Melissa Barrera is still killing it: “Abigail” star talks blood cannons and “Scream” fallout

After the mess with "Scream," the actress previews what's next for her, from a vampire ballerina flick to more indie cinema.

Melissa Barrera comes alive when she's talking about blood cannons, devices that safely but forcefully shoot fake blood in your face. Between Scream (2022), Scream VI (2023), and now Abigail (in theaters this weekend), Barrera is somewhat of an expert. "It's something I thought I'd never say in my life, but yet here we are," the actress tells Entertainment Weekly with zeal.

Apparently, there are all different kinds. One variation, she says, looks like a big fire extinguisher; a 4- or 5-foot-tall tank connected to a hose with a small cone at the tip where the blood comes out. Barrera looks like she's cupping a giant invisible tortoise as she mimics the crew member in charge of holding the nozzle directly at her on set.

Another kind looks more like a coffin riddled with holes and placed in the ground — appropriate for a vampire ballerina movie. "It was in a larger area where blood had to go 360 degrees," she recalls. "Once, they had to coordinate everyone to press the air pressure thing and the cannons at the same time, and the blood would just come out of all the different holes in the coffin. It was fun."

Fun is exactly what Barrera feels a lot of Hollywood fare is missing these days. And as she plots her next moves after a highly publicized exit from Scream, she's thinking about what's important to her, especially in her work. "Nowadays, everything is so serious. And art, most of the time, is a reflection of the world, so it makes sense that everything is kind of depressing and sad and grave and weighted," she comments. "But sometimes you just need a movie like this that's just going to be a wild, ridiculous, out-there rollercoaster."

Barrera was working on Scream VI — in the role of Sam Carpenter, daughter of deceased serial killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) — when she heard her directors, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, were working on Abigail. The premise focuses on a team of criminals with varying fields of specialty who are all hired to kidnap the young daughter of a wealthy crime boss. Their mission: keep the kid at a safe house overnight while the dad coughs up the ransom money. Don't use real names; don't let the girl see your face. What they don't expect is for this kid, the titular Abigail, to be a vampire ballerina who proceeds to pick them off one by one in a blood-soaked tutu. It has "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me" vibes.

Barrera didn't want Gillett or Bettinelli-Olpin, two-thirds of the filmmaking team Radio Silence, to feel pressured to work with her again after two movies. "I never want them to feel like they have to cast me in something because we're friends," she says. "They might want to work with someone else, and that's totally valid." So she told her management to put her in the general pool of actor applicants, and fortunately, Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin immediately saw Barrera as Joey, a former drug addict capable of reading people and willing to do anything to reunite with her kid.

"We approached Scream VI very much from a place of 'we did the one [Scream] for everybody else who loves Scream. Now let's do our version that is wholly our taste and isn't beholden to anything.' So that was a nice stepping stone towards Abigail," Bettinelli-Olpin says. "But it also was exciting to work with someone you love again." He points to how Samara Weaving and Henry Czerny, both stars of their past movie Ready or Not, make appearances in Scream VI. "We try to keep it in the family as much as possible."

"I'm so happy for Matt and Tyler coming up as directors because they should be the kind of directors that are the norm in Hollywood," Barrera says. "Everybody wants to work with them and work with them again."

Radio Silence and Barrera departed the Scream franchise after that sixth film, albeit for very different reasons. As Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin said previously, their timeline to make Abigail didn't align with the studio's mission to make a seventh movie as fast as possible. Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin are credited as executive producers on the upcoming movie, but they confirm to EW that it's just a vanity credit. "They gave us that title as, I think, a thank you for being such an instrumental part in bringing that franchise back to audiences, but that is as far as our engagement goes," Gillett explains.

In the end, the powers that be at Spyglass couldn't make Scream VII on a speedy timeline anyway. The studio fired Barrera as the de facto lead of the franchise for expressing her support for the Palestinian cause and criticizing Israeli actions in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. It was announced very quickly after that Jenna Ortega, playing Barrera's onscreen sister, Tara Carpenter, would also exit, though scheduling conflicts were cited. Another result: the replacement director, Christopher Landon, parted ways.

Scream VII will now be helmed by Kevin Williamson, who wrote the screenplays for Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 4. So far, Neve Campbell is the only actor confirmed to return, though Courteney Cox is in talks.

The silver lining for Barrera is the Scream fans who showed their support for the actress online. "It was very beautiful, very unexpected," she says. "Obviously, I just didn't know what the reaction was going to be. Seeing the love and the support from the fans, the people that understand that it's bigger than a movie — what's happening is not just about a movie, it's something deeper — I'm very grateful."

She admits that what she says next may sound "a little wishy-washy," but she always felt fandoms reflect the talent behind them. "You attract the kind of people [with] the energy that you put out," she explains. "There's something that just draws you to them. To see the support from the [Scream] fans, I just felt very validated. It was beautiful in that moment where I felt so lonely and scared and just in a dark place; to feel them lifting me was beautiful."

Looking ahead to Abigail and what's next for her, Barrera remarks, "I'm not opposed to anything. I am at a point in my life where I do feel a little bit more like I need to know that the people that I'm working with are people that I'm aligned with spiritually and morally. So that's important to me now more than ever."

Barrera has always been intentional with the jobs she chooses to pursue, which she acknowledges is a privileged position, even if it didn't start that way. "I started out not having a job and still saying, 'I don't want to audition for that because I know that I'm going to be miserable perpetuating that stereotype or being a part of that kind of movie that I don't even think brings anything good to the universe,'" she says.

She chose Scream for the opportunity to be a part of a franchise she always admired; she stuck with 2022's Carmen, a musical romance told across a journey from Mexico to Los Angeles because she knew it would be something different. She chose Your Monster, which screened at Sundance this year, for its "quirky genre mix of rom-com with little elements of horror and musical." And for Abigail, it was the vampires, whom she loves almost as equally as blood cannons.

"It's always been my dream to be in a vampire movie," Barrera says. "The sad thing about it for me was that I was not one of them, but that's another story. It was literally my biggest frustration. I begged them to make teeth for me. I just wanted the teeth!"

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