Every Scream film ends with the killers (almost always plural) being unmasked, but the true villains of the franchise’s seventh installment were revealed over a year ago: the executives at Spyglass Media Group, who fired Melissa Barrera over pro-Palestine social media posts, pausing their production of a fictional killing spree to defend a real one being carried out at a far greater scale (say what you want about Ghostface but, unless Scream 7 has some big surprises in store, he’s yet to bomb a hospital.)

The film opens today (February 27), and many of the horror franchise’s biggest fans will not be lining up. “It's my favourite film franchise. I’ve seen every film on opening night since Scream 2,” says Nino, one of the organisers of a boycott campaign in response to Barrera’s firing. When the news was first announced, he got together with other fans, who, like him, were upset that “this thing that we love was going to be turned into something really ugly: a defence of genocide.” They started a grassroots campaign, creating infographics and organising teach-ins about what had happened and the importance of cultural boycotts. The campaign grew organically and won the support of over 30 advocacy and arts organisations, including the Palestinian-led BDS and PACBI; Entertainment Labour for Palestine, Film Workers for Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Following a protest outside the film’s premiere, Barrera seemed to acknowledge the campaign, posting “I see you” on Instagram alongside a love heart emoji.

Barrera, the star of the previous two instalments, was fired from her role in November 2023 for multiple social media posts which criticised Israel, but three in particular seemed to seal her fate: one in which she referred to “ethnic cleansing”, a second in which she described Gaza as a “concentration camp”, and a third in which she shared an article titled ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide’ (its author, Raz Segal, as well being a historian of genocide and the Holocaust, happens to be Israeli).

In a statement explaining its decision, Spyglass said: “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.” Someone should tell South Africa it can drop its ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice – the experts at Spyglass Pictures, in between producing a straight-to-Netflix Spy Kids sequel, have already made a definitive legal ruling. These allegedly “false” references to genocide and ethnic cleansing have, in fact, now been made by leading human rights groups and international bodies, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Association of Genocide scholars, various United Nations experts and several Democrat politicians. While the genocidal nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza remains contested, particularly in the US, Barrera’s posts of 2024 are increasingly in line with international consensus. 

“Our first and primary concern has always been the injustice of a person getting fired for speaking out against a genocide... But there was a fan component there too, where we felt like our story had been taken from us”

While she now has a series of projects lined up, including a current stint on Broadway show Titanique,  Barrera told The Independent last year that her career took a serious hit. But the effect on Scream 7’s production was arguably even more disastrous. Director Christopher Landon quit the project immediately after, followed by Jenna Ortega, who initially stated that she was leaving due to scheduling conflicts. Coming just days after Barrera’s firing, this explanation didn’t seem plausible and, sure enough, Ortega later told The Cut that it had “nothing to do with pay or scheduling” and that she left because she didn’t want to do the film without Barrera. Now missing the two young protagonists of what was supposed to be the final instalment of a trilogy, SpyGlass was forced into a hasty, half-a-million-dollar rewrite. It was then announced that Neve Campbell, the star of the original trilogy and its ongoing ‘final girl’, returned to her role as Sydney Prescott, after sitting out the previous instalment over a pay dispute.

While Nino was moved to take action out of solidarity with Palestine, there was also the sense that they had been let down as fans of Scream. “Our first and primary concern has always been the injustice of a person getting fired for speaking out against a genocide... But there was a fan component there too, where we felt like our story had been taken from us,” says Nino. While also stressing that Palestine is the priority, James – a content creator who has backed the boycott from its inception – was also disappointed. “I've always been a huge defender of [Scream] 5 and 6, how they reinvented the series and brought it to the modern day,” he tells Dazed. “So I was devastated [when Barrera was fired]. I’ve always really appreciated her as a performer, and I loved her and Jenna Ortega’s characters in the movies.”

Not everyone in the Scream fandom is on board with the boycott, to say the least. “There’s a bit of a generational divide between the younger fans and the older fans. The older fans tend to be less interested in relation to the political stuff and just want to support Neve, and the younger fans are more supportive,” says Nino. While some fans are only indifferent, others are actively hostile. James has experienced vicious online harassment for supporting the boycott, with some people creating multiple accounts to send him abuse. There’s also been a concerted effort to counterbalance the effects of the boycott, which Nino finds “weird and disturbing.” Some fans are so invested in the film’s success that they’re pledging to buy extra tickets they won’t even use, for example, or committing to seeing it at the cinema ten times. This is sometimes motivated by loyalty to the franchise – because they want to support Neve Campbell and would like to see a sequel – but others want the film to succeed for the same reasons that fans like Nino and James want to see it fail – they want to establish the precedent that production companies don’t have to worry about firing actors for supporting Palestine. 

Unfortunately, the anti-boycott backlash also contains a strain of racism towards Berrera, who is Mexican. As Nino notes, this was already in play before she was fired (the abuse she received on social media following Scream 5 is incorporated into the plot of its sequel), but it’s got more pronounced in the build-up to the film’s release, and particularly at a time of ICE violence and resurgent anti-migrant sentiment in the US. It might not be representative of the Scream fandom as a whole, or even those who reject the boycott, but in online arguments, you will see some fans saying “horrible and racist things”, says Nino, like suggesting Berrera should be deported or reported to ICE.

The film’s torturous production process seems to have had a serious impact on its quality: while I haven’t seen it, it has the franchise’s lowest rating on both Rotten Tomatoes (45 per cent), and Metacritic (38 per cent). A friend of mine who made the screen declared, simply, “it was crap.” Asked to elaborate on that, he added, “Even if I hadn’t had prior knowledge of the rewrites and restructures, it really does reek of something that had to be hastily rewritten. It’s also extremely derivative, and the other Scream films did that in a winky self-referential way, but here it just feels lazy.”

“If someone like Melissa Barrera can be fired for taking a stance, that’s a really slippery slope – it’s a situation where, if people don’t respond with their wallets, I’m genuinely very scared. What will happen to other actors who speak out?

As James says, some fans are rejecting the boycott not because they don’t care about Palestine (or at least not actively), but because they see it as futile: “A lot of the backlash is centred around a sense of ‘Well, this won’t do anything. This won’t change people's lives in Gaza’,” he says. It’s true that, like any individual action, boycotting a film is not enough to end a genocide, but that line of thinking misses what’s actually at stake: if production companies can fire public figures for sticking up for Palestine and not experience any consequences, this sets a terrible precedent. “Melissa Barrera might not be an A-lister, but she’s very well-known in the horror community,” says James. “If someone like that can be fired for taking a stance, that’s a really scary, slippery slope – it’s a situation where, if people don’t respond with their wallets, I’m genuinely very scared. What will happen to other actors who speak out?” 

Despite the franchise’s somewhat patchy quality, the Scream films are cult classics for a reason. But that is less important than trying, even in a small way, to oppose the powerful and entrenched campaign to censor to pro-Palestine speech, which really does have tangible consequences for people in Gaza. Selling that out for a film that looks, at best, incredibly mid just isn’t worth it. Scream 7 is predicted to do well enough at the box office, unfortunately, but the less money it makes, the better. Still, if you really must see it, the above reasons are not an excuse to torrent it instead.