You might not know the name, but you’ve definitely seen something produced by Blumhouse Productions over the last few years. Founded by eponymous Jason Blum back in 2000, they’ve been putting out crowd-pleasing titles for the last decade and made a killing doing it.
The aim of the game seems to be to make films on a shoestring budget, and then release them through the traditional Hollywood system to garner huge returns. And it’s working: back in 2009, Blumhouse released the now iconic Paranormal Activity. It was a film made for only $15,000 (roughly around £11,000 for us Brits), which went on to make $193,000,000 and spawn an entire series that has…well, everybody knows the rest.
The fact of the matter is that despite the occasional slip-up (or five, in the case of the Paranormal Activity series), Blumhouse Productions have effectively managed to keep horror as the cinematic staple that it’s always been. This year alone, for example, they released Get Out and Split (among many others), which moviegoers deem two of the best horrors in a long while.
Of course, it’s easy to point to the likes of A24 and excellent, frightening films like It Comes at Night and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. It’s undoubtedly true that films such as those can – and should – be considered some of the best examples of horror cinema in the past decade. I’m not disputing that. But the issue is that their monetary returns weren’t nearly as astronomical as Blumhouse’s have been, consistently.
In a sense, I suppose what I’m getting at is that we need the likes of Blumhouse and their mammoth catalogue of horror films (50, so far) in order to show the industry that horror isn’t going to go the way of the Western. Because of this, companies are more likely to take a chance on the likes of Robert Eggers’ The Witch or Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, because it has been proven that horror is a bankable genre.
But there’s still so much more to come. Next year alone, four films from the consistently notable production company have been confirmed – one of which is a 10th Halloween sequel, with Jamie Lee Curtis set to reprise her iconic role, in a film that is intended to act as a direct sequel to the 1978 original.
Evidently, the “microbudgeting” system that Jason Blum established back in 2009 wasn’t entirely revolutionary, but paved the way for a plethora of entertaining horror flicks for years to come. So next time you watch a horror movie and see the ‘Blumhouse Productions’ animation beforehand – you know, the creepy one with the flying chair and ghost girl – take a minute to appreciate all they’ve done for mainstream horror.
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