Melissa Barrera Is Reuniting With Her Scream Directors for a Mysterious Universal Monster Movie

Melissa Barrera Is Reuniting With Her Scream Directors for a Mysterious Universal Monster Movie

Radio Silence — directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and producer Chad Villella — successfully rebooted one of horror’s biggest franchises with Scream and Scream VI. Now they’ve tapped the star of those films, Melissa Barrera, to join another movie reviving a beloved property from horror’s past, in the form of a mysterious Universal Monster project.

Deadline broke the news of this excellent re-team, though sadly there are precious few other details about what’s currently titled “Untitled Monster Thriller,” which has a script by Stephen Shields (The Hole in the Ground) that was revised by Guy Busick (Ready or Not, Scream, Scream VI). The trade notes that Radio Silence has been developing this film for a while — it’ll be part of Universal’s post-Dark Universe push toward standalone releases (see: The Invisible Man, Renfield) using its classic monsters in fresh, modernised stories — but the success of Scream and its quickly greenlit follow-up meant they had Ghostface-adjacent commitments to attend to first.

According to Deadline, “While they began meeting with other talent, it became evident pretty quickly that Barrera was the perfect fit for the role following two successful shoots with the rising star and offered her the part.” After this project, you can go ahead and replace “rising star” with “scream queen.” There’s no word yet on when we can expect this one to drop — could it possibly come together as quickly as Scream VI did? — but our main concern at the moment is which monster from among the Universal firmament will be headlining this one. We’re also hoping this project will make Radio Silence forget about that Escape From New York reboot they recently added to their schedule.

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Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.


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