Horror Cinema Has a Gatekeeping Problem
The mega-producer Jason Blum’s comments about female directors being uninterested in the genre point to a bigger issue facing Hollywood.
The biggest name in horror filmmaking is indisputably the producer Jason Blum. That’s a fact only reinforced by the opening weekend of his newest movie, , which made $77.5 million in its first three days—a record for the 40-year-old franchise. Blum’s company, Blumhouse Productions, finances small-budget genre films and gives directors full creative control; it has been behind Oscar winners like and , as well as extremely profitable franchises like and . Working with Blum can provide a solid path to mainstream success, which makes it particularly dispiriting that a female director has never made a theatrical horror film for
