Melissa Barrera

Watch how little Melissa Barrera does when the mask appears. In Scream VI (2023) other people flinch, run or start talking; she goes quiet and her face shuts. Sam Carpenter knows what her father was and is frightened of what that makes her, and Barrera plays the fear as stillness. It is her most recognisable move, and across three horror films for the same two directors she has done it a great deal.

She did not start in horror. She came up through Mexican television, the talent show La Academia (2011) and the telenovelas that followed, then Club de Cuervos (2017), before Vida (2018) put her in front of an English-speaking audience as Lyn Hernandez. Her training was in musical theatre, and In the Heights (2021) is the one film that has asked for it, with Barrera's Vanessa singing rather than hiding. Then Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett cast her as Sam in Scream (2022), and horror is where she has stayed: Scream VI, then Abigail (2024) for the same directors, and Your Monster (2024), an indie horror-romance.

Stillness needs something to push against, and that is where the films have let her down more often than she has let them down. In Scream, Sam has a secret she cannot say aloud, and Barrera plays it as one clenched note that James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick's script never lets her vary; Jenna Ortega, in a hospital bed for most of the film, is the sister we worried about. By Scream VI she had grown into the part, and the two of them arguing in a New York kitchen is the best scene in either film without a knife in it, because Ortega's restlessness gives Barrera's quiet a shape. Abigail takes the shape away. Joey is handed a child and a drug habit she has beaten and asked to carry more and more of the film's feeling, and the steadiness goes flat as the weight goes on.

We noticed, in the last half hour of Abigail, that we were watching Alisha Weir's small monster and not the heroine, and we were sorry about it, because Barrera was doing precisely what she had been asked to do. The fault was the script's; the risk is that a run of scripts like it will fix her in the public mind as the woman who stands still while other people scream. She has said she wants "a character that feels fully human, that feels like somebody that I know". On the evidence of the Scream VI kitchen, she can play one when someone gives her another person to talk to.

Radio Silence have cast her three times and have not yet found the film that suits her. The next director to try should give her a room with no vampire in it, and perhaps a song.