Scream VII director Christopher Landon wants to make it clear that he wasn’t involved in the decision to fire Melissa Barrera.
“This is my statement: 💔 Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make,” Landon, 48, wrote via X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, November 22, before deleting the post, according to Deadline.
The social media response came shortly after news broke that Barrera, 33, was dismissed from the next Scream film due to her comments about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.
“Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp,” she wrote via Instagram Stories earlier this month, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Cornering everyone together, with no where to go, no electricity no water … People have learnt nothing from our histories. And just like our histories, people are still silently watching it all happen. THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING.”
Variety reported Barrera resharing posts that accused Israel of “genocide and ethnic cleansing” and distorting “the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry” is what led to her being fired.
Production company Spyglass Media Group, who is behind the newest batch of Scream films, subsequently denied that Barrera’s pro-Palestine comments caused the decision.
“Spyglass’ stance is unequivocally clear: We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” their statement to Variety read.
Barrera has yet to publicly address the situation. She initially joined the Scream franchise in 2022 as Sam Carpenter, who starts to get threatened alongside her sister, Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), by a masked murderer called Ghostface.
Sam enlists the help of OG Scream stars Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Dewey Riley (David Arquette) because of their respective history with Ghostface. (Campbell, 50, subsequently left before the sixth film after rejecting the studio’s salary offer.)
Since releasing the first Scream film in 1996, the movies have become a cultural phenomenon and were revived with Barrera and Ortega, 21, at the helm. Before her exit, Barrera praised directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett for helping revive the franchise.
“We have the same team reprising [their roles behind the scenes]. In the fifth movie, there was a lot of pressure [with it being] the first without [late director] Wes [Craven] and they were still trying to honor him,” she exclusively told Us Weekly in July 2022 before filming the sixth film. “[They were trying to make] something that still felt familiar but had their own touch. … Now they’re putting a little more of their sauce into it and it just feels scarier.”
