Blumhouse, the company of visionary Jason Blum, is undoubtedly a hallmark of today’s horror film. The sagas of Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious, New Halloween and Happy Death Day have its production demonstrating its absolute dominance in the genre and its impact. Many of them are infiltrated by the ills of today’s world in the purest form of terror: capitalism, racial and gender conflicts. Those are themes he’s also carrying over to his television model, with a handful of new projects feeding platforms’ catalogs in 2022.
Recently, Blumhouse decided to consolidate its physical television and film production groups into a centralized division. In this way, you share resources and take your TV premieres to a higher standard of quality, without giving up cinema’s famous model of success: creating visually compelling stories on microbudgets.
“Broadcasting on on-demand content platforms allows us to give more nuance to what we’re telling,” Blum himself, who recently received an award for his work in production at the Locarno Film Festival, told this newspaper in the Year 2020. But, he clarified, that doesn’t mean Blumhouse wants to use the same narratives in both mediums, even though he tells similar stories. In its stories designed for streaming, the company relies primarily on serial documentaries and real events.
In March, the production company slipped into the most-watched series on Netflix, tapping into a universal concept with The Worst Roommate Imaginable. In five chapters, it rescues four tales of recent true terror. They are not stories of people leaving the dishes unwashed; his behavior has ended up on the event pages. The series is inspired by a New York Magazine article, from which it takes its name, which chronicles the life and death of Jamison Bachman, a serial stalker. Their victims have always been women in their 30s renting a room in their homes. He, a 60-year-old man who looked almost two decades younger, would become their tenant and stop paying rent almost immediately, breaking into their homes and subjecting them to constant threats and nightmares.
But the series, which often uses animation for its recreations, tells different stories in this first season. Dorothea Puente was a serial killer disguised as an old woman who offered her home to people at risk of poverty, then killed and buried them in her own garden. And handsome and charismatic sportsman Youssef Khater is actually an international con man who is still at large, although he was exposed while living in a youth hostel in Santiago, Chile, where he buried a woman alive.
The recently released Los anarquistas for HBO Max tells the true story of Anarchapulco, the surrealist libertarian movement that charged its members between $500 and $1,000 to attend a convention to shake capitalism from a hotel at the epicenter of tourism in six episodes for HBO Max to confront Mexico from . Leading this parade of quirky characters is Canadian Jeff Berwick, businessman, libertarian, and anarcho-capitalist activist who brings together certain characters who share a common notion of being against the system. But what begins as a hopeful experiment in living a radically new way of life turns out to be more challenging and dangerous than anyone expected. Insane as this story is, which is linked to Trumpism and the book burning that ended in a murder and a suicide, the series serves as a reflection (and warning) of what is happening in part of world society.
Prior to these two projects, the company had already produced a true crime documentary series for digital platforms with the successful The Jinx (HBO, 2015). But in recent years he’s been bringing his own universe he’s created on the big screen to streaming platforms as well. In 2019, it did exactly that, adapting one of its franchises, The Purge, into two 10-episode seasons viewable on Amazon Prime Video. A year earlier he had created the horror anthology Into the Dark for the US platform Hulu.
Collective madness at a book burning portrayed in HBO Max.HBO’s “The Anarchists.”
In the field of fiction, it is already preparing, also for Amazon Prime Video, The Horror of Dolores Roach, the adaptation of the fictional podcast of the same name, launched in 2018 by Spotify with the sound production of the prestigious Gimlet Media. In this tale of cannibalism in the social and literal sense of the word, Justina Machado (actress in Two Meters Under and Day by Day) plays a woman who, after 15 years in prison, returns to her highly gentrified Washington Heights neighborhood with barely $200 in the Pocket. There he only finds the help of an old friend who offers him his house to sleep in and starts a small massage shop in his basement for a fresh start. When an usher-turned-private investigator played by singer Cyndi Lauper begins to complicate his life, he decides to do whatever it takes to protect his new life. “This is a modern horror story with a touch of dark humor that makes it a very special story,” they defined Blumhouse Television at the time of the project’s announcement last February.
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