Blumhouse Productions is the envy of Hollywood. The production company makes extremely successful movies for little money. For instance, Get Out cost $4.5 million and earned $253 million at the box office. Split? $9 million and $278 million. Insidious? $1.5 million and $97 million. A whopping budget doesn’t automatically equal a financially successful film — just ask Blade Runner 2049 — and Blumhouse has figured out the low risk, high reward formula (as long as the formula doesn’t involve Jem and the Holograms).
Jason Blum, the company’s founder, recently spoke to the New York Times about something he knows well: the things that scare people. There are 19 examples in total, many of which involve various jump scares, which checks out if you’ve seen any horror movie in the past, oh, 30 years. A few:
-Door swings closed, someone is now standing behind you in the room.
-Someone knocks on the car window and he’s standing behind you.
-Something attracts your attention in the background, and then foreground jump.
-Objects suddenly flying off shelves.
-Characters driving, then unexpected car crash.
-Looking into a mirror or water — something jumps out.
They’re cheap but effective, like Blumhouse’s movies.
Blum also highlights “cat leaping out of the darkness or a high shelf,” which Community so brilliantly parodied in a Halloween episode. In related news, Blumhouse Productions’ Insidious: The Last Key, which will likely involve doors closing, mysterious shadows, spooky noises, jump scares, flickering lights, and rolling objects, opens on January 5, 2018.
(Via the New York Times)
