Scary Movie Season Is Back So Revisit 3 of the Franchise’s Wildest Chapters on Tubi
The Scary Movie franchise has spent decades roasting whatever horror couldn't stop talking about, and three chapters are ready for a spooky-season rewatch on Tubi.
Wassup?! Sorry. We legally had to.
More than 25 years after Scary Movie introduced Cindy Campbell, Brenda Meeks, Shorty, one extremely unserious Ghostface, and an entire generation to a version of horror where nobody was safe from becoming the punchline, the franchise came screaming back this year. The sixth Scary Movie hit theaters in June after a 13-year absence, reuniting Anna Faris and Regina Hall alongside Marlon and Shawn Wayans for another round of genre slander. Turns out the Final Girl retirement plan continues to have terrible benefits, because even parody's favorite survivors are getting pulled back into the horror revival.
Perfect timing, because spooky season has us looking backward. Scary Movie, Scary Movie 4, and Scary Movie 5 are currently on Tubi, giving us three very different snapshots of what horror audiences were obsessing over in 2000, 2006, and 2013. The franchise may be ridiculous, but its targets are basically little pop-culture timestamps. Slashers dominate one era. Jigsaw and Japanese-horror remakes come knocking in another. Eventually, everybody owns a security camera because a demon might move a chair at 3:14 a.m.
Is this a complete Scary Movie marathon? No. Is it enough to watch horror trends change while increasingly bizarre people attempt to survive them? Absolutely. So grab the popcorn, leave your dignity somewhere safe, and let Tubi's Terror on Tubi supply the actual scares once we're finished making fun of them.
Scary Movie
Before Ghostface was answering increasingly complicated questions about horror trivia, the Scary Movie version was having a less professional relationship with the job.
The 2000 original drops Cindy Campbell and her friends into a murder mystery that borrows heavily from Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, then proceeds to treat neither movie with an ounce of respect. The killer has the familiar mask. The teens are hiding a deadly secret. Cindy is very clearly our Sidney Prescott stand-in. Everything surrounding those recognizable ingredients has gone completely off the rails.
What makes the first movie especially fun is how committed everyone is to making the worst possible version of a familiar horror character. Cindy tries to fulfill her final-girl duties while surrounded by people who would barely survive the opening scene of a normal slasher. Brenda refuses to react to danger appropriately. Shorty seems to be having a completely different movie night. Even Ghostface occasionally appears more interested in joining the nonsense than completing the murder part of the job.
Anna Faris somehow makes Cindy the closest thing this movie has to a functioning human being, while Regina Hall's Brenda and Marlon Wayans' Shorty turn supporting characters into two of the franchise's biggest scene-stealers. The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, and plenty of turn-of-the-millennium pop culture also wander into the parody blender, making the movie feel less like one spoof and more like the year 2000 losing control of the remote.
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Scary Movie 4
By 2006, horror had changed. Cindy Campbell had not developed better survival instincts in the meantime.
Scary Movie 4 catches the genre during its Saw, The Grudge, and War of the Worlds era, throwing Cindy into a mashup of Jigsaw traps, ghostly encounters, and an alien invasion that absolutely nobody trained her for.
Cindy and Brenda also have the energy of women who have survived enough horror franchises to know panic is optional by now. Cindy can encounter another deeply concerning supernatural situation and somehow keep moving, while Brenda continues treating mortal danger like a personal inconvenience. Their complete inability to stay away from horror becomes part of the joke: different monster, different movie reference, same two women somehow back in the middle of it.
Death has never seemed particularly binding for Brenda, and by now her latest return barely needs an explanation. The Village and other mid-2000s hits also get caught in the crossfire, but the fun isn't only identifying which movie is being roasted. It's watching completely different horror worlds get stitched together until everything Scary Movie 4 throws at Cindy Campbell somehow feel like they belong to the same deeply unserious universe.
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Scary Movie V
Fast-forward to 2013 and horror has discovered a terrifying new enemy. Home surveillance footage.
Scary Movie 5 takes aim at the found-footage and supernatural boom led by Paranormal Activity, while Mama, Evil Dead, Black Swan, and other recognizable hits get pulled into the chaos.
This time, Ashley Tisdale's Jody and Simon Rex's Dan take over the central story without Cindy or Brenda around to help or make things significantly worse. The switch gives movie five the energy of a reboot happening inside a series built to make fun of reboots. Jody and Dan inherit the basic Scary Movie responsibility of remaining remarkably functional while their lives become a mashup of whatever Hollywood had recently decided was terrifying.
Cameras go up around their home, strange activity begins, creepy children are involved, and eventually ballet gets dragged into the nightmare because apparently Black Swan hadn't suffered enough. The targets may have changed from masked slashers to demonic activity, but the franchise's philosophy remains beautifully uncomplicated: if pop culture took it seriously, Scary Movie probably shouldn't.
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