Ranker’s Top 5 Blumhouse Horror Movies

NOTE: Readers are still voting on this list all the time, and the ranking changes frequently. Changes in the list ranking may not immediately be reflected in this blog.

Blumhouse is best known for being a highly prolific producer of horror films, regularly churning out winning fright franchises like the Insidious, Paranormal Activity, and The Purge series. The Blumhouse formula is infamous in the film world: keep the budget as low as possible ($5 million or under) to minimize risk and maximize profit.

But even though the studio’s strategy has proved successful so far, maintaining this blockbuster streak will take more than just playing a numbers game. After all, when you put out as many films as Blumhouse does each year, even small losses can add up if you aren’t delivering films your audience is dying to see. While sequels are the most obvious way to compound the success of one film, Blumhouse should be able to identify the diverse audiences that appreciate its wide range of films, then deliver new content.

To demonstrate what these audiences look like, we took a look at the five most popular Blumhouse horror films according to this Ranker list with 10.5K votes and explored how fans of each movie feel about other horror movies in the Blumhouse catalog (Whiplash is not included in this analysis, despite being #5 on the list, because it is not a horror film). We provide a brief analysis of each movie’s audience and suggest some movies that Blumhouse might imitate to keep those audiences coming back.

#1: Get Out

Get Out Fans’ Top 5 Blumhouse Horror Movies:

1. Split

2. Hush

3. The Visit

4. The Gift

5. The Purge: Election Year

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Jason Bloom’s movie studio, but Get Out is a Blumhouse picture, through and through: the film cost $5 million to make and raked in a total of over $252 million worldwide.

As one of the most popular and most talked about horror movies of the last decade, Get Out has a particularly large and diverse audience. Both Split and The Visit are M. Night Shyamalan films, so it could be argued that Get Out fans are drawn to horror films from visionary directors. Meanwhile, Hush and The Gift are similar to Get Out in important ways: they’re domestic thrillers that use claustrophobia and the urgent need to escape to heighten anxiety for viewers. Finally, the only hallmark Blumhouse slasher here, The Purge: Election Year, foregrounds our current political situation to create commentary as well as movie theater thrills. The bottom line for Blumhouse: produce something on a small stage that speaks to the political big picture, and you’ll have Get Out fans returning to the box office.

#2: Insidious

Insidious Fans’ Top 5 Blumhouse Horror Movies:

1. Insidious: Chapter 2

2. Insidious: Chapter 3

3. Insidious: The Last Key

4. Ouija: Origin Of Evil

5. Sinister

The tastes of Insidious fans is proof of the effectiveness of the Blumhouse formula: if something works, keep repeating it, whether it’s in the form of sequels or of franchises with nearly identical names like Sinister. While it seems like these two wells have gone dry for Blumhouse, with no sequel apparently in the works for either Insidious: The Last Key or Sinister 2, the takeaway here is that there is a dedicated audience within the horror world looking for supernatural scares. The genre is often dominated by slashers and thrillers, but the fact that audiences for movies like Insidious are so dedicated indicates there’s plenty of good reason for producers to ditch realism every now and then and embrace the occult.

#3: Sinister

Sinister Fans’ Top 5 Blumhouse Horror Movies:

1. Sinister 2

2. Ouija

3. Insidious

4. Ouija: Origin Of Evil

5. The Purge

Again, the crossover between the audiences of the studio’s two big supernatural horror series (not including the infamous found footage franchise Paranormal Activity) indicates that supernatural horror is a winner for horror film producers in general, and certainly for Blumhouse. We’re interested to see whether The Manor, a Blumhouse flick about a haunted nursing home set for release in 2022, manages to gain the affection of Sinister, Insidious, and Ouija fans.

#4: Split

Split Fans’ Top 5 Blumhouse Horror Movies:

1. Get Out

2. Glass

3. The Visit

4. Hush

5. The Belko Experiment

Split is part of M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable film series, as is fan’s second top Blumhouse horror choice, Glass. Because fans also like Shyamalan’s found footage offering The Visit and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, we get the sense that big-name directors are a big draw for those who love Split. But there’s something to be said as well about their preference for Hush, a thriller about a deaf woman being stalked by a killer in her home, and The Belko Experiment, a horror movie about office workers who are forced to fight one another to survive a deadly game. Both these movies, in contrast with Split, are about people who are suddenly terrorized in mundane places they thought were safe — their home and their workplace, respectively. When an A-list director isn’t in the budget, Blumhouse can bring Split fans into the theater with deft combinations of the familiar and the frightening.

#5: Hush

Hush Fans’ Top 5 Blumhouse Horror Movies:

1. Upgrade

2. The Belko Experiment

3. Get Out

4. Happy Death Day

5. Creep

The results from fans of Blumhouse’s 2016 sleeper hit Hush point to a very practical strategy for Blumhouse: more high-concept, imaginative horrors. All these Top 5 movies are characterized by novel twists that distinguish them from similar films in their genre: Upgrade uses biotech sci-fi to enhance the traditional gory revenge thriller, for example, while Happy Death Day augments the slasher genre with a Groundhog Day-like premise. Hush earned critical acclaim for its use of ambient noise and sparse dialogue, thanks to a deaf and mute protagonist. Similarly, non-Blumhouse flicks like A Quiet Place and Birdbox also snared attention with novel approaches to tried-and-true horror formulas. There’s clearly an appetite for innovation among horror fans to which Blumhouse must continue to appeal.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

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