The FBI was involved in the Scream VII fallout at one point

The blowup of Scream VII was a horror film of its own. Earlier this week, Jenna Ortega admitted that her 2023 departure from the franchise had nothing to do with pay or scheduling (as originally reported) and everything to do with Melissa Barrera’s very public firing for posting pro-Palestinian sentiments on social media. “If Scream VII wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time,” Ortega said. 

One of those team members was original director Christopher Landon, who also left his “dream job that turned into a nightmare” in the wake of Barrera’s axing. Now, the filmmaker is also processing the “dark and tumultuous experience” of the film’s breakdown in a new interview with Vanity Fair. 

In 2023, Landon recalls getting the call from Scream producer Spyglass Media sharing that it had fired Barrera for what it perceived as “hate speech.” Without its star, the movie “all came tumbling down in an instant,” Landon reflected to VF. “It was devastating to suddenly cancel everything.” (Ortega also shared that without Barrera, the project was “kind of falling apart.”) 

But while cancelling plans was disappointing, what came next was worse. A lot of people blamed Landon for Barrera’s departure even though he had “no control of the situation at all,” he told VF. “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.”