Melissa Barrera Talks Scream Queen Status and Sweater Weather in ‘Your Monster’

With Halloween right around the corner, it’s the season of scary movies and all things horror. But jump scares and sequels aren’t all that await you in theaters this year, thanks to Your Monster. The spooky flick is a fun remix of horror and rom-coms, starring Melissa Barrera (the final girl in both Scream and Scream VI) as Laura, a shy theater actress reeling from a major break-up in the midst of recovering from major surgery. Between sobbing and stuffing her mouth with sympathy pies, she discovers that she’s not as alone as she thought—there’s a Monster (Tommy Dewey) in her closet.

The burgeoning relationship between Laura and Monster makes for an unorthodox one, starting with a shriek-cute rather than a meet-cute, but it’s a clever and charming take on the romantic comedy. Observer spoke with star Melissa Barrera about everything from how Your Monster adds to her scream queen status to the movie letting her show off her musical theater talents.

‘Tis the season of Halloween, so what makes Your Monster a perfect Halloween movie?

I think it’s a little bit of everything for the season. It’s got the horror elements, which are obviously very appropriate for Halloween. It’s got cozy vibes. It’s like a sweater-weather movie, which is also perfect. This time of year, everyone’s so focused on Halloween and scary movies that they forget that there’s other fun, funny, romantic things that you can be watching. Obviously I’m biased, but I think it’s the perfect movie for this time of year.

We get so many Christmas rom-coms, so you might be starting a new trend with the Halloween rom-com with this one.

Hopefully! That would be awesome.

Back to the cozy fall vibes, how would you rank the sweaters that Laura gets to wear? The sweater game was really strong in Your Monster.

It was! Oh my God, all the costume design was so brilliant. [Costume designer] Matthew Simonelli is such an incredible talent. I got to keep all of Laura’s outfits, I have them all hanging in my closet. Every single thing that she wore—shoes, accessories, all of it. I think one of my favorite cozy sweaters was the one in the montage where it’s a white sweater with a sun, some flowers, and a little house—it’s very Laura. She’s a very colorful person in her wardrobe, and I loved it because it was so not me. I think Laura is, outfit-wise, the least like me of any character that I’ve ever played.

You’ve become known for your work in horror, but Your Monster has you playing a very different kind of scream queen. How did you handle the horror this time around?

It’s funny, because to me, this has less horror than anything else. It’s more of a rom-com and a drama with music than it is a horror. At the beginning, it has some horror elements and you think you’re gonna get scared and, obviously, there’s a monster. I always thought of it more like a romantic thriller, in my head.

But interestingly enough, this is the movie where I’ve screamed the most. In all of the horror movies that I’ve done, I haven’t screamed, and this one, that’s the least horror of all, is the one that I get to scream in.

This movie has a lot of fun subverting both horror and rom-com tropes. How did you approach your performance with that sort of genre mash-up and subversion in mind?

I never think about the genre I’m in, really, when I’m acting. That’s the director’s job, to hone us in on the tone that they’re envisioning. My job is to be as honest as I possibly can be for the character. Hopefully, if it’s meant to be funny, it’ll be funny because of the honesty, and if it’s meant to be heart wrenching, it’ll be heart wrenching because of the honesty, and if it’s meant to be scary, it’ll be scary because of the timing and the editing—but also because of the honesty.

I think I approach all of my roles in the same way. This one, what I focused the most on—what the biggest challenge was—was the comedy. I hadn’t done comedy in a long time, and I was a little bit scared of it. I was scared that I wasn’t going to be funny.

The thing is, not everyone is funny, is the reality. That’s terrifying! You either have the comedic timing or you don’t. I was very lucky that Tommy [Dewey] is such a comedic genius and such an amazing improviser, and that Caroline [Lindy, writer/director] is also a comedic genius, and she knew exactly what she wanted out of the humor. They helped me loosen up and get into it.

For your comedic scenes, you do a lot of screaming, crying, and pie eating. So how would you rank those in terms of difficulty as an actor?

I thought that I was going to throw up eating the pie, because I wasn’t eating pie—I was eating whipped cream. That was the easiest thing to reset [between takes], so they would just refill it with whipped cream, and it was disgusting. I’m not a whipped cream girl—I always say no to the whipped cream whenever I get a drink—so that was the challenge for me.

Crying was a challenge in that Laura has different cries. Like a baby, they have a cry for hungry, they have a cry for poop. So Caroline was very specific that she wanted different kinds of crying for her, for the comedy of it all. Figuring out those different cries was a challenge, but it was fun.

You also get to show off your musical theater talents. How was it to break out those singing chops, especially in the finale?

It was exciting! It was cool, because not since In the Heights have I had to do this level of training for the belting that is required for that song. I was nervous about it, but I was also very excited because it’s my first love. Musical theater is what got me into acting and I still feel the most alive in that setting, in the rehearsal process of a musical or a play or whatever is going to be on stage. It was nice to get the opportunity to explore as Laura, and to also live out vicariously through Laura the dream of a Broadway debut.