Welcome to the Blumhouse Film Series Offers Creepy and Fresh Fun

Blumhouse may have made its mark in the movie business by offering easy-to-digest horror films to the multiplex masses (remember them?), but a recent collection of made-for-streaming films demonstrates a new interest in much broader subject matter. Don’t worry—or don’t get too excited—because these films still follow the Blumhouse recipe for mass appeal.

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Bingo Hell is among this crop of films that were released shortly before Halloween. In this movie, neighborhood activist Lupita (Adriana Barraza) fights to protect her beloved neighborhood from both gentrification and an evil force that’s taken over the local bingo hall. The bingo hall is one of the few community centers that longtime residents of her neighborhood can still call home, and she is very suspicious of the new management. As the remaining lifelong residents of her barrio disappear one by one, an epic confrontation—a final stand, if you will—becomes inevitable.

Team Lupita gathers. Brian Roedel/Amazon Content Services LLC

The strongest part of this Blumhouse offering is the characters. Director Gigi Saul Guerrero fills the cast with quirky and lively characters who have the verve of the best of indie cinema. Despite the horrific moments in the very beginning of the film, there is little else to signal the supernatural showdown to come in the opening scenes. If the characters had been any less engaging, this move would be death for a decidedly genre-bound offering, but this time with the characters propels everything that follows. 

Brian Roedel/Amazon Content Services LLC

Bingo Hell spends most of its running time in a vibe that recalls the modern Creepshow series on Shudder at times and classic Twilight Zone in others. Some of the more freewheeling X-Files would work as a programmatic appetizer as well. All of this is to say that the film feels like an extended episode of an anthology series. There’s nothing too grave or deeply developed. For the most part, what you see is what you get in terms of theme, plot, and story. For this film, that works just great and anything else likely would have taken away from the fun. Besides, with a name like Bingo Hell, you’d be foolish to think this one was going to give Hereditary a run for its money. 

Blumhouse

Another Welcome to the Blumhouse offering is The Manor. In this tale of terror, Judith Albright (Barbara Hershey) moves into a stately assisted-living mansion in order to recover from a recent stroke. While the Manor is idyllic in many ways, as soon as Judith’s estranged daughter Barbara (Katie A. Keane) and beloved grandson Josh (Nicholas Alexander) walk out of her room for the first time, she discovers the first of many unpleasant facts of life in Golden Sun Manor. The more she pokes at the shadows and tries to unravel the mystery, the more her family is convinced she is slipping into dementia. 

“Just like a college dorm,” she said. Kevin Estrada/Amazon Content Services LLC

The Manor could be described as something like Cocoon by way of The VVitch. The film is a little bit of a consideration of how we treat our elders, a little bit folk horror, and just a twist of the TV series Supernatural. Like Bingo Hell, it is fundamentally breezy and not too challenging as far as horror offerings go these days. There’s nothing incredibly frightening about it, except for that oppressive feeling of bad community that infected the (more earnest) Blumhouse cinematic offering Get Out. While it was enjoyable, I have to say that the trope-ness of much of the story will leave many genre fans unimpressed. Despite the images that recall classic gothic horror or even relatively recent gems such as The Woman in Black, this one is solidly in the category of “horror lite.”

Just a dark and ominous cluster of ancient trees. Nothing to worry about here! Kevin Estrada/Amazon Content Services LLC

Unfortunately, the script is the weakest part of this endeavor. At times it feels like a first draft, or—even worse—like a young person trying to “write older.” Perhaps because of the ambitious nature of the story and its unconventional (by horror standards) protagonist, this lack of solid character dialogue is brought into sharp relief. The other side of this is that since the film is not too serious, the lack is nothing fatal to the experience of the film. There are things to enjoy if you are committed to seeing it to the end.

Happily, the end is one of the highlights of The Manor. While many horror films fall apart in the final moments, this one actually delivers an ending that is earned and perhaps better than the sum of its parts. Since much of this film was not as developed as it could have been, I was very pleasantly surprised to see director Axelle Carolyn double down on a conclusion that was, shall we say, delicious.

As of this writing, there are at least six other films in the Welcome to the Blumhouse collection, all of which take an equally laudable risk in terms of the characters they introduce and the stories they tell. While they all may not appeal to the most hardened horror aficionado, they have plenty to offer that horror fans and general audiences can enjoy and celebrate. Like the name suggests, it’s both a sampler and an open house. 

Welcome to the Blumhouse films are available on Amazon Prime.