Rogen, Apatow rebuke film critic over Isla Vista slayings article

May 27, 2014 10:02 AM PT

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow both took to Twitter to slam Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday for a column in which she argued that their movies might have encouraged Elliot Rodger’s deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., near UC Santa Barbara.

On Monday, Rogen directed a tweet at Hornaday that said, “I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed.” The “Neighbors” star followed up with a second tweet that said, “how dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage.”

Apatow also tweeted in response to Rogen’s messages, adding, “She [Hornaday] uses tragedy to promote herself with idiotic thoughts.”

According to police, Rodger, 22, fatally stabbed his three roommates on Friday night and then embarked on a shooting rampage across the beachside college town of Isla Vista that left three more UCSB students dead and 13 others injured, and culminated in Rodger’s apparent suicide.

Rodger, the son of “Hunger Games” assistant director Peter Rodger, left behind a 137-page manifesto and YouTube videos in which he blamed his isolation and misery on the indifference of women and complained of being excluded from the local party scene.

In a column published Sunday, Hornaday wrote that “Rodger’s rampage may be a function of his own profound distress, but it also shows how a sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike.”

She continued, “How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like ‘Neighbors’ and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure’? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, ‘It’s not fair’?

“Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it.”

On her own Twitter account, Hornaday has yet to respond to Rogen and Apatow.