Horror guru on ‘Craft’ and Halloween
‘Monsters are a great Trojan horse for a message about our time’
COVID-19 is disrupting most people’s Halloween plans, but nothing — not even a pandemic — can keep Jason Blum from celebrating his favourite holiday.
If you’re familiar with the works of Hollywood’s horror super-producer (“Get Out,” “Paranormal Activity”), it’s not a shock that he has two skeletons chilling and drinking wine outside of his house as part of his seasonal decor.
Just in time for Halloween, the 1996 cult hit “The Craft” is getting a sequel with director Zoe Lister-Jones’ “The Craft: Legacy” (now on on-demand streaming platforms), in which another four teen girls form a tight-knit coven. Next month brings “Freaky” (in theatres Nov. 13), a body-swap horror comedy in which Vince Vaughn plays both a serial killer and a teen girl.
USA Today talks with Blum about his busy slate and the current state of horror. As a producer, have you found any silver linings amid COVID?
It’s hard to say when you’re in the middle of it. Artists always get affected by tragedy. We’ll have compelling stories, not necessarily about the pandemic, come out of this time when artists have been forced to be at home and think about the world in a different way. With “The Craft” and “Welcome to the Blumhouse,” is centring women and people of colour onscreen and telling their stories paramount for you?
I’ve always focused on our filmmakers representing our diverse audience. It’s important that the stories that we tell are told from different kinds of people with different points of view. It makes business sense. It also happens to be the right thing to do.
“The Invisible Man” is still my favourite horror movie of 2020. Do you feel you’ve cracked the code on the
Universal monsters again by having them embrace what’s happening in the world?
The monsters are a great Trojan horse for a message about our time. Clearly, “Invisible Man” was about abuse, and the next ones we work on are going to be really fun, super-scary, taut genre movies, but there’ll be an underlying theme, which will have more to say than just making you jump.
Do you feel the genre is in a golden age?
I do. People go to horror movies when the world around them is scary. What Jordan (Peele) did with “Get Out” was show that you could do horror and also get recognized by awards. It made filmmakers who never considered horror think about doing scary movies, too. Jordan brought everybody’s game up.