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When trying to describe his new movie Drop, Happy Death Day and Freaky director Christopher Landon found the scariest premise of all time. “This movie is like Twitter,” Landon tells Den of Geek at our New York Comic Con studio. “The movie touches on online culture, where you are being harassed or tormented by someone that you cannot see and cannot find, and cannot respond to.”
Honestly, it was only a matter of time before someone made a horror movie about the most cursed hellsite on the internet. Barbarian, Open Windows, M3GAN, and AfrAId already showed the terrors of Air B&B, livestreams, and other burgeoning wonders of the modern era, so it is only fitting for Landon to add to our technological anxieties via Drop, a movie about a date interrupted by the “X” user from Hell—although even then we cannot help but agree when Landon quips, “We will not call it ‘X.’ No one calls it ‘X.’”
Directed by Landon and written by Blumhouse vets Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, Drop stars White Lotus‘s Meghann Fahy as a single mom who goes on her first date in years. She’s charmed by her blind rendezvous, Henry (Brandon Sklenar from It Ends With Us), but an onslaught of anonymous threatening messages makes her doubt the new man in her life. Given its subject matter, Drop seems determined to veer hard from the comedy-horror tone which marked Landon’s most well-known hits. Yet the director sees it less as a break from his style and more of a return to his earlier days.
“I wrote a movie a long time ago called Disturbia, which is very much a Hitchcockian thriller,” Landon reminds horror fans. “This is a return to something that I’ve always loved. I wanted to give myself a bit of a break from the horror-comedy world. I felt like I was getting to this place where everyone knows I’m going to take a concept and turn it into a horror-comedy, so I didn’t want to do that again.”
While Drop takes Landon back to basics, it did represent a change for star Fahy. “This film was a first of many for me,” the star considers. “My first in the genre, which was both really exciting and a little bit scary. I did some stunts for the first time, too, so it was a blast.”
To help her get into the right mindset, Fahy had not only Landon’s direction but also impressive sets created to keep the production in its own world.
“It was a really beautiful set where they basically built an entire restaurant,” says Fahy. “It felt very practical. You walk in and everything feels so grand, and that does a lot of the work for you. You really just sit there at the table and it feels like you’re at a restaurant with people. But day in and day out, same lighting and same costume, you start to feel like you’re in some kind of weird—“
“Like a Twilight Zone,” Landon suggests.
Fahy agrees, but sees that as a plus. “You do lose track of the day and what time of day it is. But I thought, actually, that was sort of useful, ultimately.”
Despite all of this talk about new experiences and moving on from horror-comedy, Landon hasn’t totally given up on Tree from Happy Death Day or Mille from Freaky. In fact, he’s thought about a crossover film.
“I have played with the idea of connecting Freaky and Happy Death Day, and I actually had a weird idea on how to do that,” he admits. “They’re very similar, obviously. And they both have two very badass final girls.” Yet he’s not yet ready to share too much more, confessing that “It could just be a bit of a reach.”
Until then, Landon is happy finding the terror on more relatable experiences, such as terrible websites and terrible dates.
Drop drops into theaters April 11, 2025.
The post Drop: Blumhouse and the Director of Happy Death Day Redefine Horror in the Twitter Era appeared first on Den of Geek.
