Blumhouse is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, and today brings a new book that goes behind the scenes of the horror studio‘s meteoric and entertainingly gory rise.
Its full title is Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouseand it’s full of details about its biggest hits (Five Nights at Freddy’s, Get Out, M3GAN) and hitmakers (James Wan, M. Night Shyamalan, Mike Flanagan), styled in part as an oral history with photos, storyboards, and other insider-y mementos.
io9 has an exclusive excerpt to share from the book’s section on found footage—specificially its importance in 2012’s Sinisterdirected by Scott Derrickson and co-written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. It stars Ethan Hawke as a struggling author who decides he’ll find inspiration by moving his family into a house with a tragic past. In the attic, he discovers a stash of old movies that reveal the crime is actually part of a recurring terror that he’s now nightmarishly entangled with.
The movie’s success helped cement Blumhouse as a horror force to be reckoned with, and Sinister added on to its box-office receipts with an even rarer prize: becoming a cult classic.
THE ORIGIN OF BLUMHOUSE IS inexorably tied to the genre of found-footage horror. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity kicked off a mad dash in Hollywood to replicate the affordable model of unknown actors in home movies or security camera footage. Movies like Cloverfield, District 9and Chronicle followed Paranormal Activity and brought the found-footage aesthetic to disaster films and science fiction.
But horror is its home, and as Blumhouse grew, the company continued to experiment in the genre. Paranormal Activity was followed by six sequels during the subsequent decade, and legendary director Barry Levinson even tried his hand at found footage with the Blumhouse film The Baywhich was released in 2012. But the found-footage movie that really catapulted Blumhouse to the next level of success was a work that dramatizes what it would be like to be the unlucky soul who finds a record of someone’s gruesome death.
The origin story of Sinister began with a poker game. The movie was a Vegas gamble for both director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill. Derrickson had hit the director A-list after the success of The Exorcism of Emily Rosebut his big-money reboot of The Day the Earth Stood Still stumbled at the box office. Cargill was attempting to launch a screenwriting career after years as a film critic for Ain’t It Cool News and had spent years refining a pitch for what would become Sinister.
A chance meeting with Derrickson at a poker tournament in Las Vegas (they’d been friends for a while, but it took a few stiff drinks at the card table to get Cargill to pitch the story) set them off on the road to creating what would be dubbed the “scariest movie of all time” in a scientific study conducted by Broadband Choices in 2020, and again in 2022, when the test was repeated.
In a sense, Sinister is something close to a meta-narrative, a movie “about watching horror films,” as Derrickson says. Ellison is compelled, as we are as viewers, to bear witness to something awful, something unnatural, and something with the potential to psychically wound the audience. Sinister is not a found footage film, but rather a film about the relationship between the audience and graphic horror images. Much like the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring (and its American remake, The Ring), the image medium itself, Super 8 film in this case, contains a deadly evil. The demon Bughuul literally lives inside the home movies Ellison discovers and it is released only because of his unending, self-interested curiosity.
Not long after Vegas, Derrickson and Cargill took their pitch to various film companies, hoping to get a few meetings. They nabbed one with producer Roy Lee. The other was with Jason Blum. Both producers offered to buy the film, and a bidding war began. What was originally pitched as a $1 million micro-budget horror film became a $3 million movie. Derrickson and Cargill weighed both offers, but they simply liked what Blum had to say about the creative behind the movie better and went with him.
“I thought The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a great movie,” Blum said. “And I thought a studio would just look at The Day the Earth Stood Still and say, ’Well, maybe Scott can’t do this.’ I think we’ve always picked directors differently than studios, because we always look at their whole body of work.”
Part of Sinister’s powerful impact was because of how personal it was for Derrickson. The parallels between Ellison’s career and where Derrickson’s career was at in 2012 are clear. “I really wrote the worst version of myself,” Derrickson says. “Going all the way down that rabbit hole and into the abyss.”
Sinister is, in many ways, about obsession and the all-consuming desire for attention, approval, and fame. Ellison can’t stop watching these grisly home movies, because he believes there’s some reward for the trauma of watching real people be brutally murdered. He will subject himself to any indignity to recapture the glory he once knew. That desperation is familiar to anyone who’s toiled in the mines of the entertainment movie business for long enough.
There’s a poignancy to having been on top and desperately wanting to get back there; it’s the nostalgia for what once was and may never be again. Unlike Ellison, who gets murdered by his daughter at the end of SinisterDerrickson would go on to reach even greater heights, directing the smash hit Doctor Strange for Marvel Studios in 2016. But none of that would have been possible without Sinister.
WHAT MAKES A GREAT HORROR FILM?
SCOTT DERRICKSON, co-writer and director:
In horror, you’ve got such heightened stakes and heightened threats. And if you don’t feel tremendous empathy for the victims in a horror film, then the film is not working. Horror taps into the unspoken and sometimes unspeakable fear that we feel as human beings; it’s the unspoken and unspeakable horror that we have to reckon with in the world. And the horror film experience is itself a reckoning with that horror. It’s a reckoning with fear.
I think young people are drawn to horror, in particular, because fear is such a powerful emotion and because they have to feel so much of it being young. Wes Craven talked about how a horror film doesn’t create fear. It releases it. And I believe that. I think any time that you’re getting scared in a movie, what you’re feeling is not something that’s being put into you. What you’re feeling is something that’s already in you that’s coming out. It’s being released.
THE HANGING TREE
One of the most arresting images in the entire film is the death of the most recent occupants of the Oswalts’ home: the Stevenson family. They’re hanged, side by side, from a large tree in the yard. Sinister opens with home movie footage of this horrific murder, which was so indelible and unforgettable that the term almost inspired the title of the movie.
C. ROBERT CARGILL, co-writer:
When it was a pitch in my head, it was called “Super 8.” And of course, J. J. [Abrams] made his movie, and I’m, like, Well, I can’t call it that. And then, [Scott Derrickson and I] called it Home Movies while we were writing it. And then another horror movie was coming out before Sinister that was going to be called Home Movies. Well, we [couldn’t] call it that 1759296633. Turns out nobody remembers that movie; you know, barely anyone saw it.
And so, while we were in pre-production, I was, like, “What about Found Footage? Why don’t we just call it Found Footage? It’s great. That’s the title.” And so we shot it as Found Footage.
SCOTT DERRICKSON, co-writer and director:
Everybody was making found-footage movies [in 2012]. And this is a movie about the guy who finds the footage. Nobody had done that before, you know—made a movie about a guy who finds this scary material to watch. And the movie is really about watching horror films, in a lot of ways. So, we called it Found Footage. That was the running title for a while.
C. ROBERT CARGILL:
And then, while we were in post-[production]Jason says, “Do you think that’s a little on the nose? It’s a little inside baseball.” Like film critics know what found footage is. Filmmakers know about found footage. But does the average person at home know what found footage is? And we were, like, “Probably not.” I mean, now they do, of course. It would go on to become a real phenomenon of the subgenre. But at the time, it wasn’t. So, we just started throwing names back and forth. And I remember sending a list of truly terrible names, like The Hanging Tree, The House with the Hanging Tree. Maybe we would do something with the tree, as in The House with the Sinister Tree. And Scott just emailed back, going, “What about just Sinister? We just call it Sinister.” And I was, like, “We could . . . oh, that sounds good.” Jason said, “I like Sinister.” He didn’t tell us that Insidious was coming out and that we would spend the rest of our life getting confused with Insidious. But that was the title that stuck.
THE MONSTER
C. ROBERT CARGILL, co-writer:
In the script, Bughuul was written as literally a messed-up Willy Wonka. They started playing around with a ratty trench coat. Ratty capes. A top hat. We saw that face and then saw it in the top hat and then the trench coat, and it just didn’t work. It wasn’t scary.
So, Scott went on Flickr, one of those sites where people would post their art looking for some inspiration. He searched for the word horror on Flickr, and he got a whole bunch of images: he sent about a dozen, and I narrowed it down to five that I liked, and then Scott selected the final image of [what we know now as] Bughuul and it was perfect. He reached out to the artist, and he said, “We’d like to use this. We’ll pay you five hundred bucks to license this piece of art.” And they said, “Great.” So, they have a credit in the movie for inspiring the design.
And then we handed it over to our art team, and they did a bunch of sketches. And they did a version without the top hat, without the Willy Wonka accoutrements, and it was scary as hell. The first time they put our actor in the mask, Jason went into the trailer and freaked out, and left immediately. He went, “Nope, nope, not going back in there.”
Ironically, the image I had in my head of Bughuul was basically The Babadook [which came out two years after Sinister]. When I saw The BabadookI’m, like, “Oh, that’s my Mr. Boogie.”
ELLISON OSWALT’S MURDER BOX
The films Ellison finds in his house had to be shot on film stock that was accurate to when they were meant to have been made. All those gruesome snuff films were shot before the main production began, on Super 8 cameras. Super 8 was a Kodak film stock used primarily for home movies during the mid-20th century. The cameras were incredibly loud when rolling, so most Super 8 film stock did not have a magnetic strip for recording audio. Therefore, most Super 8 films are silent, which is why Pool Party ’66, BBQ ’79, Lawn Work ’86, Sleepy Time ’98and Family Hanging Out ’11 have no sound. The silence adds an otherworldly, spooky quality to the images on screen. It leaves the horrific screams of the families to your imagination.
Excerpted from Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse. Copyright © 2025 Blumhouse Productions, LLC. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse with Dave Schilling, featuring an introduction by Jason Blum, hits stores today. You can order a copy here.
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