Tomorrow - What Future: What Scares Jason Blum?

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

What Future comes out every Thursday, and if you want to listen you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and obviously wherever you listen to podcasts. On the premiere episode, Joshua explores Spooky Season with Jason Blum (founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions), a man behind some of the most iconic horror films of the past decade — like 'Get Out,' 'The Purge,' and 'Paranormal Activity.' Discussed: the horror of reality, the reality of horror, how data is killing art, the politics of hunting people, film industry lifehacks. We won't be sharing every episode into the Tomorrow feed, so be sure to subscribe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everyone. Josh Tobolski here. I'm back in your feed because I have a new show coming out. The I Heart Podcast on October 27th. It's called What Future. If you like what you hear, and I think that you will, because I know you and I know your heart, please subscribe on whatever platform you're using, whatever you're listening to right now. So you can get all the new episodes. See you there and thanks for listening. Hello, my name is Josh Wittepulski 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 a full episode with any other human beings yet.

Anyhow, it's all come together very rapidly, but also it took forever, which is weird, but sometimes that happens in life. I'm just very pleased to get started and talk to people and hopefully crack open your brain and pull the brain out of the skull. Actually, I'd be cracking 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 going to be like for most listeners, I would imagine. So the first show is October 27th. 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 is a kick-ass time of the year because it's spooky and it's fall. And there's pumpkins and the weather's turning,

but it's not too cold yet. And a lot of good horror movies come out. And so, of course, around Halloween, you start 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 a, there's a very specific kind of horror I like. And I think when I imagine the perfect sort of a there's a very specific kind of horror I like and I 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 love John Carpenter. I've never even heard of it. Oh my god I that's insane you have to see it immediately By the way if you're wondering who this voice is, that's my producer, Lyra Smith,

who will be making appearances. She'll largely be telling me about what movie she hasn't seen. That's just... See ya. Now, in the mouth of Manus 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, 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 of his entire output. I probably had seen they live in a few others, 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. Anyway, I was sitting on the sofa, I was flipping 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 had dine or talking and there's this man walking across the street with an ax in his hand and it's a New York City street scene and everybody's like screaming and running away from him

and he's just walking towards and eventually like smashes the acts through the through the window. It's an unbelievable sequence, but I was like, what is this? What is about? 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 feel like sometimes they're just on a razor's edge. And I think the films that I love the most, and John Carbenter has done a whole handful of movies like this, which are interested in this idea of 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 Mahal and Drive, there's a lot of this undercurrent of something isn't right with reality. Something is broken here,

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. The fact that every day it feels like something truly cataclysmic or the very least extremely disturbing is happening, right? If it's not World War III or school shootings, Trump winning in 2024,

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 in the 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 intersects sort of the way that we experience things and trying to understand what those things are, 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 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 reverses 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 10 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'm very careful about my sleep. I really get, let's see, 12 to 7. I got 7 1-1-1- up to like 2.30 in the morning watching some Blumhouse Content I was what I was watching the forever purge. That's a good one But I'm gonna come back to the forever purge. I just wanted to say it's going to be a topic So Blumhouse has not only done horror

But I think you're sort of synonymous with being the place for modern horror. But would you describe Blumhouse like that? I would describe Blumhouse as the place for modern horror. 80 to 90% of horror movies, we do the occasional with Blash Black Plansman, Handful of Others. TV a little bit differently. TV is more like 20% is straight horror. And 80% 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 Latest 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 projects that, if they're not horror, they're tangentially related to horror. Now we haven't done that 100% of the time, 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 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 making a studio film was the opposite of what I thought it was going to be, it was very frustrating. Distribution was great. Paranormal activity came out about the same time as the Tooth Fairy came out.

And what paranormal activity did was kind of coalesce almost 20 years of trying to find my place into the business in one weekend, which was, wow, there's a way to make independent movies. They can be subversive. They can be about typical 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 got 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 is 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 most of the movies that we've done,

the original horror movies that we've done, are really independent movies, dressed up as scary movies. I think it's true that the plot lines are often, in some way almost art films, but. Don't say art, indie, I mean, God forbid, art films. Okay, sorry, I take that back. I 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. Right. And sometimes even director say it, which is even worse, like I wouldn't make a horror movie, but an 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, he's in 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 wrote Paul Prophilt, 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 ghettoized, and that's another reason why I really liked it. 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 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, Orrin Pelley saved my life and made paranormal activity. I mean, that's wild to me.

I thought for sure you were gonna tell me that you've grew up on, you know, West 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 paranormal activity? The idea that you pay $15 for this little indie art movie at the one last art cinema in New York, right, or $15 at the multiplex for this other movie, it's so strange. Like the art movie, they spent $200,000 marketing this little movie and the studio movie spent $50 million marketing the movie. And the budget's also, the budget's of the one movie or $3 and the other movies, $200 million.

It's still $18, $15, a ticket or whatever. I just was so frustrated that you'd worked so hard on this movie. And it's just very hard to get distribution and once you get distribution because they're competing for screens with these bohemath 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 3,000 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 to larger audiences, even though you can see? Yeah, 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 purge, which is the purchase of a movie about gun control in America. Now if you pitched a studio, said, hey, I'm going to 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 or con, half the audience is going to disagree with you. We don't want to make political movies. It's a nightmare for them. Right. But if you say you're going to make a movie about if crime is legal from seven in the morning

till 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 Ed a drama or whatever

Because horror is deranged. I mean, most horror films have ideas. It's the right. Extremely bizarre, right? Yes. Even from the most simple of Michael Myers is going to just walk and stab until somebody sets them on fire or the very complex stuff.

Like the purge is actually a very complex idea. I mean, in terms of the entire thing you need to understand, maybe I'm feeling fresh from my viewing of the forever purge. But yeah, but I didn't understand, I guess, like what 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 you look at you look at IP the same way, like the invisible man, even that movie, that's a very, you know, forward thinking movie about male power and abuse. There's the same idea. Like if you said you wanted to do a wide release movie about those things, sure, you want to make a Sundance movie about those topics. That's what Sundance is for. The thing is, it's extraordinarily difficult to do of the

100 movies that we've made, not all of them are 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 do both, but it certainly is very exciting when we get a movie that connects with people 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 what I started talking about because I've been thinking a lot about this 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 imagines an 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 that 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, I mean, unabashedly about like white supremacy. I mean, just not even hiding it. It's got actual Nazis in it. And it depicts an America which I think, you know, feels frighteningly possible at this particular moment.

There's a character who's listening to gunfire and he says, that's American music, the different guns. And I think 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-naxism in this country. How do you approach where to draw the line? you know, MAGA and Trump stuff and, you know, real neo-nautism 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 agree that that wouldn't be like a fun, blunt house 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 in 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. 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 is okay.

We don't have a meter for how far we'll take something. The purgeweas are a good example. The purge, as a franchise, all five movies are, and the TV show too, 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 Rand, which was incredible. So each one had its own mini category under the need for category of the insane relationship that the United States

has to guns, which is the pervying theory behind all of them. The lens that we look at just to answer this second part of your question with what I was saying in the first is, is it scary or an expose? But it's an expose, we're not doing it. And if we did any exposés, it was a mistake. It's got to be scary. 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 exposé or they turn on a documentary if they want to see an exposé. They're not going to the movie theater on Friday night to see an exposé. 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 person, it's very pointedly about gun control. I had this, well, it doesn't matter. I had a disagreement about with a pointedly about gun control. I had this, well it doesn't matter, I had a disagreement with a critic once about all this, but what was the disagreement? Well, she said, 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 a good idea. Actually, is that true though? I was going to say, of course, there's like, you

know, some, you know, 3% of the nutball population that thinks the purge is a good idea. The purge is 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 going to 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 a funny thing about the purge. The purge in France is called America's Nightmare.

They translate, instead of calling it, there's no translation for the purge. So the title is like America's Nightmare. And in funneling 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 fetishizing guns.

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 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 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.

It gets more interesting when the movies are about something and we aspire to do that but I couldn't run the company If I mandated that that's the only thing that we would do right? Excuse me. I couldn't run the company Profitably if I mandated that's the only thing that we were gonna 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, a hundred and 50, 125. So you're a modern, clearly very smart man. 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 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 it 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 it out. If he used data, you would never make it out. If he used data, 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 a pose 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.

I said something I believe in. 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 the instinct of the creators, the artists who are actually making this stuff. The problems that the streamers are having as it relates 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 Buck Donavitch 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 Sothester 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 read stuff.

I think Planet Money did a show about Blum House and this kind of like cheap, fast, and dirty method. But to me, it reminded me a lot of what I've 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.

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 movie's make money, all that stuff. The biggest difference between Roger Korman 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.

Holly would put 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's 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 Wan 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 going to make Saul again. I have one constraint. I want it to be PG-13 because he doesn't want to be known as the Saul guy. Comes up with Insidious. We just shot our fifth insidious movie. Guy came up with the contraint. 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 never, I made one movie when it came to me because

no one would make insidious, which is the difference between us and Korman. And 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 of course of course quiet place I wish I made and the conjuring I wish I made those are the two get a crack at the no no but but I I still, they keep me up at night. They haunt me both of them. Well, like sort of like a horror film. Ha, ha, ha.

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. We just say that's true. I would agree with you, yes. What to you in reality is scary. Donald Trump.

And that's not a controversial statement to make, is it in In Hollywood? It's very controversial. 50% of the country disagrees with me. I would say it's about as controversial as you can 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'm saying? You don't want to go that far. No, I would not go that far. I will not say that. I'll say that. We made a great movie. If you were gonna 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 watched that tonight, the hunt's one of the best movies the company's 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 have 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 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 there are extremes on both sides and that there's the majority of America's in the middle. That's what it's about to me. There are extremes on both sides, but there are extreme nut balls on both sides. Come on both sides. Come on. I 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. And that is, it's not the whole party. There are 79 of the party Republicans mischaining, for instance, who I agree with. I agree. There's a few good ones in there. I'm not trying to put you on this spot, but... 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's a whole other podcast. Ha, ha. 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. So glad. Not to say I didn't think you would be interesting,

but you had answers that I did not see coming. You thought you were gonna have like a fan boy conversation. No, I could have imagined. So glad. Not to say I didn't think you would be interested, but you had answers that I did not see coming in. You thought you were gonna 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 Gagoseon Gallery of the artist that have sold in the last 10 years. Now, paint something based on that. Data is deaf to art and creativity. But I can 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. It's the beginning, the beginning of the end of American dominance and culture. Yeah, it will be data. Okay, and your next film is gonna be about,

it's gonna be a horrific film about data. It's gonna be a horror movie about data. Exactly. One other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is you made a movie, it's called Unfriended Dark Web. Yeah, two, we made two. It's, it's called Unfriended Dark Web. Yeah. Two, we made two.

It's, it's, 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, Timor and the guys you made that movie came as close as you can. I agree with you. It's impossible to make something scary when you're staring at a screen or what at something from the screen, almost impossible. Right.

It's an interesting, almost like this black hole for 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 worked. It's there's a screen, but it's this otherworldly sort of portal. The internet weirdly enough doesn't feel

like an otherworldly 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 where you could leave it. Jason, I have to say this was a fascinating conversation. I really, so glad.

Appreciate you taking the time. And 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. Soft and quiet is a great movie directly about white supremacy, and it just hits it right on the nose. It's pro white supremacy or anti white supremacy. It is very anti and good.

There's not two sides of white supremacy. That's not that there's not an equivalent of double guy agree. I agree. I'm just making sure there's only one side of that. Okay. And that who directed this movie all in one take, and it's 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 take. It's one take. Yeah. And it's great. And it's great. And it's great. And I hope everyone sees it. Okay. That's coming out in November 4th. Nanny, which sounds like I'm not an expert, but there's no way the Nanny is like a good guy in this movie. November 23rd.

Well, no, the nanny is quite good as the people who employ the nanny. Oh, the nanny is the good guy. Interesting, okay. Well, I mean, I don't want to, you know, you got to go see the movie, but the movie is great. Okay, yeah, no spoilers. Yeah. It's coming out November 23rd. Actually, in this last one, Megan, which I assume it's pronounced Megan, not M3 again,

but Megan is amazing. trailers out now the trailers fucked up the trailers upsetting in a big way You know that right see the trailer. It's terrific and 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's just fantastic It opens in January. It's very very very very very, very scary and creepy and and will haunt you at night. The trailer is haunting me. 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 it happened. See, if you'd studied the data, you would have known that was going to happen. Yeah, right. You're not paying attention.

If I said the data, no one would have seen the trailer. If I studied the data, we wouldn't have made the movie. Exactly. All right Jason, thank you so much. You come back and do this again sometimes. It's a great pleasure. I'd love to. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here. Bye bye. Well that was a fantastic conversation. 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 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 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 are making them on, often on very small budgets. I mean, paranormal activity apparently was made

for $15,000 and it grossed $193 million, which is like, that's like dream movie stuff. Like every person in the industry is like, if I could just make a movie for five cents and it makes $1 billion, that would be ideal. So, I mean, he's kind of cracked this, I mean, again, it's like a hack, which I think is very cool. But, 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 purge installment, obviously the white supremacists are terrible. They are 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, I bet 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 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 a conservative political party that's obsessed with violence and guns. And it is definitely talking about that stuff. It is definitely, sometimes it's heavy-handed, sometimes it's more subtle, but those are topics,

and the types of movies those things are discussed in our nine times out of 10 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 filmmaking 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 going to go watch now? Well, I am curious about the hunt. I have to say. And 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 LUMHouse movies. I mean, I think I'm happy for them. Like, I'm glad it's going well,

but there's so many movies. Like, I saw a split that I haven't seen glass. Yeah, same. I think I've seen a later paranormal activity, but not the original. I have not seen happy death. Oh, you've got to see happy death. I have not seen the new Halloween. I have not seen the new Halloween.

I have not seen the new Halloween. You guys see the new Halloween. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back next week on Thursday with more What Future. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best. you