Why Christopher Landon Really Left Scream VII—Then Got His “Best Revenge” by Making Drop

Few filmmakers know how to mash horror with comedy like Christopher Landon. His genre-bending blockbusters like Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U, and Freaky, as well as more straightforward titles like the Shia LaBeouf–led thriller Disturbia and five Paranormal Activity movies, have earned close to $1 billion despite their shoestring budgets. So it’s no wonder that in 2023, he was tapped to helm Scream VII—a highly anticipated sequel starring Scream reboot vets Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera. Then Barrera was fired from the film due to her social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war, and Ortega chose to leave it as well. Shortly after, Landon followed their lead.

“Scream was a very dark and tumultuous experience,” the filmmaker says now, sitting at a Los Angeles coffee shop. “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 latest project, opening April 11, is a clever whodunit starring Meghann Fahy as a woman terrorized by a series of anonymous text messages that demand her to kill her date (Brandon Sklenar)—or else her young son will be murdered. It’s tense and cheeky and sly all at once, as his best work tends to be. He has a talent for taking classic tropes—a hostage situation, a mysterious villain, high stakes—and creatively molding them into something 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 worked closely with Drop’s writers to develop the story. But he had to give up the project when Scream demanded his full attention. Getting the job had felt like fate: When Landon was an intern at a production company in 1995, his boss had asked him to take a look at a spec horror script they’d just received. After reading the first few pages, Landon ran to his supervisor’s office and shouted, “You have to buy this!” The script was the original Scream, written by a then unknown Kevin Williamson.

The production company bought the screenplay, and Landon sat in meetings as it was developed. He even drove Williamson around town because the up-and-coming writer didn’t have a car. Nearly three decades later, Landon could hardly believe he’d been brought into the franchise. “It felt like such a full circle moment,” he says, so karmic that Scream VII’s code name was “Full Circle.”

Then, in a shocking plot twist, Landon’s production imploded. Barrera—the film’s star, set to reprise her role after leading Scream’s fifth and sixth installments—made a series of social media posts expressing support for the Palestinian cause and criticizing Israel’s actions in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Her comments were perceived as antisemitic by executives, igniting a firestorm. Soon after, Landon got a call from Spyglass Media Group—the production company behind the horror franchise’s revival—telling him they were firing Barrera. Without her, the movie “all came tumbling down in an instant,” he says. “It was devastating to suddenly cancel everything.”

In late November 2023, news broke that Barrera had been fired, and her costar Ortega voluntarily left the movie. The cast shakeup dominated headlines, sending some Scream fans who blamed Landon on a reckless and potentially violent rampage. “People were threatening to kill me and my family, to the point where the FBI was getting involved,” he says, still 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 five and eight, with husband Cody Morris, a digital 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 because he was the film’s director, he became a target 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 announced on social media that he had exited the movie as well. He reveals now that the decision to leave the project was his own. “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.”

The studio quickly moved on by hiring Williamson to direct Scream VII, marking his first time helming an installment of the franchise. The feature is finally set to be released in February 2026, with original cast members Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and Matthew Lillard returning. “There’s no resentment at all,” Landon says without hesitation about being replaced. “What else are you going to do? Wallow? Then they win. My best revenge was making something cool, and I feel like I did with Drop. My revenge wasn’t rooted in pain or anger; it was rooted in joy and moving forward.”

He has no animosity toward Williamson, either. If anything, Landon is inclined to defend the original Scream’s writer: “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.”

Landon has been through enough to understand the power of positive thinking. His father, Little House on the Prairie star Michael Landon, died of pancreatic cancer when Christopher was just 16. “I can let this thing pull me down, or I can weaponize it. And that’s the thing I’ve tried to do throughout my life—to take those really painful experiences and turn them into something that I can use,” he says. “That’s the joy of being a writer and filmmaker. I have an outlet, and even though I was upset and I was going through shit with Scream, I knew I was going to use it somehow. And Drop was the vessel.”

Now that his schedule was suddenly clear, Landon was able to go back to Drop. “It was like kismet. The movie very much deals with an invisible assailant—someone who is attacking you and you don’t know who they are, and you don’t know where they are—and this very much reflected what I had personally gone through,” he says.

On the surface, Drop is an engaging, Hitchcockian suspense thriller. But Landon also uses it to smartly weave in commentary about social media as an anonymous platform to bully others. “I hope that it makes people think about the way that we engage with each other online and how it does matter,” he says. “There really is an impact, and it is dangerous.”

Landon’s obsession with horror started at a young age. His parents—Michael and fellow actor Lynn Noe—separated when he was six. As a kid, while visiting his dad with his older sister Shawna, Landon remembers going to the video store and sneaking into the horror section. John Carpenter’s Halloween was the first scary movie he was allowed to rent. “For some reason, my dad was like, ‘You want to watch it?’ We loved it, and we were scared shitless,” Landon, now 50, laughs.

He was instantly hooked. Soon enough, his dad allowed him to view multiple horror movies every weekend. As a teen, Landon says he had crippling anxiety and fear; screaming at a horror film allowed him to release his pent up emotions. “Horror saved me and helped me cope with life,” he says. “It was something that I needed more than anything.”

In high school, Landon began reading novels by Stephen King and John Saul—so many that his teachers would confiscate them during class. He began making short films in college, then set out to pursue a career as a writer. At 19, he cowrote a script that became 1998’s Another Day in Paradise, a crime drama starring James Woods and Melanie Griffith. But in its wake, Landon languished. He felt lost and faced the deaths of a few close friends; he left Hollywood for Austin, where he pivoted to real estate. But Landon also started writing once more—and eventually, one of his spec scripts became Disturbia, a 2007 sleeper hit. “That helped kick-start my focus,” Landon says. “I felt I could write again.” His confidence grew when he was given the opportunity to direct 2010’s Burning Palms, a satirical thriller he also wrote that starred Zoë Saldaña, Dylan McDermott, Rosamund Pike, and Shannen Doherty. “It gave me just enough confidence to step out and say, ‘I could try this, maybe.’”

From there, things snowballed. Landon joined a writer’s room for the sequel to Paranormal Activity thinking it was a one-time gig. But his story ideas led to an official writing position on the film, and jobs writing Paranormal Activity 3, Paranormal Activity 4, and Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. He also directed and wrote the franchise’s spinoff, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, which came out in 2014. “I really started to get bit by the directing bug,” he says.

The franchise’s success resulted in a record-high return investment, making it one of the most profitable in history. “You don’t need a giant budget to achieve something that is really scary or funny or very heartfelt because it’s all about people,” Landon says. “The magic trick is writing about people that you are invested in and rooting for.”

But though his filmography is studded with hits, Landon has also faced a few misses—even beyond Scream. In early 2023, Landon completed the script for a remake of the much-loved 1990 horror-comedy Arachnophobia. The film was close to production; Landon was set to direct, and Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin, was producing. But now, Landon reveals, the film is no longer being made. “There was a component that the studio was very nervous about and uncomfortable with—and that’s where we parted. I wasn’t willing to compromise on that,” he says, without elaborating. “I wasn’t going to make a change that really felt like a soul-crushing, sell-out, bad change.” (Amblin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Another project he won’t be involved in is Netflix’s reboot of Little House on the Prairie, the series that ran for nearly a decade in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Michael Landon’s performance in it as Charles Ingalls made him one of the most beloved TV dads of all time. While Landon is not opposed to the remake, “I’m sensitive to Little House in some ways,” he says. “The show is sort of untouchable. It was my dad’s pride and joy. He’s so revered, and to try to step into his gigantic shoes feels impossible for me.”

Landon says that Michael, who died in 1991 at the age of 54, also loved horror films and wished he could act in one. But his onscreen persona made that dream difficult to realize. In addition to Little House on the Prairie, Michael starred in the highly popular series Highway to Heaven and Bonanza. “He was a family guy,” says Landon, “and no one was going to see a horror movie made by him.”

Which makes it a bit ironic that Landon forged his own path through horror. “I always looked back on my career sort of like an alter ego of his. I got to do something that he always wanted to do that he couldn’t. He never got to see anything that I made, but I know he would dig it—and that makes me really happy and proud of my career.”