When Christopher Landon signed on to direct Scream 7, he wasn’t just looking to helm another slasher flick. He was looking to direct a movie built around Melissa Barrera’s character, Sam Carpenter, and when she was suddenly fired, Landon says the movie he signed on for disappeared with her.
In the new book Your Favorite Scary Movie: How the Scream Films Rewrote the Rules of Horror (via Entertainment Weekly), Landon revealed he walked away from the project “about a week after” Spyglass Entertainment dropped Barrera over her social media posts about Israel and Palestine.
“There was no movie anymore. The whole script was about her,” Landon said. Sam Carpenter, daughter of the infamous Ghostface killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), had become the emotional and narrative core of Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2024). When she was cut, the entire foundation of Scream 7 crumbled.
“I didn’t sign on to make ‘a Scream movie.’ I signed on to make that movie. When that movie no longer existed, I moved on.”
While Barrera’s firing became public in November 2023, Landon’s own exit didn’t come to light until a month later. He had hoped to quietly deal with the fallout behind the scenes, but when online backlash started boiling over, including threats to his life, staying silent wasn’t an option anymore.
“I was still sorting through my feelings about everything that had happened,” Landon explained. “When it all went down, it was something I was trying to process in a private and balanced way. When you’re a public-facing person, often people don’t like that. People want an immediate reaction, and they want you to agree with them.”
He officially announced his departure once the death threats became overwhelming.
“They were all screaming at someone who wasn’t even on the movie anymore,” he said. “There were a lot of people who thought I was some sort of villain. That really got in my head. It was painful, and it was painful to lose a dream job in such a sudden and bizarre way.”
Landon previously went into more detail, sharing that he received terrifying messages like, “I’m going to find your kids, and I’m going to kill them because you support child murder.” The threats were serious enough to involve studio security and the FBI.
“I did not fire [Melissa],” Landon clarified. “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.”
When he finally addressed his exit in December, he called Scream 7 “a dream job that turned into a nightmare.” The severity of the threats made it impossible to continue.
“I decided I didn’t want to give any part of myself to that,” Landon said. “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.”
With Landon out and the original script scrapped, Kevin Williamson, the original Scream writer who wrote Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 4 stepped in to direct a completely new version of Scream 7. This fresh take brings back franchise icon Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, who will once again take center stage when the new film slashes its way into theaters on February 27.
