Christopher Landon exited Scream 7 because he was receiving death threats.
The 50-year-old director was meant to helm the upcoming horror flick, though exited the project in December 2023 after he started to receive threatening messages when actress Melissa Barrera, 34, made social media posts about the Israel-Palestine War that were deemed antisemitic.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, he said: “People were threatening to kill me and my family, to the point where the FBI was getting involved. I got messages saying, ‘I’m going to find your kids, and I’m going to kill them because you support child murder.’ … The head of security at various studios and the FBI had to examine the threats. It was highly aggressive and really scary.”
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Despite the hostile environment he found himself in, Landon did not fire Barrera – who was dismissed from the film by production company Spyglass Media in November 2023, with the director insisting he had “no control of the situation at all.”
He said: “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. 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.”
The Happy Death Day filmmaker added Spyglass Media wanted him to stay on the project, but “the amount of abuse that [he] had to deal with” over the Barrera controversy ultimately proved too much for him.
He explained: “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.”
“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.”
After his exit, Kevin Williamson, who wrote the original Scream movie, was brought on to direct the project, though Landon emphasized he had no animosity towards the filmmaker.
He said: “There’s no resentment at all. What else are you going to do? Wallow? Then they win … I want ‘Scream’ to succeed. Kevin probably made a banger of a movie, because he knows it better than anybody. It’s going to be awesome.”
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