Horror had a week. Movies, television, trailers, and a box office story that everyone outside the genre is still trying to make sense of all collided in the same seven-day stretch. There is a lot to get into.
Scary Movie 6 Has Fans Divided This Week
Scary Movie 6 opened in theaters today, thirteen years after the last installment and twenty-five years since Marlon and Shawn Wayans were involved with the franchise. They left after Scary Movie 2 in 2001 following creative conflicts with producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, and this is also their first collaboration with Keenen Ivory Wayans since Dance Flick in 2009. That is a long time for anything to sit in cold storage, and the reactions reflect it.
Critics have not been kind. The film landed a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers pointing to jokes that feel too broad and a reliance on the kind of self-aware comedy that already felt stale the last time the franchise tried it. Both The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire noted that the humor skews generic, the kind of thing that lands with a shrug when you expected a laugh.
Audience reaction is a different, more complicated story. Some early viewers found genuine nostalgia in seeing Anna Faris and Regina Hall back as Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks. GamesRadar’s first-look coverage noted that the surprise cameos land better than the trailers suggested, even while disagreeing on the jokes themselves. There is real affection for what this franchise was at its peak, and some of that goodwill is carrying people through the rougher stretches.
The sharpest conversation started before the film even opened. A scene in which a character targeted by a killer responds “Not her! My pronouns are they them!” generated significant backlash online for trivializing nonbinary identities. It spread well outside horror circles. Whatever the film’s other problems, that joke became the pre-release story, and it will follow the movie through its entire theatrical run.
Damon Wayans Jr., Heidi Gardner, and Cheri Oteri round out a cast that looks good on paper and had genuine potential. The Wayans’ first collaboration in seventeen years deserved a stronger script. Whether the execution lives up to the reunion is where people keep disagreeing.
YouTubers Keep Breaking Horror Records
The story of online creators moving into major Hollywood production has been building for a few years. This week it became impossible to ignore.
Kane Parsons, who built an enormous following through his Backrooms YouTube series before A24 greenlit a feature adaptation, opened to $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide. That is A24’s biggest opening in the studio’s history, more than tripling the record that Alex Garland’s Civil War set two years ago. Parsons is 20 years old. He is now the youngest director in history to debut a feature film at number one at the domestic box office.
Backrooms, which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass, follows a furniture store owner who discovers a portal to another dimension in his showroom. A24 reportedly budgeted the film at around $10 million, meaning it earned back more than eleven times its production cost globally in a single weekend. Industry analysts noted that an estimated 22% of opening weekend demand came directly from Parsons’ existing YouTube fanbase, which tells you something about how this particular pipeline works.
Curry Barker’s Obsession added another data point to the same trend. The film grew 39% in its second weekend, making it the first film since 1982 to expand on both its second and third consecutive weekends. A24 responded by handing Barker the keys to a reimagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Earlier this year, Markiplier, the YouTube personality whose real name is Mark Fischbach, self-funded and self-distributed a $3 million sci-fi horror film called Iron Lung, which opened to $18.2 million. At the time, that looked like the headline story of the year. It has since been eclipsed about three times over.
Horror has always been more willing than other genres to take a chance on first-time directors with a clear vision. What has changed is that the vision now comes with a built-in audience in the millions. Studios have noticed. The rest of Hollywood is still catching up.
Ice Cream Man Drops a Bloody New Trailer
The red-band trailer for Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man arrived this week, and it delivers exactly what the title promises, which is to say it is cheerful, sun-drenched, and genuinely unpleasant.
Set in an idyllic summer town, the film follows what happens when an ice cream man starts serving neighborhood children something that does not agree with them. The trailer shows kids making snow angels in blood and pinning down adults with axes. The color palette is bright. The content is not. Roth directed, and co-wrote the script with longtime collaborator Noah Belson.
Ari Millen plays the title character. Millen is best known for his work in Orphan Black, where he played multiple cloned villains simultaneously and made it look easy. The cast also includes Karen Cliche and Shiloh O’Reilly, who both appeared in Roth’s Thanksgiving, and Benjamin Byron Davis, who appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Ice Cream Man releases August 7 in 2,000 North American venues. It is also the first film released under The Horror Section, the horror-focused company Roth launched in 2025. The trailer landed well with the people it was made for. Corrupted children, a weaponized summer aesthetic, and Roth operating in the gleefully bloody register he built his career on. Hard to argue with that combination.
Interview with the Vampire Remains One of Horror’s Best Shows
Interview with the Vampire Season 3 premieres this Sunday on AMC and AMC+, and it arrives under a new name: The Vampire Lestat. Showrunner Rolin Jones has restructured the entire season around Lestat’s perspective, with the premise being that Lestat is furious about how he was portrayed in Daniel Molloy’s published book and decides to set the record straight by forming a rock band and going on a global tour.
That is not a small swing. Daniel Hart composed original music for the season, including the single “All Fall Down,” performed by Sam Reid, who has been one of the best things on television since the show’s premiere.
AMC has built something genuinely unusual here, and this show has been one of the more consistently surprising things on the air in recent memory. The rock opera framework built around Lestat’s wounded ego could be the best idea this show has had or a complete overcorrection. Given the track record, the smart money is on the first one.
Horror does not slow down for anyone. This week alone it delivered a franchise revival that has people arguing, box office records that rewrote what a YouTube creator can do in a theater, a bloody trailer from one of the genre’s most reliable names, and a television show about to attempt something genuinely strange. All before the weekend.
