This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
If the past year has proven anything, it’s that folks in the film industry can grow accustomed to waiting on tenterhooks. After all, 2024 has been a good news/bad news situation for studios and theater owners who spent 12 months recovering from last year’s production delays and the pressures they placed on the release schedule.
Yet while much of Hollywood can cautiously breathe a sigh of relief after the past summer slump shrank by August, much of the horror genre has proven far more resilient in its own spooky corner. There are still doom-and-gloom prophecies stirred in the trades every few months about audience fatigue every time a new release stumbles, but as seen in the back half of this year, such proclamations are shortly followed by breakout indie sensations or durable studio franchise hits in the genre.
That might also be why Jason Blum, the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions and perhaps the most influential horror producer in this century, only smiles when we ask him to give us a state of the union for his genre of choice.
“Speaking as horror’s commander-in-chief,” Blum says with a smirk, “I have to say the media landscape is generally quite bleak, but horror is a very bright spot in that rather bleak landscape. People seem to love going to horror movies in groups. As we know, the box office is down a little bit this year, and it’s not totally recovered since COVID, but horror seems to really work in movie theaters. So I’m very glad to say that horror is alive and well.”
When we catch up with Blum inside the Den of Geek studio, spooky season is still in bloom, and not one but two horror movies have opened at number one at the box office in back-to-back weeks. The producer notes that this turn of events—including how the unrated indie of the pair, Terrifier 3, unseated Joker: Folie à Deux in its first weekend—defies conventional industry wisdom. But he considers audiences embracing the purely monstrous thrills of Art the Clown or a smile demon as a harbinger of good, wicked things to come.
“It looks like there is a real appetite out there for horror, and it seems like at the moment what fans are really looking for is old-fashioned horror,” Blum considers. “They don’t want deviations; they want old-fashioned, tough, gritty, scary, gory horror.”
This makes it fortuitous that the next Blumhouse title, which will arrive in cinemas in January, will be a gory and gritty throwback to the most old-fashioned of movie monsters: the Wolf Man. Blum seems to have the magic touch that Universal Pictures has been searching for with regard to their Universal Monsters legacy. To date, 2020’s The Invisible Man remains the only reinvention of one of those characters to have really popped with critics and moviegoers in the last 25 years. Still, when we chat, Blum notes that it’s not a Blumhouse mission to remake every Universal Monster property.
“I don’t really know what we would do with it; it’s kind of a case-by-case basis,” Blum says. He even reveals that he took a hard look at doing a modern riff on Bride of Frankenstein but that he could never find a way into the material that fits with Blumhouse’s M.O. “It was always sort of funny or always sort of campy, and I could never get a path to making it like a straight horror movie, and so we didn’t tackle it.”
However, Wolf Man proved more fruitful, particularly since it is a title that ended up being written and directed by Blumhouse stalwart Leigh Whannell, the mind behind the most recent Invisible Man.
“It’s a project I’ve been passionate about for a very long time, since before we did Invisible Man with Leigh,” Blum explains. “I always thought if The Invisible Man worked, I’d love to try and tackle The Wolf Man and try to do with the Wolf Man what Leigh did with the Invisible Man. And I would describe that as taking the monster and [not] making it a four-quadrant movie for everybody, but returning to its roots, which is a straight horror movie.”
At this point, Blum is aware that he has developed a familiar stable of connections with respected filmmakers in the genre. Whannell and the producer have a history going back to the first Insidious, which Whannell wrote and starred in. But like Christopher Landon, who directed horror-comedies Happy Death Day and Freaky at Blumhouse, Blum has seen that quirky and sometimes comedic voice develop into something more complex in later works.
“I think there are certain filmmakers, like Chris and Leigh, who can bring levity to a horror movie, which makes the movie scarier because the audience kind of relaxes for a minute and starts to laugh. And when they’re relaxed, they’re easier to scare.” With that said, Blum and Landon’s next collaboration, April’s Drop, is deadly serious. The producer describes the movie as a “taut and super-intense” 92-minute techno-thriller wherein a single mother on a blind date (Meghann Fahy) discovers an anonymous stranger is AirDropping threats to her child and family over the phone.
“I wrote a movie a long time ago called Disturbia,” Landon says in a separate interview, “which is very much a Hitchcockian thriller. This is a return to something that I’ve always loved, [and] a break from the horror-comedy world.” A movie that Landon describes as perfect for our current Twitter moment—“We will not call it X, no one calls it X!” he quips—Drop is a shot of original horror adrenaline.
However, Blumhouse is also keeping one foot in returning to titles that audiences already love, including follow-ups to genre breakouts such as M3GAN and The Black Phone. “I think the most important factor to creating a successful sequel is to have the people responsible for the original movie back,” Blum muses. “Hollywood doesn’t do that a lot, but on almost all the sequels we’ve done—not all, but almost all the sequels we’ve done—we have the original people back. There’s a tone and a magic dust in a movie that connects with the culture.”
In the case of M3GAN 2.0, that means director Gerard Johnstone, writer Akela Cooper, and stars Allison Williams and Violet McGraw—and, of course, M3GAN herself (voiced by Jenna Davis).
“It extends on that theme,” Blum says of the first film’s focus on parenting in a world filled with 21st-century technology. “I don’t think we’re tackling new social issues, but we’re getting deeper into who M3GAN is, what makes her tick, and how lethal she can actually be.” Blum is coy as to whether he’s seen any dailies of sequences as TikTok-friendly as the first film’s dance and singing beats, but he certainly hopes to tap back into that vein since M3GAN is a personal favorite in the Blum household.
“Little M3GAN is very lovable, and my daughter’s going to be M3GAN for Halloween this year,” he says. “That’s the first time she’s ever worn a Blumhouse costume, so clearly the movie affected the culture.”
The first Black Phone obviously also had a major impact, which Blum largely credits to director Scott Derrickson, who has been instrumental in reinventing it for a sequel. Remember, the first film’s villain (Ethan Hawke as the ghastly “Grabber”) is no longer on this mortal coil.
“Scott Derrickson doesn’t come back to do a sequel unless there’s a real reason for it to be told besides we’re trying to take everybody’s money again,” says Blum. And while he is taciturn about what that exact reason is, he says they found a way to continue marrying the first film’s blend of supernatural terror with something decidedly more realistic. “It definitely explores new themes, but I think in terms of the supernatural, it’s similar to the first movie.”
There is also, of course, one more sequel in 2025—and a follow-up to Blumhouse’s biggest opening weekend to date—Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. While that December 2025 release still hasn’t gone before cameras, Blum seems particularly confident in what he and Scott Cawthon, the creator of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game franchise, have come up with.
“We worked very hard on the script for this movie,” Blum says. “We didn’t have as many drafts of the script of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 as we did on [the first movie]. On that, we had about 14 different versions; on this, we had about four or five different versions.” Blum credits Cawthon as being one of the most intuitive collaborators he has ever seen pick up the tricks of moviemaking. Blum also notes that the blending of the Five Nights brand between cinema and gaming is reflective of horror’s current moment.
“I think people will continue to find horror in movies and on television; people are finding horror in short form; people are finding horror on YouTube; and obviously horror games have been popular for a long, long time,” Blum posits. “And I don’t want to expand the company by doing other kinds of movies or other kinds of TV shows. I want to expand by scaring people in different ways. I want to scare people in games, in live events, and in movies and TV shows. In any way I possibly can.” If he achieves that, the state of the union will stay quite strong.
Additional reporting by Aaron Sagers.
The post Jason Blum on the State of the Horror Union and What’s Next for Blumhouse in 2025 appeared first on Den of Geek.
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