Few filmmakers know how you can mash horror with comedy like Christopher Landon. His genre-bending blockbusters like Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U, and Freaky, in addition to extra simple titles just like the Shia LaBeouf–led thriller Disturbia and 5 Paranormal Activity films, have earned near $1 billion regardless of their shoestring budgets. So it’s no marvel that in 2023, he was tapped to helm Scream VII—a extremely anticipated sequel starring Scream reboot vets Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera. Then Barrera was fired from the movie on account of her social media posts in regards to the Israel-Hamas battle, and Ortega selected to go away it as nicely. Shortly after, Landon adopted their lead.
“Scream was a very dark and tumultuous experience,” the filmmaker says now, sitting at a Los Angeles espresso store. “I was gobsmacked and in shock for a while, but I’m at a place now where I can talk about it ’cause I was able to use that unpleasant experience and turn it into something positive. And that was Drop.”
Landon’s newest mission, opening April 11, is a intelligent whodunit starring Meghann Fahy as a lady terrorized by a sequence of nameless textual content messages that demand her to kill her date (Brandon Sklenar)—or else her younger son will probably be murdered. It’s tense and cheeky and sly unexpectedly, as his greatest work tends to be. He has a expertise for taking traditional tropes—a hostage state of affairs, a mysterious villain, excessive stakes—and creatively molding them into one thing new. “The hardest thing in the genre is to balance intensity and heart—and yet Chris makes it look effortless,” says Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, who has collaborated with Landon on the Paranormal Activity franchise, Happy Death Day, and now Drop. “Somehow, he does this while also being a generous collaborator who makes everyone better.”
Even as Landon was prepping for Scream VII, he labored intently with Drop’s writers to develop the story. But he had to surrender the mission when Scream demanded his full consideration. Getting the job had felt like destiny: When Landon was an intern at a manufacturing firm in 1995, his boss had requested him to try a spec horror script they’d simply obtained. After studying the primary few pages, Landon ran to his supervisor’s workplace and shouted, “You have to buy this!” The script was the unique Scream, written by a then unknown Kevin Williamson.
The manufacturing firm purchased the screenplay, and Landon sat in conferences because it was developed. He even drove Williamson round city as a result of the up-and-coming author didn’t have a automobile. Nearly three many years later, Landon might hardly imagine he’d been introduced into the franchise. “It felt like such a full circle moment,” he says, so karmic that Scream VII’s code title was “Full Circle.”
Then, in a stunning plot twist, Landon’s manufacturing imploded. Barrera—the movie’s star, set to reprise her position after main Scream’s fifth and sixth installments—made a sequence of social media posts expressing help for the Palestinian trigger and criticizing Israel’s actions within the wake of the October 7 assaults. Her feedback had been perceived as antisemitic by executives, igniting a firestorm. Soon after, Landon obtained a name from Spyglass Media Group—the manufacturing firm behind the horror franchise’s revival—telling him they had been firing Barrera. Without her, the film “all came tumbling down in an instant,” he says. “It was devastating to suddenly cancel everything.”
In late November 2023, information broke that Barrera had been fired, and her costar Ortega voluntarily left the film. The solid shakeup dominated headlines, sending some Scream followers who blamed Landon on a reckless and doubtlessly violent rampage. “People were threatening to kill me and my family, to the point where the FBI was getting involved,” he says, nonetheless noticeably disturbed. “I got messages saying, ‘I’m going to find your kids, and I’m going to kill them because you support child murder.’” Landon has two sons, ages 5 and eight, with husband Cody Morris, a digital advertising and marketing strategist. “The head of security at various studios and the FBI had to examine the threats. It was highly aggressive and really scary.”
To be clear, Landon says, “I did not fire her. A lot of people think I had something to do with it, and it was not my doing. I had no control of the situation at all.” But as a result of he was the movie’s director, he grew to become a goal anyway. “I think in the absence of people understanding how Hollywood works and what the hierarchy is, the fans were like, ‘that’s the guy.’ And so they came for me, knives out.”
On December 23, 2023, Landon introduced on social media that he had exited the film as nicely. He reveals now that the choice to depart the mission was his personal. “They wanted me to continue on. They basically said, ‘You can restart it. You can figure it out.’ But the amount of abuse that I had to deal with—I decided I didn’t want to give any part of myself to that,” he says. “For me, it was not worth it. I would rather put my efforts into something else, where I could feel appreciated and respected. The hate and abuse really spoiled it for me, and I lost my love for the idea of going forward.”
Still, he says, stepping away was heartbreaking. “In the midst of all the chaos, I was grieving the loss of one of my dream jobs. I went through all the stages—I was shocked, I was sad, and then I got angry. To be a part of this legacy, it was really hard to let it go.”