How Scary Movie’s Costume Team Rebuilt Ghostface for a 20-Years-Later Reboot

Scary Movie returns to theaters on June 5, 2026, from Paramount Pictures, in association with Miramax, reuniting Cindy Campbell, Ray Wilkins, and siblings Shorty and Brenda Meeks two decades after the original franchise went quiet. Principal photography ran from October 1 to November 24, 2025, at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, produced by Wayans Bros. Entertainment and Ugly Baby Productions. Director Michael Tiddes brought back Ariyela Wald-Cohain, the costume designer he has now worked with five times, to dress a cast split between characters written 20 years ago and a new set of victims built to spoof current horror releases.

Wald-Cohain has said her department produced nearly 1,000 costumes and roughly 200 reference boards, taped across two walls of her Atlanta office, on a production budget reported at $30 million. The job required rebuilding one of horror’s most recognizable costumes, aging four returning stars into people who have spent 20 years off screen, and then reworking parts of that plan when the studio added a round of reshoots months after the main shoot wrapped.

Rebuilding an Instantly Recognizable Silhouette

Wald-Cohain has called Ghostface one of the hardest costumes in the film to design, noting that its silhouette is recognized by audiences worldwide. The department tested a range of fabrics to get the right movement and sheen for the robe, then reworked the hood’s depth and shape so it would frame the mask correctly and stay in place during physical stunt work. She has said the fabric was also chosen to add sheen for night filming.

Rather than polishing the costume, Wald-Cohain has said she intentionally aged the robes to look cheap and hastily grabbed, since the idea was that the character had simply grabbed it. The team distressed the robe’s signature sleeve flanges for texture and movement on camera. Because Ghostface needed to survive stunts, visual effects passes and additional photography spread across two separate shooting periods, the department custom-made more than 28 versions of the robe over the course of production.

By the Numbers
Filming ran October 1 to November 24, 2025, at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, with an additional round of reshoots in April 2026 to add parodies of Sinners, Weapons and Michael.

Aging the Original Survivors

Wald-Cohain has described the core challenge of the film as reintroducing characters more than 20 years after audiences last saw them, some of whom are now depicted as parents, and treating that gap as, in her words, a really big puzzle. For Anna Faris’s Cindy Campbell, she drew on Laurie Strode from the Halloween franchise, putting the character in survival mode and dressing her as tougher and more guarded than in earlier films. The wardrobe includes a blue turtleneck and a reprinted T-shirt referencing the earlier Scary Movie installments, with the costume shifting across the film from what Wald-Cohain described as crazy and unkept to a focused killer’s look.

Regina Hall’s Brenda Meeks took cues from the 2019 film Ma, built around layered, lived-in clothing meant to suggest years of accumulated stories and chaos, sourced in part from clearance racks for a look Wald-Cohain called overly enthusiastic but misguided. She has identified Ray and Brenda as the most difficult characters to design, since Ray needed to carry authentic character DNA across multiple vignettes spoofing different films while Brenda’s costume had to blend her original comic identity with the Ma reference. For a Halloween-party sequence, Ray’s costume draws on Brokeback Mountain, built from a brown suede fringe vest, western boots, pink bandanas at the neck and in the hair, and a cowboy hat, pushed toward absurdity while staying grounded in something Wald-Cohain has said Ray would plausibly wear. A new character, Sara, was given a jacket that visually echoes Cindy’s, a deliberate thread connecting the returning cast to the newer generation of victims.

Concept Boards, Script Rewrites and the Legal Review

Wald-Cohain built her design plan around roughly 200 reference boards, spread across two walls of her Atlanta office, with each major character assigned dedicated boards showing past references, current styling and the specific spoof-movie references used in the film. She has said the film’s legal department reviewed costume designs throughout production and required each one to be altered by roughly 30 percent, because the team could not copy directly from the original Scary Movie films or from the films it parodies. Background costumes needed the same clearance as principal cast looks. The character Doofy had his patches redesigned to avoid legal issues while still evoking the original look, with a body camera added to place him in 2026.

The production schedule added its own pressure. Wald-Cohain has said the script changed constantly during shooting weeks, and one costume referencing the 2026 film Michael was built with only two days’ notice before filming. Teyana Taylor’s opening scene, which was shot during a later reshoot rather than the original fall 2025 schedule, involved Wald-Cohain and Tiddes reworking the script’s original concept so the character’s costume showed physical definition from the start of the scene rather than as a later reveal. She has credited her Atlanta-based seamstress with resolving last-minute construction problems on that opening dress within two days. Her stated approach to comedic costuming is that authenticity comes first: a costume that still feels like something the character would wear, she has said, means the joke lands better.

A costume that still feels like something the character would wear means the joke lands better.

Sourcing New Horror Targets

Costumes for the film’s new characters — Sara, Jack, Tuesday, Val, Dei and a character called Nurse Ratchet — were built to reference contemporary horror releases while keeping a distinct visual identity within the Scary Movie world. A party sequence parodying the 2025 film Sinners referenced costume designer Ruth E. Carter’s work on that film, requiring Wald-Cohain’s team to source, dye, age and rework pieces to match its aesthetic before filtering the look through the production’s comedic sensibility. That sequence was among the material added during the April 2026 reshoots, alongside parodies of Weapons and Michael, according to Wikipedia’s account of the production.

For a character based on the Heart Eyes killer, Wald-Cohain worked with mask-builder Dia Scott on aging and painting effects to match the costume to the mask. Art the Clown’s costumes needed multiple duplicates to accommodate blood effects; Wald-Cohain has said she personally spent a weekend aging outfits and applying blood spatter to them by hand rather than delegating the work.

A Leaner Budget, a Bigger Workload

Wald-Cohain has more than 25 years of experience in costume design and a long-running collaboration with Marlon Wayans and Michael Tiddes that includes A Haunted House, A Haunted House 2, Fifty Shades of Black, Naked and the NBC series Marlon; Scary Movie marks her sixth project with Wayans. She has said she reached out to the production team directly when she learned the franchise was being revived, and her advice to aspiring filmmakers is to hold on to those relationships, because that is where the next job comes from.

She has described current industry conditions as a shift in which prep times and budgets are both lower even as clients expect the same heightened production value seen in earlier, better-funded productions. She credits faster shopping platforms such as Amazon with helping departments turn costumes around more quickly, but says the broader trend is that less production support is now expected to deliver the same visual result. Scary Movie’s own $30 million budget is set against a reported worldwide gross of $231.9 million as of September 2026, split between $108.3 million domestically and $123.6 million internationally.

Photo: Tomascastelazo · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons