Terror Has Your Number in Drop
Director Christopher Landon on his latest nail-biter coming to SXSW
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., March 7, 2025
Between the time loop antics of the Happy Death Day movies and body-swap slasher satire Freaky, filmmaker Christopher Landon has a reputation for teen-centric horror comedies – or, as he calls them “feel-good horror.” But that reputation may change with his new film, Drop, a technothriller about the terrors of dating as an adult. “My husband jokingly calls this my grownup movie,” he explained.
A former resident of Austin, he’ll be back for the world premiere of Drop at this year’s South by Southwest. While the venue may be familiar, the film is a change for Landon because, as a screenwriter turned writer-director, it’s only the second time in his career that he’s directed someone else’s script. “A lot of people say that every director’s next movie is a reaction to the previous one, and I think in this particular case I was reacting to a movie that I was supposed to make but didn’t.” After so much feel-good horror, he was looking for something darker. That’s when he was handed a very early draft of the script by the duo of Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach (Fantasy Island, Truth or Dare) about Violet (Meghann Fahy), a widow on a blind date who starts having mysterious and increasingly threatening files sent to her phone. In it, he saw the opportunity to “flex some other muscles” by delving into its more mature themes.
A major directorial challenge was building the restaurant that becomes the location for this dangerous date. As soon as he started exchanging image files with production designer Susie Cullen, he knew they were on the same page because “we ended up sending each other a lot of the same images. What we both really wanted was this location that felt very sort of dramatic and beautiful, and sort of the kind of place you would take a special date. But also, we wanted it to ultimately feel like a gilded cage. And so when you look at sort of the design of the place, you see a lot of metal bars kind of encroaching on spaces, and that was the whole idea there was to sort of give you this sense that you know Violet is trapped in this beautiful but dangerous place.”
“A lot of the stuff that’s in the movie was born out of a certain legal necessity.” To wit, while the software used to terrorize Violet is very similar to AirDrop, it is most definitely not AirDrop. “Apple is very proprietary about their phones, and specifically their apps. ... It’s not even a 'name your price.’ It’s just a 'it’s off the table.’” Rather than waste time asking for permissions that would never come, the film’s designers built their own interface. Landon said, “It was about designing something that felt like it could be a competitive app, but that is also clearly sort of winking and nodding at something that the audience already knows and understands.”
While the team didn’t even bother haggling over platforms, there was no cutting corners on getting the rights to real-world memes. “That was a bitch to deal with,” Landon admitted, “but I’m very happy that we got to where we did, and that we were able to get all of them.”
He explained it was “vital” to have those iconic onscreen images. With them, he said, “[The audience] is lured into sort of the false comfort of, like, 'this is a game,’ and then, of course, it turns sinister.”
Drop
Headliner, World Premiere
Sunday 9, 9:30pm, Paramount Theatre
Monday 10, 2:30pm, Hyatt Regency
