With ‘Scary Movie’ returning in a hotly-anticipated sequel later this year, Matthew Rozsa revisits the best in the series; ‘Scary Movie 4.’
Once upon a time, a movie spoofing a horror series… did such a good job that the filmmakers behind that series asked to use one of their sets.
Twenty years ago — on April 14, 2006, to be precise — Miramax Films released Scary Movie 4, the fourth installment in the hit horror movie spoof franchise. While I doubt the upcoming Scary Movie 6 is being released to capitalize on that anniversary, it would be fitting if that were the case, because Scary Movie 4 is the best B-movie in the series. Just look at how it manages to see Saw, and as a result, get “seen” in the most meaningful sense of that word by the Saw filmmakers.
Scary Movie 4 is the Gold Standard for Spoofs
Courtesy of Buena Vista International
Sure, 2000’s Scary Movie probably has the most nostalgic value; the cast list for Scary Movie 6 shows many characters from that film are returning for this one. Among the sequels, 2003’s Scary Movie 3 was the most lucrative, grossing $221 million. Yet Scary Movie 4 is unique among the sequels because (a) it focuses entirely on movies that have proved to be classics and (b) it is, quite simply, the most brilliant in its comedy.
Among the entries, only chose as its primary targets movies that, for the most part, also aged well ( and ). By contrast, 2001’s focused on the forgettable remake; targeted , an M. Night Shyamalan film widely remembered today for its risible plot twists, and a bona fide classic in Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of ; and 2013’s lampooned the obscure and the overrated ballet melodrama
Scary Movie
Scary Movie
Scream
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Scary Movie 2
The Haunting
Scary Movie 3
Signs
The Ring
Scary Movie 5
Mama
Black Swan.
Scary Movie 4, on the other hand, focuses on the first two Saw movies, the 2004 American remake of The Grudge, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of War of the Worlds, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, and Michael Moore’s political documentary skewering President George W. Bush’s administration, Fahrenheit 9/11.
Because it encompassed so many targets, critics missed the point that they were both worthy of satire and that the jokes landed far more often than not. The New York Times’ Nathan Leed dismissed the movie as funny but “parody without plot,” while The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter admitted to being ashamed at having laughed at its humor. Yet Scary Movie 4 does have a plot — well, it has exactly as much plot as every other movie in the series, which is to say it’s a purée of its source materials — and throughout its narrative, crafted by director David Zucker and screenwriters Craig Mazin, Jim Abrahams, and Pat Proft, it repeatedly sticks its comedy landing.
Take its approach to The Village. Of all the movies it picks on, only The Village fails to hold up as a classic – as Scary Movie 4 notes, it has a plot twist as dumb as that in Signs – but The Village was also visually lush and distinctive, and Scary Movie 4 picks up on that. It is also full of sharp observations about the post-9/11 themes that suffused War of the Worlds, the spooky imagery and ambiance in The Grudge, and the ways torture traps can go wrong in the Saw universe.
For a Better Understanding of Scary Movie 4’s Genius, Look at What it Does With the Saw films.
Courtesy of Buena Vista International
Two of the comedy high points in Scary Movie 4 involve scenes in Saw and Saw II. In the opening, we see TV therapist Dr. Phil McGraw and basketball star Shaquille O’Neal trapped in a bathroom with their legs chained to pipes on the walls. When they realize they can only escape by cutting through their feet with a saw, the two celebrities engage in a heart-to-heart… with results unlike anything one would ever see in a Saw movie.
Marcus Dunstan, who co-wrote Saw IV through Saw VII, shared an interesting nugget about this scene; the set of the decrepit bathroom was reused in subsequent Saw sequels. “I thought it was a wonderful moment of industry harmony when Scary Movie 4’s Saw parody set was reused in Saw III,” Dunstan said. “The Saw II bathroom set had long been destroyed, and the production design team of Scary Movie 4 had done such an excellent job recreating it for Scary Movie 4… that Saw III came a calling… and movie twistory was made.” Dunstan concluded, “Long live creation, collaboration, and inspiration!”
Kevin Greutert, who edited the first five Saw movies before directing the sixth, seventh, and tenth films, added a little more nuance to Dunstan’s recollection. “My cobweb-riddled memory has [Twisted Pictures executives] Mark [Burg] and Oren [Koules] purchasing the Scary Movie 4 bathroom from Bob Weinstein for Saw IV, not III,” Greutert recalled. “And that the burden of buying and transporting it across the country was not cost-effective, and frankly, the set itself was really shoddy.” Ultimately, Saw production designer David Hackl, who also directed the fifth film, was brought in to bring the setup to Saw standards.
“I think Twisted Pictures just liked the publicity of buying the set from [Scary Movie 4], although my guess is that the first thing they thought of when they heard Saw was being parodied was ‘Wait, that’s not funny, let’s sue!’” Greutert joked. It isn’t simply that the Saw creatives took sets from Scary Movie 4; they actively enjoyed the movie as well. Josh Stolberg, who co-wrote the ninth and tenth Saw installments, was quite enthusiastic about the film when asked.
“About whether the Saw parody works comedically… fuck yeah!” Stolberg said. “I enjoyed it at the time, before I was ever involved in Saw… and now appreciate it even more having lived in that world for the past decade.” Breaking it down, Stolberg pointed out that both the leg trap parody and another scene — also set in the bathroom, and this time with an eyeball-based trap involving series star Anna Faris and pulled from Saw II — “because the filmmakers understand the TONE of Saw — the seriousness, the moral weight, the, dare I say it, self-importance… and then they completely undercut it.”
Stolberg, who also directed the comedies Kids in America (which he also co-wrote) and The Hungover Games and wrote Good Luck Chuck, broke down what makes parody work.
“Personally, for me, parody works best when it comes from love of the thing you’re parodying,” Stolberg observed. “When the comic version is more MOCKING from the outside, it feels mean. This honestly feels like it’s coming from love. They are exaggerating the DNA of the original. So I love it. What makes me laugh about those scenes is that they clearly understood how seriously we have all been taking ourselves when it comes to the franchise.” Greutert recalls Darren Lynn Bousman, who directed the second, third, fourth, and ninth Saw films, also enjoying seeing them.
“I remember watching Scary Movie 4 in Toronto with Darren Bousman when we were making Saw III, and we thought it was amazing that Saw was already iconic enough to warrant getting parodied, and frankly, a real honor,” Greutert said. “I haven’t seen the full film since then, but these scenes remind me of how funny it is, at least for horror fans who are in-the-know about this series and the other horror movies that they also take on. I’ve always said that the hardest part of making a horror movie is not making a comedy, because there’s so much that can go laughably wrong. By extension, I also envy Zucker and the others on the team of the Scary Movie franchise who have gotten to marinate in the humor of horror.”
Long Live Leslie Nielsen’s President Baxter Harris — and Boo to Real-Life President Donald Trump!
Courtesy of Buena Vista International
Perhaps the highest of the high points in Scary Movie 4 are those involving the Lawrence Olivier of spoofs, Leslie Nielsen. From Airplane! to The Naked Gun trilogy, Nielsen spent much of the 1980s and 1990s developing a reputation as the go-to guy for quality movie parodies. The key to his success was the genuine joy he brought to playing deadpan characters reacting obliviously to increasingly silly and anarchic situations.
Part of this stems from Nielsen’s personality. Bob Logan, who worked with Nielsen on another horror spoof, 1990’s Repossessed (which parodied The Exorcist), described what it was like working with the man. “Working with Leslie was an absolute kick,” Logan told Dread Central last year. “He was a man who for 40 years played dramatic roles solely, and all of a sudden, this comedic genius breaks out. I think he was a closet comedian.”
Of all the comedy heights involving Leslie Nielsen in Scary Movie 4, the two that soar to atmospheric levels involve politics. Parodying the Fahrenheit 9/11 clip of President George W. Bush seemingly being preoccupied with a children’s book story during the September 11th terrorist attacks, Scary Movie 4 imagines what would happen if a president were quite sincere in caring more about a fictional pet than thousands of real-world deaths.
Later, Nielsen’s President Baxter Harris seems not to comment on Bush’s presidency so much as foreshadow Trump’s. Nielsen, who was 80 at the time Scary Movie 4 was released (the same age as Trump in 2026), at one point is so incompetent and doddering when speaking to the United Nations that he takes the expression “show your ass” to a whole new level. It’s as if Zucker (who is now a conservative, albeit not a hack like Joe Rogan, Scary Movie 4 co-star Bryan Callen and their Austin comedy scene) and the three screenwriters somehow saw into the future and gave Nielsen’s Harris a scene like nothing that happened during Trump’s administration, but like the headlines that emerge every day under Trump.
Indeed, with Nielsen’s President Harris, it’s hard not to remember how Trump’s own address to the UN was marred by technical difficulties and how he revealed his own insanity and incompetence — before then humiliating all other world leaders by revealing they too were emperors without clothes. When I reached out to the Trump White House with observations like this, including that Bush never threatened the free speech of the Scary Movie 4 filmmakers, the same press secretaries who regularly reply to this journalist’s other queries did not respond.
This raises an interesting question. Bush, for all of his faults as president, never attacked Scary Movie 4 for ridiculing him. It is hard to imagine Trump, who tries to silence his comic critics like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, behaving likewise. Can satire like Scary Movie 4 survive in the Trump era?
“In regard to the political satire and whether or not it’s endangered… I honestly don’t think political satire is going away,” Stolberg said. “I do think that it’s changing shape now. These days, reality has started to feel absurd, so sometimes it’s harder to find the contrast. Half the shit I see on TV on the news feels like they could cut and paste it into an opening sketch on SNL.” He added, “That said… when you’ve got smart writers and filmmakers and actors… I think that comedy CAN adapt. I don’t think that the true danger is that political satire will disappear… it’s just going to be that it becomes safer (fear of alienating half the country), or just fucking lazy. But the best versions will always find a way to an audience… and to a laugh. When REALITY starts to get this extreme, exaggeration loses its edge.”
The Legacy of Scary Movie 4
Courtesy of Buena Vista International
Twenty years later, the legacy of Scary Movie 4 is not simply that it was funny, or even that it was one of the best entries in its franchise. Its real legacy is that it captured a moment in popular culture when horror films, political anxieties, and media spectacle were all colliding, and then distilled that collision into comedy that still lands today. The movie works because it understands its targets. It treats Saw, The Grudge, War of the Worlds, and even Fahrenheit 9/11 not as disposable pop-culture artifacts but as meaningful texts worthy of close observation. That is why the jokes still feel sharp. They are rooted in tone, theme, and character rather than just surface-level references.
The fact that Saw filmmakers embraced the parody — and even borrowed its set — says more about the film’s success than any box office number or review. Parody is supposed to exaggerate what is already there. When the creators of the original material recognize themselves in the exaggeration and laugh along, it means the parody understood them. Its political humor also feels eerily prescient. The idea of an incompetent, spectacle-obsessed president once felt like an absurdist exaggeration. In 2026, it feels closer to a documentary. That shift in perspective makes the movie feel less like a relic of mid-2000s comedy and more like a time capsule that accidentally predicted the tone of modern political life.
When I interviewed Scary Movie 2 co-star David Cross, he commented that the fans he had met of the series tended to be “more urban, ethnic, younger — definitely younger.” Describing the way they interact with him, he said they tend to approach him and say things like, “Yo yo yo, you was in Scary Movie 2, yeah?” At the time, I was struck by the fact that he clearly has a dim view of a series that he admitted helped him make a lot of money.
I still feel that way.
If the upcoming Scary Movie 6 wants to live up to its predecessor, it will need to do what Scary Movie 4 did: understand its targets, respect them, and then gleefully tear them apart.
