Blumhouse is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, and today brings a new book that goes behind the scenes of the horror studio‘s meteoric and entertainingly gory rise.
Its full title is Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse, and it’s full of details about its biggest hits (Five Nights at Freddy’s, Get Out, M3GAN) and hitmakers (James Wan, M. Night Shyamalan, Mike Flanagan), styled in part as an oral history with photos, storyboards, and other insider-y mementos.
io9 has an exclusive excerpt to share from the book’s section on found footage—specificially its importance in 2012’s Sinister, directed by Scott Derrickson and co-written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. It stars Ethan Hawke as a struggling author who decides he’ll find inspiration by moving his family into a house with a tragic past. In the attic, he discovers a stash of old movies that reveal the crime is actually part of a recurring terror that he’s now nightmarishly entangled with.
The movie’s success helped cement Blumhouse as a horror force to be reckoned with, and Sinister added on to its box-office receipts with an even rarer prize: becoming a cult classic.
THE ORIGIN OF BLUMHOUSE IS inexorably tied to the genre of found-footage horror. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity kicked off a mad dash in Hollywood to replicate the affordable model of unknown actors in home movies or security camera footage. Movies like Cloverfield, District 9, and Chronicle followed Paranormal Activity and brought the found-footage aesthetic to disaster films and science fiction.
But horror is its home, and as Blumhouse grew, the company continued to experiment in the genre. Paranormal Activity was followed by six sequels during the subsequent decade, and legendary director Barry Levinson even tried his hand at found footage with the Blumhouse film The Bay, which was released in 2012. But the found-footage movie that really catapulted Blumhouse to the next level of success was a work that dramatizes what it would be like to be the unlucky soul who finds a record of someone’s gruesome death.
The origin story of Sinister began with a poker game. The movie was a Vegas gamble for both director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill. Derrickson had hit the director A-list after the success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but his big-money reboot of The Day the Earth Stood Still stumbled at the box office. Cargill was attempting to launch a screenwriting career after years as a film critic for Ain’t It Cool News and had spent years refining a pitch for what would become Sinister.
A chance meeting with Derrickson at a poker tournament in Las Vegas (they’d been friends for a while, but it took a few stiff drinks at the card table to get Cargill to pitch the story) set them off on the road to creating what would be dubbed the “scariest movie of all time” in a scientific study conducted by Broadband Choices in 2020, and again in 2022, when the test was repeated.
In a sense, Sinister is something close to a meta-narrative, a movie “about watching horror films,” as Derrickson says. Ellison is compelled, as we are as viewers, to bear witness to something awful, something unnatural, and something with the potential to psychically wound the audience. Sinister is not a found footage film, but rather a film about the relationship between the audience and graphic horror images. Much like the 1998 Japanese horror film Ringu (and its American remake, The Ring), the image medium itself, Super 8 film in this case, contains a deadly evil. The demon Bughuul literally lives inside the home movies Ellison discovers and it is released only because of his unending, self-interested curiosity.
Not long after Vegas, Derrickson and Cargill took their pitch to various film companies, hoping to get a few meetings. They nabbed one with producer Roy Lee. The other was with Jason Blum. Both producers offered to buy the film, and a bidding war began. What was originally pitched as a $1 million micro-budget horror film became a $3 million movie. Derrickson and Cargill weighed both offers, but they simply liked what Blum had to say about the creative behind the movie better and went with him.
... continue reading