Seth Rogen Slams Article Linking 'Neighbors' To Santa Barbara Shooting

Seth Rogen has reacted angrily to a newspaper article suggesting that "Neighbors" and films by Judd Apatow may have in some way motivated Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and himself in a rampage in Santa Barbara on Friday.

In a column for the Washington Post, critic Ann Hornaday spoke of "outsized frat-boy fantasies" that films by Rogen and Apatow breed, and that they feed unfair expectations.

Rogen hit back on Twitter, calling her comments "insulting and ill-informed."

Rodger, 22, who was the son of the second unit director of 'The Hunger Games', penned a 141-page manifesto and recorded a 'retribution' video before carrying out the attack, killing six and injuring 13.

“It all has to come to this,” he said in the seven-minute video, which had been uploaded to YouTube on May 23.

“After I've annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I'll take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there.”

Hornaday wrote in her column: “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,” she added.

“If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger -- thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections -- no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.”

Apatow weighed in too, asking 'why is it always everything but mental illness? Because that doesn't sell papers'.

He also tweeted: