“It’s a project I’ve been passionate about for a very long time, since before we did Invisible Man with Leigh,” Blum explains. “I always thought if The Invisible Man worked, I’d love to try and tackle The Wolf Man and try to do with the Wolf Man what Leigh did with the Invisible Man. And I would describe that as taking the monster and [not] making it a four-quadrant movie for everybody, but returning to its roots, which is a straight horror movie.”
At this point, Blum is aware that he has developed a familiar stable of connections with respected filmmakers in the genre. Whannell and the producer have a history going back to the first Insidious, which Whannell wrote and starred in. But like Christopher Landon, who directed horror-comedies Happy Death Day and Freaky at Blumhouse, Blum has seen that quirky and sometimes comedic voice develop into something more complex in later works.
“I think there are certain filmmakers, like Chris and Leigh, who can bring levity to a horror movie, which makes the movie scarier because the audience kind of relaxes for a minute and starts to laugh. And when they’re relaxed, they’re easier to scare.” With that said, Blum and Landon’s next collaboration, April’s Drop, is deadly serious. The producer describes the movie as a “taut and super-intense” 92-minute techno-thriller wherein a single mother on a blind date (Meghann Fahy) discovers an anonymous stranger is AirDropping threats to her child and family over the phone.
“I wrote a movie a long time ago called Disturbia,” Landon says in a separate interview, “which is very much a Hitchcockian thriller. This is a return to something that I’ve always loved, [and] a break from the horror-comedy world.” A movie that Landon describes as perfect for our current Twitter moment—“We will not call it X, no one calls it X!” he quips—Drop is a shot of original horror adrenaline.
However, Blumhouse is also keeping one foot in returning to titles that audiences already love, including follow-ups to genre breakouts such as M3GAN and The Black Phone. “I think the most important factor to creating a successful sequel is to have the people responsible for the original movie back,” Blum muses. “Hollywood doesn’t do that a lot, but on almost all the sequels we’ve done—not all, but almost all the sequels we’ve done—we have the original people back. There’s a tone and a magic dust in a movie that connects with the culture.”
In the case of M3GAN 2.0, that means director Gerard Johnstone, writer Akela Cooper, and stars Allison Williams and Violet McGraw—and, of course, M3GAN herself (voiced by Jenna Davis).
