As the spooky season approaches, one movie studio showed up at New York Comic Con to bring the house down. Blumhouse has been championing original horror movies for years, with their low-budget, creative freedom approach kicking off with the enormously successful Paranormal Activity. Since then, they’ve helped launch films like Insidious, Whiplash, Get Out, Sinister, The Purge, and this year’s Speak No Evil.
With a new year comes a new BlumFest, a panel where CEO Jason Blum brings in a few of the creative minds behind Blumhouse’s upcoming horror films to give us a sneak peek at what’s to come. But first, we had to catch up with the company’s founder, who has been producing these films since the turn of the 21st century.
Although Blum is now one of the most respected names in horror, he recalled a time when he needed to fight to get one movie made. “Paranormal Activity,” he recalls. “No one returned my calls for three years. I had no clout. Now, if I say a movie’s good, no one will buy it, but at least they’ll watch it. When I did Paranormal Activity, they wouldn’t even watch the movie. For three years, I tried, I begged people to watch the film. They would not see the film. I had to sell the remake rights to get people to actually watch the film in front of an audience. That’s why I never turned back. I only made horror movies ever since then because that moment was so such a big moment in my life.”…