On Friday, July 10th, New Line Cinema is releasing The Gallows which follows a group of high school theater students who are being terrorized by Charlie, a former student who died horrifically during a play production and doesn’t take kindly to a new generation of aspiring thespians tackling the doomed material some 20 years later.

Directed by Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing, The Gallows stars Reese Mishler, Pfeifer Brown, Ryan Shoos, and Cassidy Gifford and was also produced by Blumhouse Productions.  Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Blumhouse founder, Jason Blum, about their latest project and also heard his thoughts on wrapping up the Paranormal Activity franchise this fall, staying diverse, and whether or not he’s ever considered directing- plus much more.

Congrats on The Gallows- I had a lot of fun with it. At what point did you guys at Blumhouse jump on and in what capacity did you work with Chris and Travis?

Jason Blum: It was first brought to us in rough cut form by their manager and I think it was Couper (Samuelson) who watched it first and said it was something I definitely needed to see because he thought it was really cool and very different than anything we’d been seeing at that time.  And when I did watch it, I thought it had an interesting story and to be honest, it takes a lot to get me excited about anything found footage these days (laughs) but The Gallows really worked well as a concept.

So I decided that we were going to take it on and both Travis and Chris were happy with what they had been able to accomplish so far, but still wanted to take things a bit further.  That was something I helped them with a bit and we talked a lot about how to achieve those scares but giving them a little bit of a twist as well. I think the film turned out pretty fun and I hope fans think so too.

One thing I appreciate about what Blumhouse does is that you guys do take on a wide variety of projects- it could have been so easy to just keep making Paranormal (Activity)-type films but  that wasn’t the case at all. That being said, is it getting harder to find diverse projects to work on?

Jason Blum: I’m glad to hear you say that just because that’s something I’ve always tried to keep in mind with what we do at Blumhouse. And I don’t know if it’s necessarily harder now but it is something that I’m aware of with anything that we do. Being scary is also something that’s equally important to us as well. I always want to try new and different things, otherwise there’s no point. We make films at a certain level so that we can always take risks and sometimes they work and sometimes they aren’t always as success as we thought they’d be.

Even if we fail though, we’re always going to take risks.

I know one of those risks recently was The Lazarus Effect which I enjoyed but it didn’t seem to connect with everyone out there.

Jason Blum: You know, I was the one who pushed for Lazarus to get a big release; I truly believed it deserved it and I still do. Obviously, it didn’t do as well as we had hoped but you never give up on your films even if they don’t perform the way you thought they would. Movies always find a new life once they are distributed on DVD and Blu-ray or on VOD.

It definitely feels like we’re in this kind of knee-jerk criticism culture lately- does that affect you guys at all?

Jason Blum: It does seem like we all need to judge things quickly and I’m just as guilty of it- although I do try and work on it (laughs). But I think a lot of that is due to social media and the power of everyone having a voice. The good thing about movies is that after they’re released, they still live on which means that time is on our side. People will go on to discover our movies and maybe they’ll like them, maybe they won’t but in the end, I feel like the fact that people continue to talk about our movies over time is a good thing ultimately.

Because you have found so much success on the indie level of filmmaking, is there a secret to what Blumhouse does at all? Or does it vary between projects?

Jason Blum: I don’t know if there are necessarily any secrets or hard and fast ideas necessarily but there are guidelines that we always follow at Blumhouse. I think the biggest thing that we do differently than the studio system does is that we always work with much tighter scripts. Usually, studio projects go through rewrite after rewrite after rewrite but that’s not how we approach it. We come into production on our films with a script that we’re confident about because we know the budget we’re working with and the time constraints we have so we know that we don’t have time for all that.

I just watched the trailer for Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension and it looks great- but it also made me a little sad too. Is there a reason why this one will be the final film?

Jason Blum: I’m sad about it too. For a while, we were making them every year and so we have this core group of people we’d see every time we’d gear up and that’s all over now. It’s tough; these films mean so much to all of us and those of us who have worked on them continuously have become a family throughout the years.  We just felt like it was time- I don’t want to run the series into the ground so this feels like the appropriate note to go out on.

I know you’ve worked on a ton of films but do you ever get nervous about them when they’re getting released, or even leading up until then?

Jason Blum: I still get totally nervous about everything we put out and I get nervous about all aspects- from box office receipts to how things are going on Rotten Tomatoes. I’m very emotionally involved with every single film we’ve done and honestly, how could you not be as a producer? And I’m also very fortunate that I work with an entire team of people that are just as passionate as I am about what we do at Blumhouse. We’re all in it together and we all work hard to make sure our films succeed.

One last question- going back to that idea about you having produced almost over 70 different projects at this point in your career. Have you ever considered directing at all or are you happy staying on the producing side of things?

Jason Blum: You know, one of my strengths as a producer is that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to direct a film (laughs). I know there’s a joke out there that most producers are really just ‘frustrated directors’ but I don’t think I’m cut out for the directing side of this business at all. I enjoy working with the directors we find, many of them are often first-time filmmakers and that’s exciting, and I’m happy to keep busy on the producing side of things and support these directors any way that I can.

  • Heather Wixson
    About the Author - Heather Wixson

    Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.