YMMV / Scary Movie

• Alternative Joke Interpretation: The reporters for Black TV getting the hell out of town the moment white people start dying works whether you interpret that as them knowing that in horror movie scenarios the Black Dude Dies First, or suspecting that if they stick around they're going to be turned into scapegoats for the murders by racists.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The basketball scene from the second, based on a popular Nike commercial at the time. Good lord the basketball scene, which many also consider the best/funniest scene in the whole movie.
  • The "Twins" scene and the Michael Jackson Shout-Out to The Others (2001) in the third movie.
• Cargo Ship: Doofy and the Vacuum Cleaner in the first one, and Ray and the Clown Doll in the second.
• Contested Sequel: Different fans can easily find any given movie the worst or the best. Generally speaking, the biggest fan divide is between those who prefer the installments by the Wayans Family (the first two) and those who prefer the installments by David Zucker and Craig Mazin (the third and fourth). The fifth film, on the other hand, everyone can agree is pretty terrible.
• Crosses the Line Twice: So many examples that it has its own page.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Shorty for being a hilarious invocation of Stoners Are Funny and having a lot of the best lines.
  • Mahalik and CJ for their amusing Seinfeldian Conversation shtick and being loyal friends to George.
  • Doofy for being a surprisingly good twist villain who managed to deflect suspicion by pretending to be mentally challenged.
• Evil Is Cool: Doofy. The fact that he was a killer who feigned being mentally challenged was seen by many viewers as a surprisingly good twist.
• First Installment Wins: While the other films (except for the fifth film) also have their fans, the first Scary Movie is the most popular and is commonly considered the best.
• Franchise Original Sin: The first two films had scenes spoofing The Matrix, The Usual Suspects, Charlie's Angels, Mission: Impossible, and contemporary ad campaigns for Budweiser and Nike, none of which are horror movies. Overall, however, they were still clear-cut parodies of horror movies first as opposed to pop culture parodies. Not so in the third film, which had a whole subplot devoted to parodying 8 Mile and a much broader list of targets for its mockery than just horror movies. The third film also suffers from being a Narrow Parody; the first two are devoted to mocking popular subgenres of horror (the first film parodies teen slasher movies, the second parodies supernatural horror), while the third just mocks two recent horror films that happened to be recent hits at the time (namely Signs and The Ring), but otherwise have almost nothing in common. The following films only sank further into this morass, much like the rest of the spoof genre did in the 2000s — a morass for which many have blamed Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, a writer/director duo who built their careers on the fact that they were two of the six writers on the first film (and technically they only wrote a very early draft that was one of several scripts that would become Scary Movie).
• Friendly Fandoms: The franchise, at least the first film, has a following among fans of the Scream movies and some of said fans were introduced to Scream via the first Scary Movie.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Shorty making light of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown's substance abuse issues in the second movie becomes this after the former died of an overdose eleven years later.
  • James Woods' character Father McFeely comes off as pervy and sexually inappropriate Pedophile Priest, especially when he's told by Megan's mother that Megan won't allow her mom to go near her, to which Father McFeely suggests that she could convince Megan with candy. Years later, Woods was accused of sexual misconduct by then 16-year-old Amber Tamblyn.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The scene where the priest played by James Woods starts coming onto a possessed girl, given that he would later have a girlfriend decades younger than himself.
  • Brenda's movie theater murder in the first film was a parody of the scene in Scream 2 with Maureen's own. Their respective actresses, Regina Hall and Jada Pinkett-Smith, went on to star in Girls Trip together.
  • The leader of the aliens in 4 being the Jigsaw puppet from the Saw franchise, who wants to avenge his dead son. One year later, in the fourth installment of the actual Saw series, it's revealed that Jigsaw's motivation for his killings was his dead son — in fact, said puppet was originally built as a toy for the baby before his wife's miscarriage.
  • In the first movie, there's a Take That! to Shaquille O'Neal for his acting skills in Kazaam. Guess who shows up in 4?
  • One of the Ghostface killers' motives in the first film is that he's irrationally angry about the state of his favorite TV show. This foreshadowed the motive in Scream (2022), in which the killers were angry about the state of their favorite movie franchise.
  • Shorty and Brenda Meeks are named after Randy Meeks from the Scream franchise. Years later, the fifth Scream movie would actually have a pair of African-American siblings with the surname Meeks (in this case, they're Randy's niece and nephew).
  • The parodic twist scenario in the first film's climax, where the two Ghostfaces corresponding to the first Scream's are revealed to just be wannabes and are then finished off by the real Ghostface, is later echoed pretty directly in the real Scream movies as the cold open of VI, where wannabe independent Ghostfaces are shockingly revealed to the audience...but get killed off at the start of a spree by one of the real mystery killers the plot is centered on.
• Hollywood Homely: Very much played for laughs with Cindy Campbell who is played by the obviously attractive Anna Faris yet is constantly criticized over her appearance (this joke is dropped in the two Zucker/Mazin films which portray Cindy as more of a Brainless Beauty type.)
• Les Yay: Jody and Kendra in Scary Movie 5.
• Mandela Effect: In one scene Shorty states "I see dead people" after getting high, a reference to the horror movie The Sixth Sense, released the previous year. However, many clearly remember him saying "I see white people" instead, which would be a racial joke.
• Memetic Mutation: Name a Brenda scene. Any Brenda scene. There's probably not a single second of her screen-time that hasn't been gif-ed and/or spread in some form, most of them being mainstays in the regular internet meme-vocabulary to this day. Classics include her breathlessly eating popcorn while Samara steps out of her TV ("Cindy, this bitch is messing up my floor!"), having a Jump Scare in the theatre ("Lord, imma have a heart attack! Damn, this is some scary shit!), judging her friend's dating habits ("She don't love herself!") and multiple parts of the sequence where her and Cindy are chased by an undead skeleton ("Die, bitch, please die!", "Cindy, this is a skeleton, this is bones!").
  • In Russia, this scene from the second movie where Father McFeely attempts to leave the scene saying (in the original) "Fuck this".
• My Real Daddy: Fans of 3 and 4 sometimes consider Craig Mazin to be this, as he was the main writer on those two films (and Superhero Movie), which did better among general audiences than 2 did. Tellingly, when he left to do the sequels to The Hangover, the quality of the fifth film dropped like a brick.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The climax of Cindy and Bobby's sex scene in the first movie.
  • The (thankfully) brief, snotty scene in the first movie.
  • The Evil Dead (2013) sequence in the fifth movie.
• Nightmare Fuel: Professor Oldman getting seduced and killed by The Ghost Of Hugh Kane's Mistress in Scary Movie 2 is a geniunely frightnening scene. Especially since we don't exactly see how she killed him.
• Older Than They Think: What this movie does in two hours, Shasta McNasty did in a 30-minute Halloween Special: "I Know What You Did To My Feathers"
• Only the Creator Does It Right: A fair number of fans feel this way about the Wayans Family, appreciating their cruder, more pop-culture savvy style seen in the first two films over David Zucker and Craig Mazin's more straightforward spoof style used in the third and fourth films, although those films do have fans of their own (see Surprisingly Improved Sequel below).
• Paranoia Fuel: Despite it being played for laughs, there is a bit of creepiness during the scene in Scary Movie 3, where Tom sees the sheriff's hat gets bigger. Again, it is played for laughs but there it shows that Tom's mind might be slipping to the point where things don't seem real. The sheriff doesn't seem to notice so it could be in Tom's head.
  Youtube Commenter: This is how becoming insane feels like.
• Parody Displacement:
  • The basketball scene from 2 is far more memorable than the original 2000 Nike commercial that inspired it.
  • Many people may be more familiar with Brenda's movie theater death in Scary Movie than Maureen's movie theater death in Scream 2, despite the latter inspiring the former. Aside from how over-the-top funny (and much more deserving) the later scene was, a good reason may be because Regina Hall was one of the film's protagonists unlike Jada Pinkett's Advertised Extra.
  • In France, "Wazzup" became memetic, but only the Scary Movie version, since the Bud ad never aired there.
• Retroactive Recognition: Kevin Hart as CJ in the third and fourth movies.
• Rule of Sean Connery: Tim Curry's role in Scary Movie 2. Unfortunately, it's also the worst of the franchise (unless you dislike 5 even more) so your appreciation of his performance depends on how much you can stomach the rest of it.
• Sacred Cow: The original film is considered a classic spoof film, and it is considered unacceptable to criticize it like other modern spoof films, most of which are poorly received.
• Sequelitis: With only 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, Scary Movie 5 is, by far, the worst one.
• Shallow Parody: Increasingly so as the series progressed. The first film took flack for how it was a parody of a franchise that was already a parody.
  "Damn, that is some quantum shit!!"
• Signature Scene: It's a tie between the "Wassup" phone sequence and the rap scene where the killer murders everyone, except Shorty.
• Special Effect Failure: From the first film's scene where the teacher commits suicide by jumping off of the school, it's an obvious dummy falling onto an obvious soft pad which is then quickly edited to look like he landed on the flat grass. This only adds to the humor, though.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Scary Movie 3 was generally considered a great improvement on 2, with the gross-out humor being replaced by more straightforward humor reminiscent of Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun trilogy. It helps that one of the three writer-directors of those projects (David Zucker) took over as director with Leslie Nielsen making an appearance (having previously starred in Airplane! and The Naked Gun). Some even consider it the best of the series.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • A big problem with Scary Movie 2, even taking into account the fact that spoof movies generally don't age too well. In addition to the film featuring a lot of spoofs of adverts and music videos from 2000—2001 (which are a lot less likely to be remembered than films from the same time period), most of the films being spoofed got horrible critical receptions and were quickly forgotten (barring The Exorcist and Poltergeist (1982)), which hurts the film quite badly these days. The second movie also contains a reference to then popular, but now mostly-forgotten game show The Weakest Link and a joke about Mad Cow Disease, a disease that was hot-topic at the time but has since been virtually eradicated.
  • Scary Movie 4 suffers from this to some extent, as a result of a lot of references to pop cultural things that are now mostly forgotten or considered outdated, such as MySpace and the original iPod. Fortunately, most of the films being spoofed are still well-remembered and well-regarded (with the arguable exception of The Village (2004)), so the film doesn't feel quite as dated overall.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Officer Doofy in the first film. Although it was all a façade, the fact that his intellectual disabilities are played for laughs wouldn’t fly anymore well into The New '20s.
  • Likewise, Ms. Mann brings to mind panic surrounding transgender individuals in locker rooms or restrooms and would likely be seen as a highly transphobic gag if released today.
• Values Resonance: Yes, really. A recurring joke throughout the series that the wholesome white girl nearly always makes it to the end of the movie unscathed while the black characters are perfectly aware that they're all dead meat. In The New '10s, where Black Lives Matter is a prominent sociopolitical movement and putting the Token Minority first on the chopping block is more likely to make audiences groan, this makes the black characters come across sympathetically.
• Vindicated by History: The second film was highly panned when it was first released. Now, it's considered a classic and is viewed as one of the better films in the franchise (and one of the better parody movies overall).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: You wouldn't think so with this series, but Scary Movie 4 featured a version of the infamous bathroom from the Saw franchise that not only was on point to how the original looked, but the makers of Saw III were so impressed, they were able to use it (With some minor alterations) for that film while also saving money with the budget.
• Woolseyism: The Russian dub of the first 2 movies, due to cultural differences and the audience being unfamiliar with many of the spoofed movies, often invented its own jokes to great effect.

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