Original SCREAM 7 Directors Say Their Version Was Meant To “F*ck You Up”

The road to Scream 7 has been anything but smooth. Between creative shakeups, cast exits, and a full-on course correction, the next chapter in the long-running horror franchise has gone through serious growing pains.

Now, the original directing duo behind Scream (2022) and Scream 6 are opening up about what their version of the sequel could’ve looked like and it sounds like they were ready to push the franchise into some seriously dark territory.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, collectively known as Radio Silence, were initially developing ideas for the next installment before leaving to make their killer vampire ballerina movie Abigail. While they never locked in a script, they had a clear vibe in mind and it wasn’t going to pull punches.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Bettinelli-Olpin explained: “We never read a draft of any version of Scream 7 that we were going to do because we had left to do Abigail before that. The thing that we had in our minds for Scream 7 was sort of like, ‘How hard can we go with this?’

“It was the thing that we talked a lot about. For us, it was always this idea of, [if] Scream VI is like a secret feel-good movie, Scream 7‘s going to f*ck you up. That was as much as we ever got to.”

That’s a wild statement considering how intense Scream 6 already was. But Radio Silence clearly wanted to crank things up and make audiences walk out rattled.

Gillett also shared that they were considering a creative pivot in scale. After taking Ghostface to New York City in Scream 6, they thought it might be cool to swing the pendulum the other way:

“Given that we expanded the sort of scope of the story by going to New York, the other thing that we had talked about — just Matt and I, by the way, it wasn’t a conversation with the writers — was, ‘How do you do the opposite for 7?’

“Like, shrink it down and make it this like ultra-contained, almost continuous, like minute-to-minute thing. But outside of our own stupid idea, we weren’t privy to any plan beyond just, ‘There’s gonna be another one.'”

An ultra-contained, minute-to-minute Scream movie would’ve been interesting and a brutal change of pace.

Of course, that version of Scream 7 never materialized. The production hit turbulence when Melissa Barrera, who played Sam Carpenter, was fired in November 2023 over social media posts about the Israel-Hamas conflict and what she described as the “atrocities being committed against Palestinians.”

Spyglass responded by stating the company has “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.”

Her exit triggered a chain reaction. Jenna Ortega, who played Tara Carpenter, also stepped away, later saying the sequel “was all kind of falling apart” without Barrera anchoring it as the new final girl.

Director Christopher Landon, who had stepped in after Radio Silence left, eventually dropped out as well, revealing he and his family had received “highly aggressive and really scary” death threats.

Before everything unraveled, there were bigger plans in motion for Sam’s story. Skeet Ulrich, who reprised his role as Billy Loomis in hallucination form in Scream (2022) and Scream 6, recently talked about the original trajectory.

“I’m not involved. I’m really excited though,” he said of Scream 7. “I’m excited for [original Scream (1996) writer] Kevin Williamson to take the helm and to see what the mastermind of it all comes up with. I have no clue.”

He then added: “I used to know because part of coming back for five and six was being a part of seven. It was a three-picture arc for Billy Loomis, or the imagination of Billy Loomis in Melissa Barrera’s character’s head. But when all that went down with her, obviously you lose her and you lose what’s in her head.”

That three-film arc for Billy Loomis haunting his daughter could’ve led to something twisted and fascinating in Scream 7. Instead, the franchise is heading in a new direction.

Neve Campbell officially returned as Sidney Prescott after sitting out Scream 6 due to a salary dispute. Original Scream writer Kevin Williamson is now stepping into the director’s chair for Scream 7. That’s a full-circle moment for the series, bringing the mastermind of the 1996 classic back to guide the next chapter and it’s been met with mixed reviews.

So while we’ll never see the Radio Silence version that was supposed to “f*ck you up,” it’s fascinating to imagine what that stripped-down, emotionally punishing sequel might have looked like. Now the franchise is pivoting back to Sidney Prescott and its original creative DNA.