Blumhouse is a name that, most of the time, can be assured to provide you with a decent viewing experience. Assortments of their output have been released before, but on September 29th will come Blumhouse of Horrors, the largest collection to date consisting of ten of the biggest hits of their relatively extensive catalogue of productions.
So you know what you’re getting and in case you’re unfamiliar with any of them, here’s a brief rundown of what you can expect:
- Get Out is Jordan Peele’s directorial debut following a young African-American man meeting the rich family of his white girlfriend, where things become increasingly sinister.
- Happy Death Day follows a sorority girl who becomes stuck in a time loop and must discover who keeps killing her if she wants to escape.
- The Purge is a home invasion movie set on the one night of the year where all crime is legalized for 12 hours as a way of maintaining social order the rest of the time.
- Ouija sees a group of friends play with the titular spirit summoning board and unleash something malevolent.
- Unfriended features a group of teenagers on a video call, with a phantom addition to the chat stalking them in real life and real time.
- Split follows a teenage girl kidnapped by a man with extreme dissociative identity disorder, whose condition is causing him to develop into a comic book-style supervillain.
- The Visit sees a pair of teenage siblings stay with the grandparents they’ve never met, only for all to not be as it seems.
- Truth or Dare has a group of college students play the childhood game, only for deadly consequences to befall anyone who doesn’t follow through with the spiralling requests.
- Ma has a lonely middle aged woman befriend a group of high schoolers but become increasingly and dangerously controlling as her tragic life is uncovered.
- The Boy Next Door sees a teacher going through a separation have a one night stand with the young man who has just moved in next to her, only to become the target of his obsession.
Although Blumhouse started out like many other companies with an assortment of dramas, thrillers and comedies, in the last decade it’s shifted into more of a genre specialist production house after the unexpected runaway success of Paranormal Activity. Also around this time it established a model of developing films on small budgets whose directors are given creative freedom, which has become a major factor in its success and makes you wonder why so many producers still cling to the ‘bigger budget = better movie’ way of thinking.
That such a large collection can exist yet still omit some of Blumhouse‘s other great movies, such as Cam and The Belko Experiment, is a good indicator of what you can expect from the company, and by extension how many more great offerings they’ll provide in the future.