In a recent conversation with low-budget horror kingpin Jason Blum, writer Eric Eisenberg of Cinemablend circled back on a question that Blum has heard before: Given the huge box office success of last year’s Halloween, has Blumhouse given any more consideration to future entries in the Scream or Hellraiser series? Like Halloween, both have connections to Miramax, which produced Halloween along with Blumhouse. Although Blum’s answer seems purposefully calculated to keep expectations low, he does confirm what will likely excite plenty of horror fans: Blumhouse is at least mulling over concepts for both Scream and Hellraiser. Says Blum:
Yes, we definitely have [discussed it]. We’re looking—there’s nothing happening with either one of those things—but we’re definitely looking at it, and it’s definitely something I’d be open to.
And why wouldn’t he be open to it, after Halloween made more than $250 million on a mere $10 million budget? The horror genre has never been more profitable or bankable than it is right now, and with the benefit of some strong IP, Blumhouse could have more big hits on their hands with a new Scream or Hellraiser film.
Of the two, Hellraiser probably has the lower box office ceiling, but would likely be easier to pull off. The franchise has been through a never-ending series of low-budget, direct-to-video garbage releases, most recently in 2018’s Hellraiser: Judgement. Many of the films in this series have been made primarily just to hang onto the franchise rights, often by shoehorning the Cenobites (or their leader Pinhead) into unrelated crime or detective stories, with unsurprisingly poor results. A Hellraiser adaptation with a decent budget and writer behind it, refocusing itself on the creepy mythos of the Cenobites, could feature quite a bit of artistic freedom in either rebooting the series or loosely remaking the original Clive Barker story. Either way, a new Hellraiser entry from Blumhouse could take many forms.
A new Scream adaptation, on the other hand, would be somewhat unavoidably bound to the legacy and lasting storyline of the four previous films in the series, all of which were directed by Wes Craven. The most obvious answer is that a new Scream would have to get pretty meta in its discussion of the evolution of horror tropes, but Craven’s Scream 4 already tackled the idea of the Ghostface killer making use of the rules of “horror remakes.” Any entry in the Scream series would also likely have to feature the return of at least a few key characters, unless Blumhouse were to go the (not recommended) route of rebooting the series entirely. Given how they treated Halloween, though, this doesn’t seem likely.
Both of these projects are obviously hypothetical for now. We’ll bring you more news on any new Scream or Hellraiser series entry as it breaks.