Drop Director Christopher Landon Left Scream 7, But Still Found Room To Homage A Horror Legend

When Christopher Landon was announced as taking over the directorial reigns of the "Scream" franchise from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gilpin of Radio Silence, it felt like the perfect passing of the torch to a person who was always meant to be at the helm of a Ghostface vs. Sidney Prescott showdown. "Some people don't know this, but one of the reasons why I was so excited to do 'Scream 7' was because I was an intern at the company that made the original 'Scream,'" he told me during an interview with Fangoria Magazine.

It was 1995, and Landon was tasked with reading a spec horror script from an at-the-time unknown writer named Kevin Williamson. It only took him a few pages of reading before he knew he had to convince his supervisor to buy it. Becoming the director of "Scream 7" was the kind of full circle career moment Hollywood loves, so much so that the code name for the film was "Full Circle." Sadly, following Spyglass Media Group's decision to fire Melissa Barrera from "Scream 7" after she expressed support for Palestine online (the company's official statement was that her posts were "crossing the line into antisemitism" — their words, not ours), Landon found himself targeted by enraged fans who believed he had something to do with the decision as the director, going so far as to make threats against the lives of his children.

His full circle moment would never be realized, as he voluntarily exited the project. Landon was lucky enough to have met Wes Craven and visit the set of the original "Scream," which made walking away from "Scream 7" that much harder. Fortunately, leaving the project opened him up to direct Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach's screenplay for "Drop" (check out our review here)" and upon reading it, Landon realized he could still pay homage to the horror legend in a different way.

"Drop" is to Chris Landon what "Red Eye" was to Wes Craven.

"Red Eye" is, for my money, Wes Craven's underappreciated masterpiece. Starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, the film is a high-intensity thriller set on a red eye flight wherein a hotel manager finds out the man sitting next to her is an assassin working with an accomplice to kill her father if she doesn't use her hotel connections to help him set up an assassination of the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. It's an incredibly intimate horror story, and one that gives McAdams and Murphy the space to really showcase their acting chops. It's a departure from the slashers Craven was mostly known for like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Scream," while tonally different from other horror works like "The People Under the Stairs" and "The Last House on the Left."

There's a maturity to an adult nail-biter that's more of a race against the clock than a person running for their life from a spree killer, one that's not always immediately thought of when a person hears the words "horror movie." But that's precisely what "Red Eye" is, and it had the same tone that Christopher Landon wanted to bring to "Drop." As he explains, "It was just a weird, kismet-y thing where I was like, 'No, I didn't get to make that other thing, but I still got to tell Wes I love him in a different way,' and that was really meaningful and powerful to me." There's a clear love of the works of Craven, Alfred Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma embedded in the DNA of "Drop," but as almost the entirety of the film takes place in the single location of a sprawling, stunning restaurant (designed and created specifically for the film), the parallels to "Red Eye" are unmistakable.

The biggest difference, of course, is that "Drop" leading lady Meghann Fahy isn't being tormented by her dinner date, but by an unseen force sending her threatening memes that she has to keep quiet from the man sitting across from her at the table.

There's a quote often attributed to Pablo Picasso (and then at the center of episode 5 of "The Studio," interestingly enough) that says "good artists copy, great artists steal," meaning that good artists are capable of imitation or replication, but the sign of a great artist is one who can steal from the best and transform it into their own. It's why a film like "Star Wars" works so well despite being an amalgamation of Akira Kurosawa films and Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces." It's why The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" is one of the greatest albums of all time, because Brian Wilson saw what The Beatles were doing with "Rubber Soul" and could then launch into creating a masterpiece. This manner of thinking is evident in all of Christopher Landon's works, and his films are better for it.

There are obvious pulls, like how his body-swap slasher (co-written with Michael Kennedy) "Freaky" is essentially "Freaky Friday" meets "Friday the 13th," but even looking at his Netflix gateway horror film "We Have a Ghost," there are touches of Steven Spielberg's 1980s Amblin-era heyday. While he didn't direct the film, Landon co-wrote the screenplay for 2007's "Disturbia," another Hitchcockian thriller that is essentially "Rear Window" from the perspective of a troubled teenager. This is to say, "Drop" feeling like a spiritual sibling to "Red Eye" isn't out of the ordinary for Landon, but it's another example of why he's not just a good artist, he's a great one.

"Drop" is currently playing in theaters everywhere.