Blumhouse
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“I Have to Pay Some Form of Homage to the Art Form That Saved Me From Myself”: Writer/Director James DeMonaco on His Staten Island-Set Drama, This Is The Night
A veteran screenwriter and, more recently, an accomplished director, James DeMonaco has had a prolific career most commonly associated with The Purge franchise. Spanning five films and a television series, The Purge marked DeMonaco’s sophomore directorial outing and, aided by the upstart production company, Blumhouse, saw the filmmaker’s first box-office hit. DeMonaco, who also directed the second and third entries in the series, continues with the franchise, as a screenwriter, to this day (a rumored sixth installment is currently in the works). However, ties to his hometown of Staten Island remain at the forefront of DeMonaco’s creative endeavours, and his […]
by Erik Luers on Sep 28, 2021 -
“Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Appropriately presented the day before Halloween, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s “Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” provided an intriguing peek inside the multifaceted production house from a female POV. Moderated by Variety’s Deputy Awards and Features Editor Jenelle Riley, the three executives Zooming in included Blumhouse Television’s head of physical production, Lisa Niedenthal; Blumhouse Productions’ executive vice president of development for feature films, Bea Sequeira; and Blumhouse Productions’ head of casting, Terri Taylor. There’s “so much emerging talent in this genre,” Niedenthal enthused when asked about working in today’s scary movie world. Though Niedenthal […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 10, 2020 -
“And For The Real Hero Close Ups… You Wanna Use The Stuff You Find Inside Baby Diapers.”: D.P Mark Schwartzbard on the Practical Snow, Fire, and Black Goo Blood of Black Christmas
DPs don’t often rank up to their title linearly. Mark Schwartzbard did. Trying to break into the industry after film school, he sent letters to productions but never heard back. He got an internship where he cold-called companies like Coca Cola and offered them product placement in return for Cola. Eventually, the production company he interned for offered him his first loader gig for deferred pay. He loaded and A.C’ed for years on features and commercials and eventually bumped up to camera operator. He pulled focus for the length of Borat and operated on Bruno. Dayplaying, he experienced such New […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 25, 2019 -
“All These Other Misogynists Waiting to Pounce”: Sophia Takal on Black Christmas
Rotely obsessed with heroic Final Girls and the murderers brandishing phallic-shaped penetrative weapons who stalk them, slasher films have long been the subject of gender-study discourse and academia, each observation proving that a knife can be perceived as more than a knife, a stabbing more than a stabbing. What is it about the anonymous, shadowy male presence that feels so threatening? Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas seeks to investigate and literalize that question, presenting the modern male as someone who can be equally powerful and deceitful. What’s so scary about the fictional Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees when the world we […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 18, 2019 -
“Every Viewer Can Decide What to Believe or Not Believe, Who to Trust and What to Question”: Avi Belkin on His SundanceTV True Crime Series No One Saw a Thing
Currently playing on SundanceTV, the Blumhouse-produced No One Saw a Thing is a true crime series directed by Avi Belkin, whose unexpectedly riveting Mike Wallace Is Here premiered earlier this year at Sundance (and launched in theaters just last month). It revisits a surreal episode in American vigilante history in which the small town bully of Skidmore, Missouri was shot to death while sitting in his truck, his wife by his side. This occurred back in 1981 —and to this day no one’s been charged. Even though a good chunk of the population witnessed the murder. While this mystery remains unsolved, […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 26, 2019 -
“It’s Not Purification, It’s Something Else”: Sophia Takal Scorches Social Media Self-Care Celebrities in her Blumhouse Horror Feature, New Year, New You
In Blumhouse’s first female-directed feature film, New Year, New You, Sophia Takal (Always Shine, Green) sticks four friends from high school (played by an all-female cast toplined by Suki Waterhouse, Carly Chaikin, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Melissa Bergland) and their hidden grievances into one of the women’s sealed residence for a New Year’s reunion. The four are connected, molded and torn by a tragedy in their past that Takal reveals through sharp cuts of glass shattering and blood inking through a pool. Danielle (Carly Chaikin), now a social media self-care icon who claims to mix amongst the likes of Leonardo Dicaprio […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 28, 2018 -
DP Toby Oliver on Get Out, Cheating the Sunken Place and Color Grading Trailers
Sometimes you have to go where the market pushes you. And after nearly twenty years behind the camera, the market suddenly wants Toby Oliver to shoot horror films. The Australian cinematographer lensed three fright flicks last year alone, all for the low-budget genre juggernaut Blumhouse. He’s practically become Blumhouse’s version of Hammer’s in-house DP Jack Asher. The most recent of Oliver’s horror efforts to hit screens is Get Out, a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?/Stepford Wives hybrid in which black New York photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) travels upstate to meet his white girlfriend’s family (Allison Williams and parents Catherine Keener and […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 7, 2017 -
Working Through Fear: An Interview with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum
Driving down Beverly, you head opposite Hollywood, away from Studio City, toward the nondescript, single-level, brown-bricked building that’s the literal Blumhouse — the offices of horror movie maestro Jason Blum. Since founding the company, Blum has produced dozens of films that have made varying degrees of impact on the zeitgeist: the found-footage scares of the Paranormal Activity films, the reinvented haunted house of the Insidious pictures, the social violence of The Purge series. And then, of course, there’s megahit Get Out, Jordan Peele’s ferociously intelligent satire on racism that, despite its share of lobotomies and knifings and violently applied white […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2017 -
Blumhouse Picks David Lynch’s 10 Scariest Moments
Uncanny, unsettling, disturbing, surreal — David Lynch’s work summons up no shortage of adjectives. But one that gets applied surprisingly rarely is scary. But precisely because of its inflection of horror with the qualities listed above, Lynch’s films can be terrifying in a much deeper way than your normal, well-executed jump-scare thriller. The folks at Blumhouse certainly know horror, and this week site contributor Gregory Burkart posted a nicely curated list of annotated clips speaking to Lynch’s ability to scare, particularly nailing a couple that have long haunted this Lynch fan. The first is from Eraserhead, the “ooh, you are […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2016 -
Shooting a Movie in 25 Days for Blumhouse: Phil Joanou on The Veil
One of the best American suspense films of the last ten years sneaks onto VOD, iTunes, and Netflix streaming this week as director Phil Joanou’s The Veil arrives courtesy of Universal and Blumhouse. A movie in the subgenre that James Mangold once referred to as “the cinema of unease,” it’s a slow burn horror flick that skillfully utilizes the Blumhouse production model (which yielded The Purge, Sinister, and The Visit) to tell a slightly more ambitious – though no less unsettling – tale. Working from a subtle, complex, and ruthlessly original script by Robert Ben Garant, Joanou tells the story […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 21, 2016
