The Guy Behind "Get Out" and the New "Halloween" Tells Us How to Be a Horror Buff in Five Movies

If you want to be a horror buff, start with these five recommendations.

Jason Blum knows his stuff. (And by 'stuff' we mean 'images and themes that will haunt your nightmares for eternity'.)

The American producer, founder of Blumhouse Productions, has basically defined the modern scary movie, shepherding microbudgeted found footage flicks like Paranormal Activity and Creep, alongside the undying Purge and Insidious franchises. And that's just the tip of the creepy iceberg.

Last year alone, he gave us Split and Happy Death Day as well as the Best Picture-nominated instant classic Get Out. In 2018, Blumhouse Productions boasts Upgrade, BlacKkKlansman and the latest Halloween reboot (continuing on from the iconic 1978 original featuring masked 'babysitter killer' Michael Myers). And in 2019, we'll get Glass, AKA the sequel to Split; Happy Death Day 2U; and Jordan Peele's Us.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

With Halloween hitting cinemas on 26 October, we thought we'd ask Jason to share his picks for the "Five Horror Movies You Need to See".

Check out his choices below (if you dare)...

Too terrified to hit play on the video? Err, okay. It's just a dude talking to camera, but fine. Read about Jason Blum's formative Top Five instead:

1. Psycho

"Almost every successful movie that we've done as a company, whether it was Purge or Get Out or The Visit or The Gift and, most of all, Paranormal Activity, have really been hated before they were loved [like Psycho]."

2. Friday the 13th

"I saw Friday the 13th when I was too young. It got under my skin and it scared me to death. Now I have seen the movie more recently and I wasn't as scared as I was before... it doesn't age that well, but it's a very well-crafted movie and it's a very important movie."

3. Rosemary's Baby

"It's one of the great scary movies and what I learned from Rosemary's Baby and what hopefully you'll see in most of the movies that we do is that if you have a great story and great drama, the scares are kind of less important, because the scares will be incredibly scary as long as you have drama knitting them together. The best example of that was Get Out, which is a really scary movie, but it's scary because of what the story is, not because of what the individual scares are."

4. Freaks

"You have to take it in the context of when it was made and it was very unusual and one of the reasons I love horror is because it celebrates unusual, strange things."

5. An American Werewolf in London

"I was terrified out of my mind and I loved the movie and it was very important to the choices that I've made going forward on all the scary movies that we've done."

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