The inaugural Hollywood & Horror event hosted by Variety gathered some of the biggest producers, executives, and creatives on Wednesday at Trophy Room in Los Angeles to speak about their impact in genre storytelling. The event started off with a keynote conversation with Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum, who detailed his career in celebration of the company’s 15th anniversary.
Other panels included a discussion from Samuel Zimmerman, SVP of Programming at Shudder, a conversation with Nic Noviski, founder of the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, and a roundtable with industry professionals who are leading the world of horror in music.
Featured Keynote Conversation: Jason Blum
When Blum started his career as a cable salesman and a real estate agent, he began introducing himself as a film producer during the early years of Blumhouse. “There’s a clear line you can draw between that desire that I had in myself and our business model, which is don’t pay me a fee, but if the movie works, pay me and everyone else involved with it. And if it doesn’t, we’ll move on to the next one,” revealed Blum in a retrospective conversation celebrating 15 years of the production company with Variety’s Senior Entertainment & Media Writer Matt Donnelly.
As Blumhouse is getting ready to release “Black Phone 2” in theaters, Blum reflected on his love for the genre and working with major production companies to distribute the genre to wide audiences.
“You can trick the Hollywood machine into releasing insane, subversive, crazy movies, and that’s always why I was always interested in doing studio movies with horror, because it’s the only genre where you can just do the craziest things, and they’re not independently released, and yet studios still release them,” said Blum. “I really do love horror for a lot of reasons, but what I love most is it’s a way to take independent films and to make subversive, crazy films that have been released by mainstream public companies.”
Behind The Scenes With Shudder
As an intern and editor at Fangoria, Samuel Zimmerman slowly found his way to AMC Networks as the company began planning out the blueprint for a new horror on demand service called Shudder. Ten years later, Shudder has grown to become a prominent voice in showcasing emerging genre filmmakers from around the world, with a curated selection of thrillers, body and psychological horror, and more.
“There are movies we released and made that in traditional or conventional knowledge, you might not see as something successful or something that can be commercially broad, but because we love it, we think other people will,” said Zimmerman in conversation with Variety’s Executive Digital Editor William Earl. “We’ve seen that translate, especially with our international films. [Shudder] released films like ‘Terrifier’ and ‘La Llorona,’ and these movies that made real impacts, whether they were incredibly damaging and freaky or socially and politically aware. It’s about trusting our own instincts and trusting the audience’s instincts and seeing where it takes us.”
With Shudder’s past collaborators, Zimmerman spoke about platforming directors who have since gone on to have success on the big screen throughout different mediums. “We’re privileged to be at a stage with filmmakers where we’re working on different features and second features, and then we get to see these filmmakers welcome the world and make big, incredible work. We did ‘Revenge’ with Coralie Fargeat, and then she did ‘The Substance.’ We were lucky to work with Issa López with ‘Tigers are Not Afraid,’ and then she did ‘True Detective.’ Not only do we get to make these statements with these filmmakers that introduces them to the world, but it puts us in a position of [similar to finding] your favorite band, which is trendsetting [for us].”
Revolutionizing Horror Storytelling
With their recent collaboration with Blumhouse, Meta has entered the world of “M3GAN” and “The Black Phone” through virtual reality. “They’re quite different in nature,” said Meta Content Entertainment Lead Rick Rey. “They offer different types of opportunities. In ‘M3GAN,’ you as a viewer can experience what it’s like to have an M3GAN’s vision, and it’s not just a situation where it’s feedback effects. We’re actually in real time scanning your room environment, highlighting objects, leveraging the sensors and the cameras that we have in the device to make it feel personal to you.”
“We’re a technology company. We are doing our best to develop the tech that’s going to empower creators and creatives to really create these types of experiences at scale. We’re hoping to see many different variations because it really sort of just opens the aperture in terms of what the creative power is. Empowering creators [and] making sure that we’re developing our tool set and that we’re delivering it to studios, developers, creators, filmmakers to make sure that they have the opportunity to play.”
Easterseals Disability Film Challenge: Spotlight on Suspense
As the creator of the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, Nic Novicki originally created the competition to be a one-off event with friends. “Roughly one in four of the population self-identifies as having a disability,” revealed Novicki. “95% of those roles are actually portrayed by people that don’t have disabilities. I came up with this idea for a disability film challenge, and right away casting directors and film festivals started reaching out. In 2017, I partnered with Easterseals, which is the nation’s largest disability services organization and now to date, we have 850 films that have been created.”
The 2025 theme for this year’s challenge was thriller and suspense, in which Novicki credits the submissions for exploring different pathways into the horror genre and showcasing individuals with various disabilities throughout their filmmaking.
“Thriller and suspense, they’re cousins. When you hear the word disability, it intersects because you can have somebody with a disability, that’s part of any religion, sexual orientation. Horror intersects too,” said Novicki. “We had 123 films [this year], and many of them are going to screen in the horror block [at film festivals]. Every year, we have a set genre and an assignment, and everybody has their own interpretations of what that film is. I love seeing that you get 123 different versions of what thriller and suspense is. I think that’s really what horror is too, [because] there’s not just one kind of horror movie.”
Featured Speakers: Masters of Horror Music
In a conversation led by Variety’s Chief Music Critic Chris Willman, five creatives working in the music industry spoke about their work in various horror projects released in 2025. Jeff Russo, composer for “Alien: Earth,” revealed the challenges of scoring a series based off of one of the most beloved horror franchises, and how it played a part into the production of the soundtrack. “
“One of the things that me and [Noah Hawley] talked about was we needed to figure out what the underlying material made the audience feel right,” said Russo. “I wanted to tip my hat to Jerry Goldsmith’s score [for “Alien’] and use the same sort of harmonic structure and the same feeling that he was able to derive.”
Chanda Dancy, who composed this year’s “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” told the audience about her past experience as a composer on different films that helped inspire her musical work. “When I was starting out, I did like a million Lifetime films that ended up with people stabbing and slashing. Whenever I think of 90s style horror, I think of a giant orchestra, [with] lots of brass. It’s very bombastic and has lots of melodic motifs.”
“The vision of a music supervisor is in service to the vision of our show or our director. Where that trust is applied can look different in so many different types of working relationships,” said Amanda Krieg Thomas, who served as the music supervisor for “American Horror Story” and “Monster: The Ed Gein Story.” “I think that it is that trust between the creative and what we do that makes the collaboration strong.”
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