HOUSE OF HORRORS

From Paranormal Activity to The Purge, Halloween to The Invisible Man, Blumhouse’s low-budget, big-profit filmmaking model has revolutionised the way Hollywood looks at horror. Total Film talks to founder Jason Blum about how he changed the rules…

- RICHARD EDWARDS

Conventional wisdom would say that Hollywood’s most successful production outfit over the last decade has been, hands down, Marvel Studios. After all, the MCU is the ultimate box-office behemoth, boasting four of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time. But there may be another contender for the crown…

Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions generally spends significantly less on an entire movie than Marvel would pay Robert Downey Jr. for donning the Iron Man armour, but their returns are huge. Since Paranormal Activity earned nearly $200 million on a miniscule $15,000 budget, Blumhouse has repeatedly turned movies that cost $5-10 million (tiny by Hollywood standards) into box-office hits.

“Our business is really a combination of independent filmmaking and studio marketing,” Blum tells Total Film when we sit down to chat. “The eureka moment for me came when I thought, ‘Wow, I can have my cake and eat it too if we make scary movies independently and then have studio marketing behind them. Paranormal Activity (2009) is where all of that coalesced, because that was like the ultimate independent movie released by a very traditional studio distribution department. Then The Purge (2013) was really the movie that felt like it wasn’t just a magic trick and we weren’t just getting lucky, that we actually had a different kind of system that worked.”

Although Blumhouse has produced non-genre dramas like Whiplash and BlacKkKlansman, it’s with horror that the company has made its name. Bizarrely, Blum admits he was never a massive fan of scary films – “I really love all kinds of movies, but I wasn’t a horror fanatic at all” – yet he saw the genre’s potential for telling stories that were cheap to make, while also being marketable.