“Welcome to Blumhouse” Explores the Horrors of Family with Diverse Voices
Emerging directors created sinister plots with family and race at the front of their productions.
Spooky season is here, and Amazon Studios and Blumhouse Productions are ready to give a scare. With disturbing stories surrounding race and family, their newly-released film anthology “Welcome to Blumhouse” calls for a deep reflection on American life and the thriller genre while keeping you at the edge of your seat.
“I think dysfunctional families are always relevant,” Veena Sud, director and screenwriter for “Welcome to Blumhouse’s” The Lie, said in a Zoom interview with NYU Local. “I was really happy to do a deep dive into the psychology of probably where the terror begins for a lot of people.”
The Lie, a remake of the 2015 German film We Monsters, follows teenager Kayla and her divorced parents as they try to cover up the presumptive murder of Kayla’s frenemy Brittanny. Played by The Kissing Booth’s Joey King, Kayla is a problem child, going from panic attacks to indifference when questioned about murdering her friend. At the beginning of the film, Kayla’s parents despised each other but the task of protecting their daughter from being charged brought them back together, reawakening good pre-divorce memories for Kayla.
“What I was trying to reflect in The Lie was a type of parenting that is very American, that is very contemporary,” Sud said. “People make horrific mistakes in the name of love all the time, especially parents who feel guilty about the damage that they think they’ve done to their child.”
Underneath the questionable decisions taken by this white family to remain guilt-free of murder and cover-up, the theme of racial profiling comes to play. After Britanny doesn’t come home for a couple of days, her father asks Kayla’s family for answers but he is encountered with evasions and false accusations to the police pointing at him as the one behind Britanny’s disappearance. The father, who is Pakistani, quickly becomes the police’s main suspect.
“When I was asked to do the remake, I knew that I wanted to talk about race and specifically anti-Muslim sentiment in this country so I made the father of the missing and a seemingly-murdered girl, South Asian Pakistani,” Sud said. Sud wanted to make clear that in America, as a man of color and as a Muslim, the criminal justice system that we live with will always disadvantage you, even if you are innocent. “Who’s the victim then becomes the perpetrator or the perceived perpetrator,” she said.
Black Box, the second release in the “Welcome to Blumhouse” anthology, also explores the theme of the family. The movie narrates the life of single father Nolan, played by Uncorked’s Mamoudou Athie, who depends on his school-age daughter to retrace his memories. After having disturbing nightmares whenever he tries to remember his past, Nolan undergoes therapy with an experimental doctor who has an inexplicable interest in his case and completely changes his life in a really twisted way (no spoilers!).
“When I saw that the…original script was about fatherhood and this man trying to become better for his daughter,” Black Box’s director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr. said, “I immediately was drawn to this idea of exploring a flawed father.”
Besides the intriguing and warped plot, Black Box is remarkable for its all-Black cast, something seldom seen in the thriller genre. Alongside Athie, the movie features Tony-award-winner Phylicia Rashad and Charmaine Bingwa, the first woman of color to win the Heath Ledger Scholarship which recognizes rising Australian actors.
“Although the leads in my film are Black, I really pushed for diversity across the board from top to bottom and there was no pushback [from Blumhouse],” Osei-Kuffour Jr. said. “They say, ‘Write what you know,’ and for me, in order to be as specific as possible to that experience, I just felt I could only tell my story and I happen to be Black.”
The first four films of “Welcome to Blumhouse,” which include The Lie and Black Box, are available on Amazon Prime Video. Four other anthology movies have expected release in 2021.
