of horror references—some that call back to the 1970s, others to movies released as recently as last summer. As horror fans who’ve been patiently waiting for this latest instalment will know, it’s been over a decade since Scary Movie 5, which means that the brothers have an entire bloody era of horror to dunk on.
In the list below, we’ve rounded up the most important ones to catch up on, based on the Scary Movie 6 trailer. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
We’ll start things off with a no-brainer: if you’re planning on watching Scary Movie 6, it’s well worth going back to watch at least a few of the original movies—all five if you have the time and aren’t particularly worried about sacrificing a few good brain cells.
The series basically reinvented a spoof genre that Hollywood was known for in the 1980s—think movies like Airplane! and Naked Gun, only, well, much stupider.
The trailer’s opening sequence, which takes place on what looks like a New York subway, is a literal murderer’s row of movie references. First, we see Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, then Jason from Friday the 13th, then the killer from Heart Eyes. Sharp-eyed viewers (or anyone with a pause button) might have also spotted Pennywise from It, Pinhead from Hellraiser, another person dressed as Chucky, and another as Michael Myers from Halloween. In other words, a bunch of horror legends as well as, well, Heart Eyes.
The first recent horror thing that the trailer references is the iconic dance scene from M3GAN—a surprise crossover AI horror hit from 2022 that’s well worth checking out if you like your horror low on gore and high on camp. Also, don’t listen to the haters, the sequel’s pretty good, too.
Watching the trailer on Monday evening, I got my first real belly laugh from seeing the braided girl who Ghostface calls “Tuesday”, which is, of course, a delightfully dumb reference to Wednesday—the Jenna Ortega-led Netflix series that sparked its own M3GAN-like viral dance in 2022.
If you haven’t seen it, the gothy, Adams Family spin-off show is typical of the recent work Tim Burton has either directed or produced—like 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The next clear reference appears to be to the 2018 reboot of Halloween—a movie in which the franchise’s Final Girl, Laurie Strode, can be seen with the same frazzled blond hair and military jacket that Anna Faris sports in the trailer.
The movie itself probably isn’t anyone’s favourite instalment in the long-running slasher franchise, but it did manage to bring Jamie Lee Curtis back into the fold after the scream queen passed on Rob Zombie’s attempted reboots.
Outside of its heavily remunerated creators, the biggest success story of the Scary Movie franchise thus far has undoubtedly been Regina Hall—an actress and comedian who has enjoyed a varied career since bowing out after the fourth instalment and was even a little unlucky to miss out on a nomination at the Oscars this year for her performance in One Battle After Another.
Given all that, the actress would have been well within her rights to give Scary Movie 6 a pass. Instead, she’s thankfully returned to play Brenda once more, and this time with a look cribbed from Octavia Spencer’s Ma—a 2019 horror about a woman who invites some teenagers into her home only to end up terrorising them.
