Meet the movie king of Halloween horror

If there’s a surreptitiously political, low-budget horror movie out there, the chances are Jason Blum is behind it. What can he tell us about the art of fear?

Halloween is approaching and cinemas are back to full capacity. This can only mean one thing: more horror movies. Horror is everywhere on our screens these days, and if there’s one person to blame, it might well be Jason Blum.

The 52-year-old producer seems to have cracked the code when it comes to low-budget, high-profit, endlessly sequelisable horror. His 2007 breakthrough, the camcorder freakout Paranormal Activity, set the tone. Made on a $15,000 budget, it took nearly $200m worldwide. Blum has churned out a steady stream of hits ever since: The Purge, Insidious, Sinister, Happy Death Day, Split, Get Out and Us to name a few. His company, Blumhouse, is also custodian of vintage properties such as the Halloween franchise (2018’s revamp took more than $250m worldwide), and Universal’s monster gallery (after last year’s The Invisible Man, a Ryan Gosling-led Wolfman and a Karyn Kusamadirected Dracula are in the works). These are edited highlights of Blum’s sprawling empire, which includes dramas, streaming miniseries, documentaries and podcasts.

“I keep very busy, it’s true,” Blum laughs. Tanned and easygoing, he looks the exact opposite of a Lord of Darkness. He apologises if the sunlight is too bright in the Malibu home he’s Zooming from. It doesn’t melt his flesh so he’s definitely not a vampire.

Today’s horror boom is not entirely Blum’s own doing. Many have looked at his formula and emulated it. And he does have a formula. He summarises it as “low cost, high concept”. Rule one is a tightly controlled budget. “It started as $1m,” he explains, “Insidious [from 2010] was $1m. Then we were kind of at $3m, like the first Purge movie. Now we’re more like $5m or $7m.” For sequels in a series that has proved its worth at the box-office that might go up to $20m.

But fiscal stinginess is combined with creative generosity. “Almost every director we work with has final cut,” Blum says. “When you relinquish

control, the director isn’t staying up all night thinking: ‘How am I going to get my way?’”

Blum has worked with Jordan Peele, James Wan, Leigh Whannell, M Night Shyamalan and Eli Roth. And he’s giving a leg up to others. Welcome to the Blumhouse on Amazon gives space to female and non-white first-time film-makers, whose stories take in Black vampire slayers and Latina grannies battling gentrification. In part, Blum is atoning for injudicious comments in 2018, when he sought to explain Blumhouse’s lack of movies made by women by suggesting there weren’t many female directors “inclined to do horror”. He quickly apologised.

Growing up, he was not a horror obsessive. He cut his teeth on New York indie cinema in the 90s. The first movie he produced was 1995’s Kicking and Screaming, the debut of Noah Baumbach, his former roommate at New York’s Vassar College.

What is surprising within this mass-market model is how political many of Blumhouse’s projects have been. Get Out pulled no punches when it came to race. The Invisible Man, led by Elisabeth Moss, updated an overfamiliar classic into a #MeToo-era study. The Purge series, which hinges on the premise of a night of statesanctioned lawlessness, takes gun-toting US law enforcement to its illogical extreme. This could be seen as risky business.

“Some of them are just fun, good, scary movies, but it’s more interesting if they have something to say underneath the scares,” he says. “I’m drawn to political things, but I think often people bring their own politics to what they’re watching.” He cites The Purge. “People who think there should be more guns in the world are like: ‘Go Purge!’ It’s not what James [DeMonaco, the writer-director] wanted. He was making it as a cautionary tale.”

For every Get Out or Split there’s a forgotten flop such as Area 51. Does horror need to up its game? “Well, I do think the audience gets more sophisticated, and so you have to find new and different ways to get under people’s skin.”

Having said that, 50% of Blumhouse’s movies these days are sequels. Insidious is on part four, The Purge part five and Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, due later this month, is the seventh instalment. “That’s completely true,” he says. “Everything that I’ve just said to you applies to original movies; sequels are completely different.”

Other avenues of the Blum empire are producing interesting non-horror work. Blumhouse has put out some interesting miniseries lately, in particular the Amy Adams-led murder mystery Sharp Objects, and last year’s underrated The Good Lord Bird. Maybe the indie producer in Blum is trying to get out, so to speak. He still loves horror but insists his prime motivation is not to scare. Nor is it to simply make money. “I get a kick out of surprising people,” he says. “I still get a big kick out of succeeding where people think we’re going to fail.”

STEVE ROSE WRITES ABOUT FILM AND CULTURE

You have to find new and different ways to get under people’s skin