Today's episode of What Future with Joshua to Pulski is a re release of our first ever episode, an interview with Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions. It's a really interesting listen. We will be back next week with an all new episode. Thanks for listening. Hello, my name is Joshua to Pulsky, and you somehow have tuned into What Future, my new podcast about interesting people in an interesting time on an interesting planet. This is our first show. We have not shared it a full episode with any other human beings yet anyhow, you know, it's all come together very rapidly, but also we took forever, which is weird, but sometimes that happens in life. And I'm just very pleased to get started and talk to people and hopefully, you know, crack open your brain and and then pull the brain out of the skull. Actually, I'd be cracky open your skull and then I'd be pulling the brain I mean metaphorically, not actually, and then putting your brain back into your skull. So that's what probably what the show is gonna be like for most listeners, I would imagine. So the first show is October. That's today, that's right now. If you're listening to it on the day that the show came out, and I know that you are all of you. And it's very close to Halloween, which is my favorite holiday, and just generally speaking, October as a kick ass time of the year because it's spooky and it's fall and there's pumpkins, and the weather is turning but it's not too cold yet, and a lot of good horror movies come out, and so of course around Halloween you started thinking about horror movies and scary stuff and ghost stories, and I have a deep love and a deep passion for you know, the genre is called horror, but I think my relationship with that genre is sort of there's a very specific kind of horror I like. And I think when I imagine the perfect sort of film, the one that is most sort of sweet to me in the month of October, I think of this movie by John Carpenter called In the Mouth of Madness. I've never seen it, and I've loved John Carpenter. I've never even heard of it. Oh my god, that's insane. You have to see it immediately. By the way, if you're wondering who this voice is, that's my producer Lyrah Smith, who will be making appearances. She'll largely be telling me about what movies she hasn't seen. That's just now. In the Mouth of Madness is the third in his Apocalypse trilogy. The first one is The Thing, the second one is Prince of Darkness. Which is which was? I mean, it probably competes for being my favorite John Carpenter movie. It's that or In the Mouth of Madness. I kind of don't know which one it is. And I first saw In the Mouth of Madness. I don't think it was the first John Carpenter movie I saw, but I maybe wasn't so aware of his entire output. I probably had seen They Live in a few others. But but one night I was at my parents house. I was not living there at the time, but it was late at night. I don't really know why I was there. Maybe I had gone there to eat some of their food. This is not an important part of the story, but it is a part of the story. Any I was sitting on the stuff, I was slipping through channels, and I had found this film and I was probably, like, I don't know how far into it, but I had walked into this movie that I had not seen before, and it was these two guys that are din or talking and there's this man walking across the street with an axe in his hand, and it's a New York City street scene, and everybody's like screaming and running away from him, and he just walking towards and eventually like smashes the acts through the through the window. It's as unbelievable sequence, But I was like, what is this? What is about? And and the film in the Mouth of Madness is a very special kind of horror movie. And like most of the ones that I like, it is not that it is super gory, though there are gory moments, and it's not that like you see people getting repeatedly stabbed or getting their arms chopped off or whatever. There is like horrific sort of violence in it. But the thing that makes it upsetting, and that makes it even on repeat viewings, a horrific film, is that it plays with the idea of reality. It plays with what we think of as our reality versus what it actually might be, and that our perceptions of this reality, I feel like sometimes they're just on a razor's edge. And I think the films that I love the most and John Carpenter has done a whole handful of movies like this which are interested in this idea of like what is reality, But they're also interested in a genre which is called cosmic horror, which is the things that are happening are not that they aren't real or they aren't you know, something tangible, but they're something beyond our understanding, from a place that we don't understand and can't really communicate with. So when I think about the best horror, the stuff that I love, and I would say David Lynch movies fall into this category, you know, something like Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. There's a lot of sort of this undercurrent of something isn't right with reality, like something is broken here and and you kind of feel like you're never on solid ground with where it's going and what might happen next. And that got me thinking, as we are entering Halloween and Halloween season, about the horror of actual reality that we're currently living in, Like the fact that every day it feels like something truly cataclysmic or at the very least extremely disturbing is happening, right if it's not, you know, World War three or school shootings or you know, Trump winning in four. It's some form of, you know, sort of huge distress that we're all experiencing. And I think that it's hard sometimes to navigate that stuff in your daily life and then go and enjoy something that is supposed to scare you. Right, It's kind of harder to be scared now because we have so much that's terrifying in reality. And I'm really excited that this is our first episode because I get to talk about horror movies, which again I do love, but also a lot of what we want to do on this show, and a lot of what I want to talk about on the show is the places where sort of reality and fiction meet, the places where art and the Internet intersect, sort of the way that we experience things and trying to understand what those things are and sort of make sense of them or maybe learn something about them. And so I think it's fertile ground in terms of what is horror and how does it work? But because we live in such a precarious moment, I think the concept of horror is changing, and talking about what that looks like and how it feels is pretty important. And so in thinking about this, I started to think about new films that have been released that are really speaking about or talking to what is happening in reality, and landed on this, you know, realization that Blumhouse, which is like now like the kind of the place where you find the new horror movies or the new franchises, is doing something that is really interesting in that they are making movies that are kind of sometimes very much about the reality that we live in, but also weirdly fun, which is hard for me to sort of compute how you navigate the idea of being scared in a fun way against or versus being scared in a real way, which is something that we are all, I think every day feeling. And so I thought, okay, well, let me go to the source. Let me talk to Jason Blum, the guy who started the company and who is literally personally responsible for some of the most horrific and also interesting films of the past like ten years or more. So we have Jason Blum, the founder of blum House, a master of horror, and he's here with us right now. Jason, thank you for being here. I know you're a very busy man. How much sleep did you get last night? I am very careful about my sleep. I really, I really get let's see, at twelve to seven, I got seven and a half hours. I really try and keep it over seven. That's a healthy amount. I rarely get less than seven, and when I do, I promised myself never to do that again. I Uh, I got a lot less because I actually was up to like two thirty in the morning watching some blum House content. I was. I was watching The Forever Purge. That's a and one. But I'm going to come back to the Forever Perch. I just wanted to say it's going to be a topic. So blum House has not only done horror, but I think you're sort of synonymous with being the place for modern horror. But would you describe blum House like that? I would describe them as as the place for modern horror or horror movies. We do the occasional with Blash, Black Plansman, handful of others. TV a little bit differently. TV is more like is straight horror, and I would call horror adjacent or about horrible things. Okay, give me what's horror adjacent. We made a mini series about Roger Ailes called The Loudest Voice in the room. To me, he's a horrible thing that's horror adjacent. Maybe just horror, Yeah, maybe just horror. We made a mini series recently for Showtime called The Good Lord Bird, which is about John Brown, which was about the worst thing that the United States probably ever did, which was obviously slavery. So I feel like what you said is true, and we really try and stick with project. It's that if they're not horror, they're tangentially related to horror. Right now, we haven't done that a hundred percent of the time, but but pretty close. So take me back to how you ended up in this particular space, and my guess is I'd be surprised to hear that you don't have some love of the genre. But can you talk to me about like what the moment was or what the film was that made you think this is a thing that I want to do. Yeah, I've grown to love the genre, but that's not really why I got into horror. I got into horror because I was caught between a love of making independent films and a strong dislike for the distribution of independent films which is very broken, and a love of studio distribution because everyone gets to see what you made, and a dislike for the process of studio production. My goal in life was to make a studio film, and I finally made this movie, The Tooth Fairy for Fox before Blumhouse existed, and uh, and making a studio film was the opposite of what I thought it was gonna be. It was very frustrating. Distribution was great. Paranormal Activity came out about the same time as The Tooth Ray came out, and what Paranormal Activity did, it was kind of coalesce almost twenty years of trying to find my place into the business in one weekend, which was Wow. There's a way to make independent movies that can be subversive. They can be about difficult things. They don't have to have movie stars in them. You can have a lead character die in the first act. All these kind of creative risks that you could only take with independent movies, which is why I liked independent movies. Storytelling you could do with horror movies, but with horror movies you get a studio to release them. And so really I came to horror through business and the notion that I could continue my love of independent movies. But if you look at our originals and you take out the scares. There really a series of like indie sundance movies. You look at Sinister, it's about a frustrated writer who's trying to have another hit book, who moves his family into a house that's very dangerous, and he chooses his career over his family, which is really kind of the storyline of an independent movie. And and most of the movies that we've done, the original horror movies that we've done, are really independent movies. Dressed up is scary movies. I think it's true that the plotlines are often, you know, in some way almost art films, but don't say are indie I mean, God forbid hard Okay, sorry, I take that back. I wouldn't would never describe one of your films as art. That's yeah, that's as bad as saying elevated horror. Wow, do you take issue with the elevated horror designation? Elevated horror is code word for people saying like, I'm better than people who like horror movies, like I don't really like horror, but elevated horror is something I would stoop so low as to watch, and sometimes even directors say it, which is even worse, like I wouldn't make a horror movie, but elevated horror I would make, which is literally like a director saying I wouldn't make like a bad movie, but I would make a good movie. Right, Well, isn't genre kind of ghetto eyes in a way? Like I mean this is true in literature as well, right, Like science fiction and fantasy is considered not real literature. Right, then there's a certain bar like Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a lot of science fiction, is considered a real author. And then the guys who were Paul for Philip K. Dick and his Heyday would have been considered like this kind of genre like Paul kind of crappy writer. But the quality of the work, the variance is non existent. It's just as hard to direct or create a great horror movie as it is to create a great art movie. But yes, it is kind of ghetto eyes, And that's another reason why I really liked it, right, right, I mean when you were a kid, you weren't like you watch Halloween and suddenly you were struck that you must create horror films. This is not like a lifelong passion for you. Everything in my personality and nature is someone who likes horror movies. I didn't dislike them, but I wasn't like a crazy horror movie fan at all. And I should have been, because like, I'm kind of weird and I'm an outsider and all that sort of stuff. So I should have appreciated them much more than I did. But luckily or in Pelly saved my life and made paranormal activity. I mean, that's wild to me. I thought for sure you were going to tell me that you've grew up on you know, Wes Craven and John Carpenter or something, which is which I did. So it's interesting that you just were like, this is actually a great vehicle for filmmaking because of and maybe explain this to me, because I'm not in the industry. Tell me what was better about being able to do some of the paranormal activity. The idea that you pay fifteen dollars for like this little indie art movie at the one last art cinema in New York, right, or fifteen dollars at the multiplex with this other movie. It's so strange, Like the art movie. They spent two hundred thousand dollars marketing this little movie. And the Studio Movies spent fifty million dollars marketing the movie, and the budgets also the budgets of the one movie or three dollars and the other movies two million dollars. It's still a ticket or whatever. I just was always so frustrated that you'd work so hard on this, this movie, and it's just very hard to get distribution. And once you get distribution, because they're competing for screens with these bohemoth, huge American corporations, it's just very hard. So your movie doesn't play for very long, and if it does, it's a miracle, and you're begging everyone for favors. You beg people to go see it. Versus this machine that puts like three thousand versions of your movies out on Friday Night. Just way more appealing to me. But so, is there a shortcut with horror? Is it that it plays two larger audiences even though you can Yeah, there's there's a huge shortcut with horror, which is it's like this trojan horse, like you can sneak these crazy stories into this totally mainstream system. You can sneak get out, you know. Or the per which is the purchase of movie about gun control in America. Now, if you pitched a studio said hey, I'm gonna make a movie about gun control, they would show you out of the office before you got They don't want to make a movie about gun control. It's a nightmare for them. It's political. No matter your pro work on half the audience is going to disagree with you. We know, don't want to make political movies. It's a nightmare for them. But if you say you're gonna make a movie about if crime is legal from seven in the morning until seven at night, well, it's a great concept. Cool. What is it like. It's a genre movie, so you can use horror to get kind of unusual ideas to a very broad audience, which is which is so fun. That's a fascinating point. I've never heard anybody articulate that. I did not understand that. I don't think most people are aware of that. I mean, obviously, horror films are different than a big budget action movie or at a drama or whatever, because horror is deranged. I mean, most horror films have ida extremely bizarre, right, Yes, even from the most simple of Michael my is is going to just walk and stab until you know, if somebody sets him on fire or the very complex stuff like the Purge is actually a very complex idea. I mean in terms of the the entire thing you need to understand. Maybe I'm feeling fresh from my viewing of The Forever Purge, but but yeah, but I didn't understand. I guess like when you were first talking about this, what you meant. But it is like in like Mario Brothers, you're like taking the warp pipe to another level because it's like they will let things fly that would not fly otherwise, and there's a huge audience for it. Yeah, there's this great feeling of beating the system and uh, you look at you look at I be the same way like The Invisible Man, even that movie that's a very you know, forward thinking movie about male power and abuse. The same idea. Like if you said you wanted to do a wide released movie about those things, sure you want to make a Sundance movie about about those topics. That's what Sundances, for the thing is, it's extraordinarily difficult to do. Of the a hundred movies that we've made, not all of them are like directly about a social issue or whatever. A lot of them are just like straight scary movies, which I also like, but it's very hard to to do both. But it certainly is like very exciting when we get a movie that connects with people that that is scary and also touches on an issue that's like the magical triangle for us. Then let me actually bring it back to it. I started talking about because I've been thinking a lot about this, and and actually I wasn't intending to watch The Forever Purge as a component of this conversation, but then I ended up realizing it's almost the perfect movie to have watched discussed it because so many of the Blumhouse films do touch on pretty serious political and societal issues. If you don't know what The Purge is, by the way, and I don't know how you wouldn't, because it's been a very popular series. It's a mad Jans in America where one night out of the year, all crime is legal, and to get all this bad stuff out of our systems that we do all year round. They're like, if we just condense it into one day and make every crime legal, everybody will be fine, and then the next day we'll just go back to normal and that's largely what the films are about. And there's five of the Purge movies and a TV series anyway, the most recent one is mean unabashedly about like white supremacy, I mean, just not even hiding it is right. It's got actual Nazis in it, and and it depicts in America, which I think, you know, it feels frightening lee possible at this particular momentum. There's a character who's listening to gunfire and he says, that's American music, the different guns, and I think it's you know, it's pretty fucking spot on, right, like for the climate. But we live in a world that is terrifying in a million different ways, I think right now, Like we're you know, on the precipice of maybe a world war. You know, we've got like crazy economy stuff happening. There's still you know, MAGA and Trump stuff, and you know, real neo Nazism in this country. How do you approach where to draw the line? Like, for instance, we have school shootings in America right where kids get killed on a pretty regular basis. Now it's terrifying and horrible and like about the worst thing you can think of a movie about that wouldn't be fun, right, I mean, I think we can we can agree that wouldn't be like a fun Blumhouse production, and you probably wouldn't go there. But how do you know when to draw the line? How do you make those decisions about what political topics you can go there with them? Well, there's a lot of things to unpack your question. The first thing is that horror has to be scary. If you just depict violence, or you just depict something gross, it's not scary, right, So you have to make that distinction. And then the second thing you're asking is people have different points of view about this. It is my point of view that the more you show and depict, the more people are talking about these things, and the more conversation there is about bad things in the world, the more chance there is to fix those bad things. Right. You know, some people have a different point of view about that, which which is okay, we don't have a meter for how far we'll take something. The perch Wise are a good example. The Perch as a franchise. All five movies are and the TV show to the underlying topic of all of them is gun control. Each one has a different kind of specific thing that they tackle. I don't know if you saw the one. There's one with a female presidential candidate before Hillary ran, which was incredible. So each one had its own mini category under beneath the category of the insane relationship that the United States has two guns, which is the purveying theory behind all of them. The lens that we look at. Just to answer this second part of your with what I was saying in the first is is it scary or an expose. If it's an expose, we're not doing it. And if we did any expose, it was a mistake. It's got to be scary. It's got to be scary. It's got to engage the audience. No one wants to go see an expose or they turn on a documentary. If they want to see an They're not going to the movie theater on Friday night to see an expose. They're going to get scared. And so that's really the lens that we look at it. You could make a movie about white supremacy if it's scary, which I would argue, you know, the last purge was I think it's scary because it's about things that feel real. Yeah, well that's also true. I will say gun control. I don't know that I took away a message like pro gun control. I was like, everybody needs a gun in the world of the Purge. Did you see the first movie? Yeah, a while ago, because the first perche it's very pointedly about gun control. I had this, Well, it doesn't matter. I had a disagreement about with a critic once about all this. But what was the What was the disagreement, Well, she said, I thought, I don't think the message is very clear in the first movie that it's anti gun. Any rational person watching the movies, they don't think the purchase is a good idea. Actually, is that true? Though? I was gonna say, of course, there's like, you know, some you know, three percent of the nutball population that thinks the purchase is a good idea. The Purchase supposed to be a cautionary tale of if we keep solving violence in America and school shootings in America, and if our answer keeps being give everyone more guns and make them more powerful, we're gonna wind up with the Purge, which is a world no one would want to live in, but clearly some lunatics would want to live in it. I'll tell you funny thing about the Purge. The Purge in France is called America's Nightmare that they translate instead of calling it. There's no translation for the Purge, so the title is like America's Nightmare, um and the Funnily enough, in Europe and in countries where gun control is more rational, the movies are very well understood as a cautionary tale. In America, some of us are bananas, so we think we might think it's a good idea, which is so crazy. I mean it could be because we've built almost the entire movie industry on like fetishizing guns. And I mean some of the most famous films of all time are you know, guns are very necessary for the main characters to get their way or to get to the point. That is very true. It's possible that it doesn't look that way because we actually have a gun problem right in the country. Yeah. How important is it that these things also have a message that they're also trying to kind of sneak in something political or societal to say, I think it's more interesting if they're about something. And I don't want to pretend to say every movie we've we've made is about something. Some of them aren't. Some of them are just straight scary and straight commercial. And there's a thrill to making a hit scary movie, absolutely because it's it's so hard to make a hit movie period. So to have a hit that's just a scary movie and about something is certainly a thrill. I think it's more interesting when the movies are about something, and we aspired to do that. But I couldn't run the company if I'm mandated that that's the only thing that we would do, right, Excuse me, I couldn't run the company profitably if I'm mandated that's the only thing that we were going to do. So sometimes it just has to be a thrill ride you're thinking about it in a wrong way. We read it, we love it, it's scary, we want to do it now. It's icing on the cake if it's about something. But even if it isn't about something, if we love it and we think it's scary, we want to do it. How many movies have you made in the genre? How many have you made? I think almost a hundred. D So you're a modern, clearly very smart man, and I assume you've got data on all of these movies. I'm sure you're looking at all kinds of interesting metrics about how they perform. Is there any correlation one way or the other, any any sort of data that you have about movies about something versus ones that are more straightforward that they work well, they don't work well. There's certain markets where they blow up and others where they don't. I hate data, Okay, interesting, and I think that is the death of creativity. Okay. And if we use data to make decisions, every movie that we did that's been about something would never have been made. If you use data, you would never make Get Out. If you use data, you would you would never make The Invisible Man, you would never make Split. Any interesting movie that we made wouldn't have gotten made with data. So you're rejecting data. I vehemently reject, oppose, and despise data. Yes, you must hate Netflix. I definitely don't hate Netflix. I have a lot of business with Netflix, but I would not want to work at Netflix because I wouldn't want to make decisions based on data that would not be that's not something that said something I believe in. They see that's interesting I would have expected. And maybe this is just like because I'm a deranged person who's from the Internet, and I think about like a data rules everything. I actually think, you know, a lot of the problems that the streamers are having probably have to do with the reliance on data versus like the instinct of the creators the artists who are actually making this stuff. But the problems that the streamers are having, as are it's to quality, have an enormous amount to do with data, not alone, but for sure. So that actually kind of leads into something I want to ask you about, which is, I don't know how much you've studied Roger Corman. Roger Corman for those that don't know, and I apologize if you do know, was a producer who essentially started sort of the wave of B movies in Hollywood, and he employed really really famous directors and he basically gave them no money but let them sort of do whatever they want, like Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demi and Peter Buckdanovich and Joe Dante, I mean, crazy directors worked for him. And he worked with a ton of really amazing actors like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone, but he made all of the movies really cheaply and very quickly, and just like was cranking them out. Anyway, I've watched interviews with you, and I've I've read stuff, and I think Planet Money did a show about blum House and this kind of like, you know, cheap, fast and dirty method. But to me it reminded me a lot of what I've you know, read and heard about Roger Corman. Was any of what he was doing an influence to how you've done this? Yeah, I mean I didn't know much about Roger Corman. In other words, I didn't like look at his company and say, we'll do that. But we share a lot of DNA with Roger Corman. We also don't share a lot of DNA. What we there's there's a lot that we do that's the same, which is, we make a lot of low budget movies for sure, and no one gets paid unless the movies make money. All that stuff. The biggest difference between Roger Corman and Blumhouse on the movie side of the business. TV is another thing altogether, But on the movie side of the business is almost all of his movies were done by first time directors. We almost never do movies with first time directors. Hollywood puts an enormous amount of emphasis great for our company kind of dumb, I think, but great for our company on a director's last movie. So even if a director has done three great movies, if the last movie hasn't performed well, it's more difficult for him or her to get a job than it should be. So I'm particularly focused on either showrunners people who come from TV Jordan peel Right, or directors who maybe their last movie wasn't a big financial windfall, but they have that in their past. James One comes up with Saul one and two, like one of the most successful horror movies ever of all time. He makes these two movies for Universal that are interesting movies, they don't quite connect with audiences. The guy cannot get arrested. He comes into my office. He pitches me, I'm gonna make Saw again. I have one constraint. I wanted to be Pg. Thirteen because he doesn't want to be known as the Saw. Guy comes up with Insidious. We just shot our fifth Insidious movie. Guy came up with the Country Guys. One of the most prolific, most successful people in Hollywood and one of the great artists in Hollywood, and he made a movie for my broken down company. I've never I had made one movie when it came to me because no one would make Insidious, which is the difference between us and Corman and that and that's a that's a big difference. Is there a movie you've seen recently, a film that you did not make, You did not have a hand in that. You were like, I wish I had made that fucking course of course, quiet Place I wish I made and the Conjuring I wish I made. Those are the two. Did you get a crack at the point now? But but I still, I still they keep me up at night. They haunt me, both of them, well, like sort of like a horror film. Obviously, like you've spent a lot of time thinking about things that are scary. My guess is you've got a pretty good sense of what scares people. At this point, would just say that's true. I would agree with you, Yes, what do you in reality is scary? Donald Trump? And that's not a controversial statement to make, is it? In Hollywood? It's very controversial of the country disagrees with me. I would say it's about as controversial as you get there's a chunk of those people that want to do the purge for real, Right, I think we can agree on that. You know what, I would not go that far. I will not say that. I'll say that we made a great movie if you were going to ask me. Like, one of my biggest regrets I have is that The Hunt didn't get the kind of release and the attention that it should have gotten. The Hunt was a movie that was controversial, right. I actually did not see The Hunt, so I'm a bit ignorant here, But you watch that tonight. The Hunts one of the best movies the company has ever made. We would have been talking about The Hunt three right now. But Trump tweeted about it and a journalist wrote a story about it that was incorrect. But that's all it took to doom the movie, and the movie was doomed. And just to be clear, the Hunt is a movie about people hunting people. And what year did this come out? The Hunt came out the week before the pandemic began in March. Well that's kind of a double whammy. That's true also, But that wasn't why it didn't work the way it should up. But what I was saying, bring up the hunt is I'm very against like dividing red and blue. I don't believe in that, um, And I think that it's unfortunate, not that anyone gives a shit about what I have to say to politics. I just hate Donald Trump, that's all. I certainly have nothing against the people who voted for him. I just don't like him. The hunt is about the fact that they're extremes on both sides, and that there's the majority of America's in the middle. That's what it's about to make. There are extremes on both sides, but there are extreme nutballs on both sides. Come on, that's agree except I think you will agree that there's only one party that's like, we don't believe in the results of the election. But it's not the whole party, you know, and and and that is it's not the whole party the Republicans, um, Miss Cheney, for instance. You know, I agree that I agree there's a few good ones in there. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. Oh, I would totally disagree. I think most Republicans are great people, most of them, I mean people. Maybe I don't know how they are as legislators. But okay, that a whole other podcast. That's a whole other story. Anyhow. Okay, So, and this has been so interesting, actually so much more interesting than I could have imagined. I'm so glad. Not to say I didn't think you would be interesting, but you had answers that I did not see coming. Thought you were going to have like a fanboy conversation. No, I don't know, I thought, I thought. I don't know what I thought. You're just Your comment about data, to me is kind of blowing my mind, because everybody in the industry data is you can't create. Could you imagine going to an artist who paints paintings and say, let's look at the data from the Gogosian Gallery of the artists that have sold in the last ten years. Now, paint something based on that. Yeah, data is death to art and creativity. But I can't imagine that. And it does happen for sure. I mean it's happening right now with paintings. I have no doubt that somebody is studying what has been successful in art, and they are looking at who is out there that is in a style or in a genre. In they're like ginning the beginning of the end of American dominance and culture will be data. Okay, and your next film was going to be about It's gonna be a horrific film about movie about data. Exactly good. One other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is you made a movie. It's called Unfriended Dark Web too. There's two of them, Okay, yes, I mean basically it's kind of about the Internet, right, very much so. Whenever I see a movie that uses the Internet or like a cell phone as a device like technology, I find that it's very hard to be scared by anything happening on the Internet. Do you have to work extra hard to make the Internet or a phone scary? Is it even possible? It's impossible. I think that t More and the guys who made that movie came as close as you can. I agree with you. There's no it's like impossible to make something scary when you're staring at a series screen or what else from the screen? Almost impossible, right, It's an interesting like almost like this black hole for horror. A lot of people have tried it totally. As soon as you get to the screen, you know the ring worked. I don't know why the ring works. There's a screen, but it's this other worldly's sort of portal. The Internet, weirdly enough, doesn't feel like another worldly portal, or maybe it is so much of a portal. I think the Internet is very scary, but it's impossible to make it scary in a movie. Well, I think that is about the best possible place we could leave it. Jason, I have to say, this is a fascinating conversation. I'm so glad. I appreciate you taking the time. And oh, oh wait a second before you go, of course, there are new Blumhouse things happening. Yes, of course, Soft and Quiet, give me two seconds on it subject Quiet. It's a great movie directly about white supremacy, and it just hits it right on the nose. Is pro white supremacy or anti white supremacy? It is very anti And there's not two sides of white supremacy. That's not that there's not an equivalent of Age'm just making sure there's only one side of that. And uh Beth who directed this movie all in one take, and it's um about this incredibly frightening incident that takes place with this group of women, and it's spectacular. I love the movie and it's one it's one take. Yeah, it's great, and it's great and it's great and I hope everyone sees it. Okay, that's coming out November four. Nanny, which sounds like I'm not an expert, but there's no way the nanny is like a good guy in this movie. Novemb Well, no, the nanny is quite good. It's the it's the people who employ the nanny. The nanny is the good guy. It's interesting. Okay. Well, well, I mean I don't want to, you know, you gotta go see the movie. But the movie is great. Okay, yeah, I know. Spoilers coming out November twenty three. Actually, in this last one, Megan which I assume it's pronounced Megan, not m threegan, but Megan is amazing. The trailers out now, the trailers fucked up. The trailer is upsetting in a big way. You know that, right, See the trailer. It's to rip it and uh. It's made with James One, the gentleman I talked about earlier. He's the he's my producing partner on it. And the movie is just fantastic. It opens in January. It's very very very very scary and creepy and and We'll haunt you at night. The trailers haunt him. Did you expect the viral kind of thing to happen with the trailer? Did you see that coming? I didn't expect it, but I hoped for it, and I'm glad to see. If you had studied the data, you would have known that was going to happen. You're not said data. No one would have seen the trailer. If I studied the data, we wouldn't have made the movie exactly exactly, all right, Jason, thank you so much. Come back and do this against until. It's a great pleasure. I'd love to. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me, Thanks for being here. Bye bye. Well, that was a fantastic conversation. Uh, far better than I could possibly have imagined any conversation that I've ever had going. So what did you think was the most surprising part? He had very strong feelings about data, which I feel like it is very encouraging to me and exciting because his films are successful and a lot of people love them. And I also think data is overused some places, particularly in the creation of art. But yeah, no, it was good. I'm mean it was fascinating that he's done a life hack on the movie industry with this idea of horror being like a broad release sort of thing that you don't have to spend a lot of money on, which is I mean, truly an incredible point that I would have never thought of or considered. But it is true that. I mean, these are blockbuster movies they're making, but they're making them on often on very small budgets. I mean, Paranormal Activity apparently was made for fifteen thousand dollars and it grows two hundred nine three million, which is like, that's like dream movie stuff. Like every person in the in the industry is like, if I could just make a movie for five cents and it makes one billion dollars, that would be ideal. So I mean, he's kind of cracked. This means again it's like a hack, which I think is is very cool. But um, I mean, actually, when I started thinking about this conversation, one of my prevailing thoughts was, how do you make white supremacy in a film ever fun? And I know that sounds like a crazy thought, but in the latest Purgeons moment, it's obviously the white supremacists are terrible they're the villains. It's not ambiguous, it's not both sides. It's like they are unambiguously the bad guys. And it's great when they get killed. We love when they get killed. Everybody's screaming out of their seats when they get killed. If you're like a neo Nazi, I bet these movies are really weird for you. I mean, but it would be so amazing to watch a bunch of neo Nazis watch the latest Purge movie, because they'd be like, wait a second, anyhow. But I think it is is fascinating that it can be a fun movie and action packed and scary and suspenseful, but also it is talking about immigration and white supremacists and you know, a conservative political party that's obsessed with violence and and guns, and it is definitely talking about that stuff. It is definitely means. Sometimes it's heavy handed, sometimes it's more subtle, but those are topics and the types of movies those things are discussed in are nine times out of ten are documentaries, and they don't make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, So you know, is it good is it bad? I can't say, but it's happening, and it is an interesting and very modern place to be in filmmaking that that maybe that's the only way to talk about it. Maybe the only way to confront the violence of the world that we live in is to present people with fantasy violence. Which Blumhouse movie do you think you're gonna go watch? Now? Well, I am curious about the Hunt, I have to say, and uh, that may be on the list. I haven't seen any of the insidious movies. Here's the thing. I mean, honestly, there's just too many Blumhouse movies. I mean, I think I'm happy. I'm happy for them, like I'm glad it's going well, but there's so many movies like like I saw Split, but I haven't seen Glass. Yeah, I think I've seen a later paranormal Activity, but not the original. I have not seen Happy Death, Death, Rat Seeking You help, I BRANDI

Today's episode of What Future with Joshua to Pulski is a re release of our first ever episode, an interview with Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions. It's a really interesting listen. We will be back next week with an all new episode. Thanks for listening. Hello, my name is Joshua to Pulsky, and you somehow have tuned into What Future, my new podcast about interesting people in an interesting time on an interesting planet. This is our first show. We have not shared it a full episode with any other human beings yet anyhow, you know, it's all come together very rapidly, but also we took forever, which is weird, but sometimes that happens in life. And I'm just very pleased to get started and talk to people and hopefully, you know, crack open your brain and and then pull the brain out of the skull. Actually, I'd be cracky open your skull and then I'd be pulling the brain I mean metaphorically, not actually, and then putting your brain back into your skull. So that's what probably what the show is gonna be like for most listeners, I would imagine. So the first show is October. That's today, that's right now. If you're listening to it on the day that the show came out, and I know that you are all of you. And it's very close to Halloween, which is my favorite holiday, and just generally speaking, October as a kick ass time of the year because it's spooky and it's fall and there's pumpkins, and the weather is turning but it's not too cold yet, and a lot of good horror movies come out, and so of course around Halloween you started thinking about horror movies and scary stuff and ghost stories, and I have a deep love and a deep passion for you know, the genre is called horror, but I think my relationship with that genre is sort of there's a very specific kind of horror I like. And I think when I imagine the perfect sort of film, the one that is most sort of sweet to me in the month of October, I think of this movie by John Carpenter called In the Mouth of Madness. I've never seen it, and I've loved John Carpenter. I've never even heard of it. Oh my god, that's insane. You have to see it immediately. By the way, if you're wondering who this voice is, that's my producer Lyrah Smith, who will be making appearances. She'll largely be telling me about what movies she hasn't seen. That's just now. In the Mouth of Madness is the third in his Apocalypse trilogy. The first one is The Thing, the second one is Prince of Darkness. Which is which was? I mean, it probably competes for being my favorite John Carpenter movie. It's that or In the Mouth of Madness. I kind of don't know which one it is. And I first saw In the Mouth of Madness. I don't think it was the first John Carpenter movie I saw, but I maybe wasn't so aware of his entire output. I probably had seen They Live in a few others. But but one night I was at my parents house. I was not living there at the time, but it was late at night. I don't really know why I was there. Maybe I had gone there to eat some of their food. This is not an important part of the story, but it is a part of the story. Any I was sitting on the stuff, I was slipping through channels, and I had found this film and I was probably, like, I don't know how far into it, but I had walked into this movie that I had not seen before, and it was these two guys that are din or talking and there's this man walking across the street with an axe in his hand, and it's a New York City street scene, and everybody's like screaming and running away from him, and he just walking towards and eventually like smashes the acts through the through the window. It's as unbelievable sequence, But I was like, what is this? What is about? And and the film in the Mouth of Madness is a very special kind of horror movie. And like most of the ones that I like, it is not that it is super gory, though there are gory moments, and it's not that like you see people getting repeatedly stabbed or getting their arms chopped off or whatever. There is like horrific sort of violence in it. But the thing that makes it upsetting, and that makes it even on repeat viewings, a horrific film, is that it plays with the idea of reality. It plays with what we think of as our reality versus what it actually might be, and that our perceptions of this reality, I feel like sometimes they're just on a razor's edge. And I think the films that I love the most and John Carpenter has done a whole handful of movies like this which are interested in this idea of like what is reality, But they're also interested in a genre which is called cosmic horror, which is the things that are happening are not that they aren't real or they aren't you know, something tangible, but they're something beyond our understanding, from a place that we don't understand and can't really communicate with. So when I think about the best horror, the stuff that I love, and I would say David Lynch movies fall into this category, you know, something like Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. There's a lot of sort of this undercurrent of something isn't right with reality, like something is broken here and and you kind of feel like you're never on solid ground with where it's going and what might happen next. And that got me thinking, as we are entering Halloween and Halloween season, about the horror of actual reality that we're currently living in, Like the fact that every day it feels like something truly cataclysmic or at the very least extremely disturbing is happening, right if it's not, you know, World War three or school shootings or you know, Trump winning in four. It's some form of, you know, sort of huge distress that we're all experiencing. And I think that it's hard sometimes to navigate that stuff in your daily life and then go and enjoy something that is supposed to scare you. Right, It's kind of harder to be scared now because we have so much that's terrifying in reality. And I'm really excited that this is our first episode because I get to talk about horror movies, which again I do love, but also a lot of what we want to do on this show, and a lot of what I want to talk about on the show is the places where sort of reality and fiction meet, the places where art and the Internet intersect, sort of the way that we experience things and trying to understand what those things are and sort of make sense of them or maybe learn something about them. And so I think it's fertile ground in terms of what is horror and how does it work? But because we live in such a precarious moment, I think the concept of horror is changing, and talking about what that looks like and how it feels is pretty important. And so in thinking about this, I started to think about new films that have been released that are really speaking about or talking to what is happening in reality, and landed on this, you know, realization that Blumhouse, which is like now like the kind of the place where you find the new horror movies or the new franchises, is doing something that is really interesting in that they are making movies that are kind of sometimes very much about the reality that we live in, but also weirdly fun, which is hard for me to sort of compute how you navigate the idea of being scared in a fun way against or versus being scared in a real way, which is something that we are all, I think every day feeling. And so I thought, okay, well, let me go to the source. Let me talk to Jason Blum, the guy who started the company and who is literally personally responsible for some of the most horrific and also interesting films of the past like ten years or more. So we have Jason Blum, the founder of blum House, a master of horror, and he's here with us right now. Jason, thank you for being here. I know you're a very busy man. How much sleep did you get last night? I am very careful about my sleep. I really, I really get let's see, at twelve to seven, I got seven and a half hours. I really try and keep it over seven. That's a healthy amount. I rarely get less than seven, and when I do, I promised myself never to do that again. I Uh, I got a lot less because I actually was up to like two thirty in the morning watching some blum House content. I was. I was watching The Forever Purge. That's a and one. But I'm going to come back to the Forever Perch. I just wanted to say it's going to be a topic. So blum House has not only done horror, but I think you're sort of synonymous with being the place for modern horror. But would you describe blum House like that? I would describe them as as the place for modern horror or horror movies. We do the occasional with Blash, Black Plansman, handful of others. TV a little bit differently. TV is more like is straight horror, and I would call horror adjacent or about horrible things. Okay, give me what's horror adjacent. We made a mini series about Roger Ailes called The Loudest Voice in the room. To me, he's a horrible thing that's horror adjacent. Maybe just horror, Yeah, maybe just horror. We made a mini series recently for Showtime called The Good Lord Bird, which is about John Brown, which was about the worst thing that the United States probably ever did, which was obviously slavery. So I feel like what you said is true, and we really try and stick with project. It's that if they're not horror, they're tangentially related to horror. Right now, we haven't done that a hundred percent of the time, but but pretty close. So take me back to how you ended up in this particular space, and my guess is I'd be surprised to hear that you don't have some love of the genre. But can you talk to me about like what the moment was or what the film was that made you think this is a thing that I want to do. Yeah, I've grown to love the genre, but that's not really why I got into horror. I got into horror because I was caught between a love of making independent films and a strong dislike for the distribution of independent films which is very broken, and a love of studio distribution because everyone gets to see what you made, and a dislike for the process of studio production. My goal in life was to make a studio film, and I finally made this movie, The Tooth Fairy for Fox before Blumhouse existed, and uh, and making a studio film was the opposite of what I thought it was gonna be. It was very frustrating. Distribution was great. Paranormal Activity came out about the same time as The Tooth Ray came out, and what Paranormal Activity did, it was kind of coalesce almost twenty years of trying to find my place into the business in one weekend, which was Wow. There's a way to make independent movies that can be subversive. They can be about difficult things. They don't have to have movie stars in them. You can have a lead character die in the first act. All these kind of creative risks that you could only take with independent movies, which is why I liked independent movies. Storytelling you could do with horror movies, but with horror movies you get a studio to release them. And so really I came to horror through business and the notion that I could continue my love of independent movies. But if you look at our originals and you take out the scares. There really a series of like indie sundance movies. You look at Sinister, it's about a frustrated writer who's trying to have another hit book, who moves his family into a house that's very dangerous, and he chooses his career over his family, which is really kind of the storyline of an independent movie. And and most of the movies that we've done, the original horror movies that we've done, are really independent movies. Dressed up is scary movies. I think it's true that the plotlines are often, you know, in some way almost art films, but don't say are indie I mean, God forbid hard Okay, sorry, I take that back. I wouldn't would never describe one of your films as art. That's yeah, that's as bad as saying elevated horror. Wow, do you take issue with the elevated horror designation? Elevated horror is code word for people saying like, I'm better than people who like horror movies, like I don't really like horror, but elevated horror is something I would stoop so low as to watch, and sometimes even directors say it, which is even worse, like I wouldn't make a horror movie, but elevated horror I would make, which is literally like a director saying I wouldn't make like a bad movie, but I would make a good movie. Right, Well, isn't genre kind of ghetto eyes in a way? Like I mean this is true in literature as well, right, Like science fiction and fantasy is considered not real literature. Right, then there's a certain bar like Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a lot of science fiction, is considered a real author. And then the guys who were Paul for Philip K. Dick and his Heyday would have been considered like this kind of genre like Paul kind of crappy writer. But the quality of the work, the variance is non existent. It's just as hard to direct or create a great horror movie as it is to create a great art movie. But yes, it is kind of ghetto eyes, And that's another reason why I really liked it, right, right, I mean when you were a kid, you weren't like you watch Halloween and suddenly you were struck that you must create horror films. This is not like a lifelong passion for you. Everything in my personality and nature is someone who likes horror movies. I didn't dislike them, but I wasn't like a crazy horror movie fan at all. And I should have been, because like, I'm kind of weird and I'm an outsider and all that sort of stuff. So I should have appreciated them much more than I did. But luckily or in Pelly saved my life and made paranormal activity. I mean, that's wild to me. I thought for sure you were going to tell me that you've grew up on you know, Wes Craven and John Carpenter or something, which is which I did. So it's interesting that you just were like, this is actually a great vehicle for filmmaking because of and maybe explain this to me, because I'm not in the industry. Tell me what was better about being able to do some of the paranormal activity. The idea that you pay fifteen dollars for like this little indie art movie at the one last art cinema in New York, right, or fifteen dollars at the multiplex with this other movie. It's so strange, Like the art movie. They spent two hundred thousand dollars marketing this little movie. And the Studio Movies spent fifty million dollars marketing the movie, and the budgets also the budgets of the one movie or three dollars and the other movies two million dollars. It's still a ticket or whatever. I just was always so frustrated that you'd work so hard on this, this movie, and it's just very hard to get distribution. And once you get distribution, because they're competing for screens with these bohemoth, huge American corporations, it's just very hard. So your movie doesn't play for very long, and if it does, it's a miracle, and you're begging everyone for favors. You beg people to go see it. Versus this machine that puts like three thousand versions of your movies out on Friday Night. Just way more appealing to me. But so, is there a shortcut with horror? Is it that it plays two larger audiences even though you can Yeah, there's there's a huge shortcut with horror, which is it's like this trojan horse, like you can sneak these crazy stories into this totally mainstream system. You can sneak get out, you know. Or the per which is the purchase of movie about gun control in America. Now, if you pitched a studio said hey, I'm gonna make a movie about gun control, they would show you out of the office before you got They don't want to make a movie about gun control. It's a nightmare for them. It's political. No matter your pro work on half the audience is going to disagree with you. We know, don't want to make political movies. It's a nightmare for them. But if you say you're gonna make a movie about if crime is legal from seven in the morning until seven at night, well, it's a great concept. Cool. What is it like. It's a genre movie, so you can use horror to get kind of unusual ideas to a very broad audience, which is which is so fun. That's a fascinating point. I've never heard anybody articulate that. I did not understand that. I don't think most people are aware of that. I mean, obviously, horror films are different than a big budget action movie or at a drama or whatever, because horror is deranged. I mean, most horror films have ida extremely bizarre, right, Yes, even from the most simple of Michael my is is going to just walk and stab until you know, if somebody sets him on fire or the very complex stuff like the Purge is actually a very complex idea. I mean in terms of the the entire thing you need to understand. Maybe I'm feeling fresh from my viewing of The Forever Purge, but but yeah, but I didn't understand. I guess like when you were first talking about this, what you meant. But it is like in like Mario Brothers, you're like taking the warp pipe to another level because it's like they will let things fly that would not fly otherwise, and there's a huge audience for it. Yeah, there's this great feeling of beating the system and uh, you look at you look at I be the same way like The Invisible Man, even that movie that's a very you know, forward thinking movie about male power and abuse. The same idea. Like if you said you wanted to do a wide released movie about those things, sure you want to make a Sundance movie about about those topics. That's what Sundances, for the thing is, it's extraordinarily difficult to do. Of the a hundred movies that we've made, not all of them are like directly about a social issue or whatever. A lot of them are just like straight scary movies, which I also like, but it's very hard to to do both. But it certainly is like very exciting when we get a movie that connects with people that that is scary and also touches on an issue that's like the magical triangle for us. Then let me actually bring it back to it. I started talking about because I've been thinking a lot about this, and and actually I wasn't intending to watch The Forever Purge as a component of this conversation, but then I ended up realizing it's almost the perfect movie to have watched discussed it because so many of the Blumhouse films do touch on pretty serious political and societal issues. If you don't know what The Purge is, by the way, and I don't know how you wouldn't, because it's been a very popular series. It's a mad Jans in America where one night out of the year, all crime is legal, and to get all this bad stuff out of our systems that we do all year round. They're like, if we just condense it into one day and make every crime legal, everybody will be fine, and then the next day we'll just go back to normal and that's largely what the films are about. And there's five of the Purge movies and a TV series anyway, the most recent one is mean unabashedly about like white supremacy, I mean, just not even hiding it is right. It's got actual Nazis in it, and and it depicts in America, which I think, you know, it feels frightening lee possible at this particular momentum. There's a character who's listening to gunfire and he says, that's American music, the different guns, and I think it's you know, it's pretty fucking spot on, right, like for the climate. But we live in a world that is terrifying in a million different ways, I think right now, Like we're you know, on the precipice of maybe a world war. You know, we've got like crazy economy stuff happening. There's still you know, MAGA and Trump stuff, and you know, real neo Nazism in this country. How do you approach where to draw the line? Like, for instance, we have school shootings in America right where kids get killed on a pretty regular basis. Now it's terrifying and horrible and like about the worst thing you can think of a movie about that wouldn't be fun, right, I mean, I think we can we can agree that wouldn't be like a fun Blumhouse production, and you probably wouldn't go there. But how do you know when to draw the line? How do you make those decisions about what political topics you can go there with them? Well, there's a lot of things to unpack your question. The first thing is that horror has to be scary. If you just depict violence, or you just depict something gross, it's not scary, right, So you have to make that distinction. And then the second thing you're asking is people have different points of view about this. It is my point of view that the more you show and depict, the more people are talking about these things, and the more conversation there is about bad things in the world, the more chance there is to fix those bad things. Right. You know, some people have a different point of view about that, which which is okay, we don't have a meter for how far we'll take something. The perch Wise are a good example. The Perch as a franchise. All five movies are and the TV show to the underlying topic of all of them is gun control. Each one has a different kind of specific thing that they tackle. I don't know if you saw the one. There's one with a female presidential candidate before Hillary ran, which was incredible. So each one had its own mini category under beneath the category of the insane relationship that the United States has two guns, which is the purveying theory behind all of them. The lens that we look at. Just to answer this second part of your with what I was saying in the first is is it scary or an expose. If it's an expose, we're not doing it. And if we did any expose, it was a mistake. It's got to be scary. It's got to be scary. It's got to engage the audience. No one wants to go see an expose or they turn on a documentary. If they want to see an They're not going to the movie theater on Friday night to see an expose. They're going to get scared. And so that's really the lens that we look at it. You could make a movie about white supremacy if it's scary, which I would argue, you know, the last purge was I think it's scary because it's about things that feel real. Yeah, well that's also true. I will say gun control. I don't know that I took away a message like pro gun control. I was like, everybody needs a gun in the world of the Purge. Did you see the first movie? Yeah, a while ago, because the first perche it's very pointedly about gun control. I had this, Well, it doesn't matter. I had a disagreement about with a critic once about all this. But what was the What was the disagreement, Well, she said, I thought, I don't think the message is very clear in the first movie that it's anti gun. Any rational person watching the movies, they don't think the purchase is a good idea. Actually, is that true? Though? I was gonna say, of course, there's like, you know, some you know, three percent of the nutball population that thinks the purchase is a good idea. The Purchase supposed to be a cautionary tale of if we keep solving violence in America and school shootings in America, and if our answer keeps being give everyone more guns and make them more powerful, we're gonna wind up with the Purge, which is a world no one would want to live in, but clearly some lunatics would want to live in it. I'll tell you funny thing about the Purge. The Purge in France is called America's Nightmare that they translate instead of calling it. There's no translation for the Purge, so the title is like America's Nightmare, um and the Funnily enough, in Europe and in countries where gun control is more rational, the movies are very well understood as a cautionary tale. In America, some of us are bananas, so we think we might think it's a good idea, which is so crazy. I mean it could be because we've built almost the entire movie industry on like fetishizing guns. And I mean some of the most famous films of all time are you know, guns are very necessary for the main characters to get their way or to get to the point. That is very true. It's possible that it doesn't look that way because we actually have a gun problem right in the country. Yeah. How important is it that these things also have a message that they're also trying to kind of sneak in something political or societal to say, I think it's more interesting if they're about something. And I don't want to pretend to say every movie we've we've made is about something. Some of them aren't. Some of them are just straight scary and straight commercial. And there's a thrill to making a hit scary movie, absolutely because it's it's so hard to make a hit movie period. So to have a hit that's just a scary movie and about something is certainly a thrill. I think it's more interesting when the movies are about something, and we aspired to do that. But I couldn't run the company if I'm mandated that that's the only thing that we would do, right, Excuse me, I couldn't run the company profitably if I'm mandated that's the only thing that we were going to do. So sometimes it just has to be a thrill ride you're thinking about it in a wrong way. We read it, we love it, it's scary, we want to do it now. It's icing on the cake if it's about something. But even if it isn't about something, if we love it and we think it's scary, we want to do it. How many movies have you made in the genre? How many have you made? I think almost a hundred. D So you're a modern, clearly very smart man, and I assume you've got data on all of these movies. I'm sure you're looking at all kinds of interesting metrics about how they perform. Is there any correlation one way or the other, any any sort of data that you have about movies about something versus ones that are more straightforward that they work well, they don't work well. There's certain markets where they blow up and others where they don't. I hate data, Okay, interesting, and I think that is the death of creativity. Okay. And if we use data to make decisions, every movie that we did that's been about something would never have been made. If you use data, you would never make Get Out. If you use data, you would you would never make The Invisible Man, you would never make Split. Any interesting movie that we made wouldn't have gotten made with data. So you're rejecting data. I vehemently reject, oppose, and despise data. Yes, you must hate Netflix. I definitely don't hate Netflix. I have a lot of business with Netflix, but I would not want to work at Netflix because I wouldn't want to make decisions based on data that would not be that's not something that said something I believe in. They see that's interesting I would have expected. And maybe this is just like because I'm a deranged person who's from the Internet, and I think about like a data rules everything. I actually think, you know, a lot of the problems that the streamers are having probably have to do with the reliance on data versus like the instinct of the creators the artists who are actually making this stuff. But the problems that the streamers are having, as are it's to quality, have an enormous amount to do with data, not alone, but for sure. So that actually kind of leads into something I want to ask you about, which is, I don't know how much you've studied Roger Corman. Roger Corman for those that don't know, and I apologize if you do know, was a producer who essentially started sort of the wave of B movies in Hollywood, and he employed really really famous directors and he basically gave them no money but let them sort of do whatever they want, like Ron Howard and Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demi and Peter Buckdanovich and Joe Dante, I mean, crazy directors worked for him. And he worked with a ton of really amazing actors like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone, but he made all of the movies really cheaply and very quickly, and just like was cranking them out. Anyway, I've watched interviews with you, and I've I've read stuff, and I think Planet Money did a show about blum House and this kind of like, you know, cheap, fast and dirty method. But to me it reminded me a lot of what I've you know, read and heard about Roger Corman. Was any of what he was doing an influence to how you've done this? Yeah, I mean I didn't know much about Roger Corman. In other words, I didn't like look at his company and say, we'll do that. But we share a lot of DNA with Roger Corman. We also don't share a lot of DNA. What we there's there's a lot that we do that's the same, which is, we make a lot of low budget movies for sure, and no one gets paid unless the movies make money. All that stuff. The biggest difference between Roger Corman and Blumhouse on the movie side of the business. TV is another thing altogether, But on the movie side of the business is almost all of his movies were done by first time directors. We almost never do movies with first time directors. Hollywood puts an enormous amount of emphasis great for our company kind of dumb, I think, but great for our company on a director's last movie. So even if a director has done three great movies, if the last movie hasn't performed well, it's more difficult for him or her to get a job than it should be. So I'm particularly focused on either showrunners people who come from TV Jordan peel Right, or directors who maybe their last movie wasn't a big financial windfall, but they have that in their past. James One comes up with Saul one and two, like one of the most successful horror movies ever of all time. He makes these two movies for Universal that are interesting movies, they don't quite connect with audiences. The guy cannot get arrested. He comes into my office. He pitches me, I'm gonna make Saw again. I have one constraint. I wanted to be Pg. Thirteen because he doesn't want to be known as the Saw. Guy comes up with Insidious. We just shot our fifth Insidious movie. Guy came up with the Country Guys. One of the most prolific, most successful people in Hollywood and one of the great artists in Hollywood, and he made a movie for my broken down company. I've never I had made one movie when it came to me because no one would make Insidious, which is the difference between us and Corman and that and that's a that's a big difference. Is there a movie you've seen recently, a film that you did not make, You did not have a hand in that. You were like, I wish I had made that fucking course of course, quiet Place I wish I made and the Conjuring I wish I made. Those are the two. Did you get a crack at the point now? But but I still, I still they keep me up at night. They haunt me, both of them, well, like sort of like a horror film. Obviously, like you've spent a lot of time thinking about things that are scary. My guess is you've got a pretty good sense of what scares people. At this point, would just say that's true. I would agree with you, Yes, what do you in reality is scary? Donald Trump? And that's not a controversial statement to make, is it? In Hollywood? It's very controversial of the country disagrees with me. I would say it's about as controversial as you get there's a chunk of those people that want to do the purge for real, Right, I think we can agree on that. You know what, I would not go that far. I will not say that. I'll say that we made a great movie if you were going to ask me. Like, one of my biggest regrets I have is that The Hunt didn't get the kind of release and the attention that it should have gotten. The Hunt was a movie that was controversial, right. I actually did not see The Hunt, so I'm a bit ignorant here, But you watch that tonight. The Hunts one of the best movies the company has ever made. We would have been talking about The Hunt three right now. But Trump tweeted about it and a journalist wrote a story about it that was incorrect. But that's all it took to doom the movie, and the movie was doomed. And just to be clear, the Hunt is a movie about people hunting people. And what year did this come out? The Hunt came out the week before the pandemic began in March. Well that's kind of a double whammy. That's true also, But that wasn't why it didn't work the way it should up. But what I was saying, bring up the hunt is I'm very against like dividing red and blue. I don't believe in that, um, And I think that it's unfortunate, not that anyone gives a shit about what I have to say to politics. I just hate Donald Trump, that's all. I certainly have nothing against the people who voted for him. I just don't like him. The hunt is about the fact that they're extremes on both sides, and that there's the majority of America's in the middle. That's what it's about to make. There are extremes on both sides, but there are extreme nutballs on both sides. Come on, that's agree except I think you will agree that there's only one party that's like, we don't believe in the results of the election. But it's not the whole party, you know, and and and that is it's not the whole party the Republicans, um, Miss Cheney, for instance. You know, I agree that I agree there's a few good ones in there. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. Oh, I would totally disagree. I think most Republicans are great people, most of them, I mean people. Maybe I don't know how they are as legislators. But okay, that a whole other podcast. That's a whole other story. Anyhow. Okay, So, and this has been so interesting, actually so much more interesting than I could have imagined. I'm so glad. Not to say I didn't think you would be interesting, but you had answers that I did not see coming. Thought you were going to have like a fanboy conversation. No, I don't know, I thought, I thought. I don't know what I thought. You're just Your comment about data, to me is kind of blowing my mind, because everybody in the industry data is you can't create. Could you imagine going to an artist who paints paintings and say, let's look at the data from the Gogosian Gallery of the artists that have sold in the last ten years. Now, paint something based on that. Yeah, data is death to art and creativity. But I can't imagine that. And it does happen for sure. I mean it's happening right now with paintings. I have no doubt that somebody is studying what has been successful in art, and they are looking at who is out there that is in a style or in a genre. In they're like ginning the beginning of the end of American dominance and culture will be data. Okay, and your next film was going to be about It's gonna be a horrific film about movie about data. Exactly good. One other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is you made a movie. It's called Unfriended Dark Web too. There's two of them, Okay, yes, I mean basically it's kind of about the Internet, right, very much so. Whenever I see a movie that uses the Internet or like a cell phone as a device like technology, I find that it's very hard to be scared by anything happening on the Internet. Do you have to work extra hard to make the Internet or a phone scary? Is it even possible? It's impossible. I think that t More and the guys who made that movie came as close as you can. I agree with you. There's no it's like impossible to make something scary when you're staring at a series screen or what else from the screen? Almost impossible, right, It's an interesting like almost like this black hole for horror. A lot of people have tried it totally. As soon as you get to the screen, you know the ring worked. I don't know why the ring works. There's a screen, but it's this other worldly's sort of portal. The Internet, weirdly enough, doesn't feel like another worldly portal, or maybe it is so much of a portal. I think the Internet is very scary, but it's impossible to make it scary in a movie. Well, I think that is about the best possible place we could leave it. Jason, I have to say, this is a fascinating conversation. I'm so glad. I appreciate you taking the time. And oh, oh wait a second before you go, of course, there are new Blumhouse things happening. Yes, of course, Soft and Quiet, give me two seconds on it subject Quiet. It's a great movie directly about white supremacy, and it just hits it right on the nose. Is pro white supremacy or anti white supremacy? It is very anti And there's not two sides of white supremacy. That's not that there's not an equivalent of Age'm just making sure there's only one side of that. And uh Beth who directed this movie all in one take, and it's um about this incredibly frightening incident that takes place with this group of women, and it's spectacular. I love the movie and it's one it's one take. Yeah, it's great, and it's great and it's great and I hope everyone sees it. Okay, that's coming out November four. Nanny, which sounds like I'm not an expert, but there's no way the nanny is like a good guy in this movie. Novemb Well, no, the nanny is quite good. It's the it's the people who employ the nanny. The nanny is the good guy. It's interesting. Okay. Well, well, I mean I don't want to, you know, you gotta go see the movie. But the movie is great. Okay, yeah, I know. Spoilers coming out November twenty three. Actually, in this last one, Megan which I assume it's pronounced Megan, not m threegan, but Megan is amazing. The trailers out now, the trailers fucked up. The trailer is upsetting in a big way. You know that, right, See the trailer. It's to rip it and uh. It's made with James One, the gentleman I talked about earlier. He's the he's my producing partner on it. And the movie is just fantastic. It opens in January. It's very very very very scary and creepy and and We'll haunt you at night. The trailers haunt him. Did you expect the viral kind of thing to happen with the trailer? Did you see that coming? I didn't expect it, but I hoped for it, and I'm glad to see. If you had studied the data, you would have known that was going to happen. You're not said data. No one would have seen the trailer. If I studied the data, we wouldn't have made the movie exactly exactly, all right, Jason, thank you so much. Come back and do this against until. It's a great pleasure. I'd love to. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me, Thanks for being here. Bye bye. Well, that was a fantastic conversation. Uh, far better than I could possibly have imagined any conversation that I've ever had going. So what did you think was the most surprising part? He had very strong feelings about data, which I feel like it is very encouraging to me and exciting because his films are successful and a lot of people love them. And I also think data is overused some places, particularly in the creation of art. But yeah, no, it was good. I'm mean it was fascinating that he's done a life hack on the movie industry with this idea of horror being like a broad release sort of thing that you don't have to spend a lot of money on, which is I mean, truly an incredible point that I would have never thought of or considered. But it is true that. I mean, these are blockbuster movies they're making, but they're making them on often on very small budgets. I mean, Paranormal Activity apparently was made for fifteen thousand dollars and it grows two hundred nine three million, which is like, that's like dream movie stuff. Like every person in the in the industry is like, if I could just make a movie for five cents and it makes one billion dollars, that would be ideal. So I mean, he's kind of cracked. This means again it's like a hack, which I think is is very cool. But um, I mean, actually, when I started thinking about this conversation, one of my prevailing thoughts was, how do you make white supremacy in a film ever fun? And I know that sounds like a crazy thought, but in the latest Purgeons moment, it's obviously the white supremacists are terrible they're the villains. It's not ambiguous, it's not both sides. It's like they are unambiguously the bad guys. And it's great when they get killed. We love when they get killed. Everybody's screaming out of their seats when they get killed. If you're like a neo Nazi, I bet these movies are really weird for you. I mean, but it would be so amazing to watch a bunch of neo Nazis watch the latest Purge movie, because they'd be like, wait a second, anyhow. But I think it is is fascinating that it can be a fun movie and action packed and scary and suspenseful, but also it is talking about immigration and white supremacists and you know, a conservative political party that's obsessed with violence and and guns, and it is definitely talking about that stuff. It is definitely means. Sometimes it's heavy handed, sometimes it's more subtle, but those are topics and the types of movies those things are discussed in are nine times out of ten are documentaries, and they don't make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office, So you know, is it good is it bad? I can't say, but it's happening, and it is an interesting and very modern place to be in filmmaking that that maybe that's the only way to talk about it. Maybe the only way to confront the violence of the world that we live in is to present people with fantasy violence. Which Blumhouse movie do you think you're gonna go watch? Now? Well, I am curious about the Hunt, I have to say, and uh, that may be on the list. I haven't seen any of the insidious movies. Here's the thing. I mean, honestly, there's just too many Blumhouse movies. I mean, I think I'm happy. I'm happy for them, like I'm glad it's going well, but there's so many movies like like I saw Split, but I haven't seen Glass. Yeah, I think I've seen a later paranormal Activity, but not the original. I have not seen Happy Death, Death, Rat Seeking You help, I BRANDI