Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos Courtesy the studios.
Horror purveyor Blumhouse has been putting out movies for almost 20 years now. It has become the name synonymous with big audience scares. Where A24 has risen up and cultivated an image of a sort of secret movie club where the cinéastes who know go to get their fright on around tasteful cheeses and classy cocktails, Blumhouse is the rager down the block where you just walk in and keep the party going till morning, never mind the people puking on the lawn.
Since exploding onto the scene in 2007 with the insanely cheap and then insanely profitable Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse has put out a ton of missable fare alongside an impressive list of era-defining scary movies. But what are the House’s truly best films? Between deals with Epix and Hulu and Amazon, where it puts out DTV releases and feature-length TV episodes, along the rest of its streaming drops, there is an overwhelming amount of material to consider when carving down the Blumhouse output to a top 25. So Vulture has limited its eligible pool to movies that played in theaters — with all apologies to worthy digital plays like Unhuman and the truly outstanding Cam.
And it is only after painstaking consideration that we now present you with the 25 best theatrical genre releases from Blumhouse. (This isn’t a list for Whiplash, you guys.) There are foregone conclusions alongside some hot takes.
M. Night Shyamalan went mean for his 2016 hit about teen girls getting abducted by a person with dissociative personality disorder. With stellar performances from Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and James McAvoy (well, several performances come from him), the horror of young girls imprisoned is pushed to the max with borderline exploitation plotlines. One of McAvoy’s personalities is a self-hating pedophile. There’s a plotline about the trauma of child sexual abuse. Kids are getting killed. Split is wild and problematic and should not be considered as a source of record for explaining DID and the effects of complex PTSD, but it’s all those things that make it indicative of horror’s filthy, controversial side. That isn’t Shyamalan’s calling card, but there’s a distinguishing cruelty about Split that puts it in the top 25.
Sorry, everyone, but The Last Key is a great Insidious movie. And that’s for one simple reason: Last Key is the full Lin Shaye experience. Finally, the franchise is on her shoulders as the medium Elise — the best Insidious character — and when she answers a call about a haunted house, she is shocked to find it’s actually her childhood home. The fourth movie in this series has the good backstory drama, the icon finally sitting in the captain’s seat, and it’s also got the best banter with Elise’s trusty assistants, played by Angus Sampson and original Insidious scribe Leigh Whannell. Last Key hive, our time is now!
This ranking might seem uncharitably low, but think about it: Were you terrified by the entire Sinister movie, or were you terrified by those home videos within the movie? To be sure, Sinister is a hell of a time, and it definitely has a reputation as one of Blumhouse’s biggest chillers. Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime writer who is so desperate for another hit book that he moves his own family into the house where he watches a snuff film of previous occupants being murdered. As Hawke finds more of the films, he realizes a malevolent force might be involved in all this killing. (But it’s entirely his fault, ’cause he moved his family there!)
Sleight gets extra points for being an unexpected indie genre picture amid so much scary bombast. J.D. Dillard’s coming-of-age drama/superhero-origin story is about a young boy in L.A. who fashions himself into a DIY Tony Stark to hustle cash as a street magician and, eventually, to protect himself from thugs. Sleight is inventive, affecting, and a very cool piece of counterprogramming to massive budget cape-and-spandex options.
If you’re thinking that putting all the Purge movies here is too generous, you are wrong! In the fifth and most recent Purge film, the annual tradition reaches its logical conclusion. A bunch of white people go fucking crazy the day after the official Purge and decide it should never end, and they set their sights on the Mexican workers in a Texas border town. Forever Purge is another excellent action-horror outing, and stars Ana de la Reguera and Tenoch Huerta make an outstanding protagonist duo at the center of the film. As America finally melts down under the New Founding Fathers’ murderous regime, our heroes must take refuge by escaping over the border to Mexico — to more civilized lands. Blumhouse should make Purge movies forever!
The output has been very hit or miss since 2018, but the David Gordon Green–Blumhouse collaboration really did sing when the Halloween sequel/reboot landed. The script, written with Danny McBride, was ferocious and funny. Laurie Strode by way of Sarah Connor was a great freshening up for the character and the franchise, and Judy Greer was there! Michael comes back home and kills a couple in their house with a hammer for absolutely no reason. Just brutal stuff, and a great welcome back for the Shape.
Keep your 2000s remake-horror snobbery in check! Blumhouse produced the 2014 take on The Town That Dreaded Sundown alongside Ryan Murphy, with a script from Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. What a bingo board that is! New Dreaded was originally meant to be a sequel, but then it became a sort of hybrid sequel-remake, with the 1976 original playing within the movie at one point. This film weighs in at less than 90 minutes, and it looks and moves like a stylish car going at breakneck speed. It doesn’t come up often in the millennium remake-wave conversation, but it should be taken as a highlight.
Anarchy is the movie that turned The Purge into an American Fourth of July tradition. The second installment opens up the world wrought by the New Founding Fathers to show us a whole city splitting apart on Purge night. Frank Grillo teams up with Carmen Ejogo, Zoë Soul, Kiele Sanchez, and Zach Gilford to survive the night in Los Angeles. Anarchy is where the John Wick–ish extent of the Purge-verse is revealed, as we see people serving themselves up as paid Purge sacrifices to provide money for their families, killing arenas where the rich pay their way in to kill people abducted off the street, and we also get the iconic God mask man. The brain poison of Purge night reveals itself when Sanchez starts running from murder but then grabs a gun and distantly whispers, “I wanna Purge” after a loved one is killed.
Halloween Ends has many, many detractors, but! This top 25 wouldn’t be just without putting such a weird, wild swing at a Halloween movie within its ranks. This final entry in Blumhouse’s reboot trilogy is part obsession thriller between the new villain, Cory, and the youngest living Strode daughter, Allyson. It’s part erotic thriller between Cory and Michael Myers, now absolutely ancient but still killing his way through Haddonfield … and also sharing a surrogate sexual encounter in a sewer with Cory as they thrust and heavy breathe while killing a man together (???). And it’s still, yes, part slasher, as a Halloween is wont to be. After the infuriatingly, humiliatingly bad Halloween Kills, this franchise finally puts the spotlight back on the Strodes to take on the Shape at great cost. Ends also has one of the best horror-movie cold opens of all time, and for all that we must stan.
The second Paranormal is another entry that punches above the first. This time, a family moves into a new house that is shockingly already occupied. In order to surveil the property after finding the place in disarray, the family installs security cameras, which, of course, start capturing very different presences than simple robbers. Paranormal Activity 2 plays into those classic home-invasion fears but with the chest-squeezing, lo-fi supernatural scares of this franchise at its peak.
Hey, guys! Remember when Mike Flanagan still made movies? Those were the salad days! (Sorry, TV fans, but where are the movies, Mike??) The first Ouija was a financial success for Blumhouse (its spend-less ethos helped with that) and cleared $100 million, but it was fully just lame. So what do you do when you want to keep those IP fires burning but you have a bad first movie? You call in the all-hits, no-skips horrors-slinger Flanagan to bring the patient back to life. And he did! The critical approval rating leaped from a 5 percent to an 84 percent from the first to Origin of Evil, and no one should live and die by Rotten Tomatoes, but also, 5 percent to an 84 percent!!! This is product-based horror that cares! And is by far the best of any of Blumhouse’s game-based movies. (Truth or Dare and Fantasy Island, we’ll get to you later.)
Indulge us for a moment. The Boy Next Door is an obsession thriller starring Jennifer Lopez with a basement-level critical rating, but it’s also some damn fine smut. This movie is J.Lo’s Fear. This movie has Kristin Chenoweth in a pixie cut. This movie has Ryan Guzman meeting Lopez bicep first. The worst part about The Boy Next Door is that Blumhouse didn’t keep making more movies just like it.
The original Purge is an intimate affair compared to every other movie in the franchise it would spawn. Set over the course of that one infamous night, the entire thing unfolds in a single house with a single family — of rich white folks — trying to survive an onslaught by a gang of smiley-mask killers after the Black man they are hunting desperately seeks refuge in their barricaded house. The Purge performed well in theaters, but the franchise has gained a kind of snowballing fandom as more and more people discover the joys of action horror that’s tragically prescient to our political moment (unending waking nightmare?).
Now here is a slept-on banger. Dark Skies is a rare alien picture from Blumhouse, and it stars eternal superstar Keri Russell. Win-win. Russell plays a mom in a suburban household that starts experiencing mysterious disturbances, and as instances mount, the family can no longer ignore the possibly extraterrestrial nature of what’s happening to them. Plainly, Dark Skies is goddamned frightening. Watch it in the black of night with friends and scream together.
The First Purge is, ahem, the first Purge released in a world with President Donald Trump, and where the race politics of the franchise had been implied or conveyed in the wings of prior entries, this movie puts them at the very core. A prequel, The First Purge is set on Staten Island as the very first Purge beta test is launched. Participation is optional, though a cash incentive is provided, and most of the housing-project residents the film focuses on are just taking shelter for the night and hoping for the best. Purge parties pop up. Revelers are robbing ATMs or causing light mayhem, but as the new government watches its plan falter and the Black people they expected to kill and maim each other during a night of impunity choose to forgo hard crimes, bad actors are sent in to catalyze waves of horrifying violence — and prove the Purge is necessary and good. The First Purge is the franchise at its on-the-nose best, and Y’lan Noel turns in a performance that should have made him a go-to action-movie superstar.
Paranormal Activity could have been an easy cash-in franchise. Put pennies into production and then just watch the money roll in off the success of the first entry. But for a few years there, the PA movies just kept getting better. You know the drill: Hand-cam footage starts revealing things that go bump in the night in someone’s house.But it’s all in the execution. Paranormal 3 goes back in time to 1988 with a wedding videographer filming things on his clunky ’80s rig, and it is just really scary! The third film is the highest grossing in the franchise, surpassing $200 million all around the world. That’s a pretty good return on a $5 million production budget.
Insidious is another one of Blumhouse’s signature franchises, and it comes from the duo of Whannell and Wan. This was the next studio tentpole piece after Paranormal, but Insidious brought a little star power to the fold, with Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne in the starring roles. (There are also legends on hand with Lin Shaye and Barbara Hershey.) Byrne and Wilson play parents of a boy terrorized by demons from a neighboring dimension, and they’re threatening to abscond with him to the dark world forever. Insidious is also where director Wan would create the visual style that defines the look of both this and The Conjuring franchises, which, FYI, both went on to make a ton of money for the studio.
After going sci-fi for a few movies and making the worst work of his career, one of this century’s most notable genre filmmakers returned to his roots with The Visit. M. Night Shyamalan went small with this simple frightfest about two kids visiting their long-estranged grandparents and who start getting terrorized by Grandma when her supposed “sundowning” leads to terrible things happening in the house. The Visit is filled with great jump-scares and shows off the director’s skill at his least self-indulgent.
A controversial placement? Maybe! But The Purge franchise has managed to become one of the great pieces of Blumhouse’s catalogue. The first movie wasn’t beloved by critics, but it made a lot of money on a small budget. It has also gone on to age like a fine wine since America has descended into a Purge-esque political reality that feels a single step from establishing one night of lawlessness to cull the population, kill off the poor, and keep right-wing fundamentalists in power. Election Year is ranked so high because it’s the saga at its most maximal, and because Frank Grillo and Elizabeth Mitchell make an excellent pair as a senator and her head of security. This is the movie with murder-y Bratz dolls, the Statue of Liberty psycho, and the word PURGE scrawled in blood on the columns of the Lincoln Memorial. Iconic imagery all around and damn fine action-horror.
The first Paranormal movie is really the one that started it all at Blumhouse, and the one that epitomizes its eponymous founder’s ethos: Spend small, earn big. The original Paranormal Activity was famously made for about $15,000 and then went on to make more than $190 million at the box office. In a post–Blair Witch world, PA made lo-fi found-footage style bankable again, and it’s also just damn scary. Cheers to the one that laid the foundation for the House.
Christopher Landon is one of the most joyful filmmakers working in the genre today, and the Happy Death Day movies cemented his signature blend of horror and heart. This slasher features a great final girl, great one-liners, a great killer in a silly baby mask, and just enough sentiment to ground its infinitely looping time-travel framework. Blumhouse loves blending comedy into scary movies for a party-horror experience at the theater, and HDD is its biggest and best example of that.
Unfriended is a well-reviewed movie that has still managed to be underappreciated and sort of underseen. In the conversation of scariest Blumhouse movies ever, Unfriended makes a strong argument. It’s a perfect use of the then-nascent technology POV known as Screenlife, and also a perfect use of friends turning on one another. The rapid unraveling of the relationships is as harrowing as the horrific deaths, and the movie keeps its chokehold on you till the very end. This film is sleek and simple. Horror that’s meant to grind your nerves with no filler and lots of killer.
Remakes of storied films are always a tall order. You run the risk of disrespecting something beloved if you stray too far, but if you don’t do something interesting and new enough, you just embarrass yourself by putting out some cold product. In the capable hands of writer-director Leigh Whannell, though, the updated Invisible Man is a triumph. One of the most classic monsters of horror becomes a terrifying, modernized villain for the ages — despite the fact that he mostly exists as blank space in the movie. Whannell’s movie works as a top-tier entry in the gaslighting, home-invasion, revenge, and woman-gone-mad subgenres all at the same time.
Blumhouse has released a lot more scarier movies than M3GAN, but it hasn’t released any more bonkers. This film has a talking robot that kills children and dogs, and an ultraintelligent and deadly droid singing original songs, playing piano, and doing choreo. And somehow it all works! Where independent horror movies are usually the ones that carry the weight of audacity and big swings in genre because they aren’t so beholden to studio masters, M3GAN asks “what if?” about so many silly things and, thanks largely to screenwriter Akelah Cooper, dares to answer them. And as the top of this list will tell you: Always trust in Allison Williams.
Do we even need to say it? Jordan Peele’s debut as a horror-film writer and director changed everything — mainstream perception of the genre’s legitimacy, the industry’s appetite for horror movies that don’t just star white people, the possibility for scary movies to take the stage again at the Academy Awards. Get Out works as a straight-up scary movie, with harsh jump-scares puncturing the relentless dread. It works as a comedy, thanks to Lil Rel Howery’s dogged friend and TSA agent character, Rod. And it works as an example par excellence of horror as a vehicle for making incisive commentary about our culture. No matter if the House of Blum disappeared tomorrow or 20 years from now, Get Out would remain its greatest legacy.
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The 25 Best Blumhouse Horror Movies - Vulture
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