Jason Blum likes a challenge.

With a brain for spooking audiences on a tight budget, the 49-year-old producer has spent more than a decade redefining the horror genre — and changing the Hollywood business model in the process — with films like Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge and Get Out (not to mention a slew of non-horror prestige plays and TV series). This month, his mini empire, Blumhouse Productions, will release a new sequel in the Halloween franchise, which picks back up with the masked serial killer Michael Myers and his ultimate prey, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). So why dabble in an established brand when you’ve got a good thing going?

“There are bragging rights,” he half-jokingly tells me over the phone shortly after Halloween’s Toronto Film Festival premiere. The fact that there were nine sequels to John Carpenter’s original movie (“a couple of good ones, more bad ones,” he says) only enticed Blum more. Perhaps Blumhouse could make a great one.

“I really believe in the way our company makes movies,” Bum says. “I believe in our low budgets. I believe in using directors who aren’t necessarily from horror, like Jordan Peele or [Halloween director] David Gordon Green. And I believe in our system which is unique and unusual. I wanted to show that we could make a Halloween movie different than the other ones before.”

Scrapping the continuity of the sequels, Halloween picks up with the original mythology in real time. Graying, paranoid and armed with an anti-Myers arsenal, Laurie is a survivor of trauma, having relived her encounter with Michael Myers every day for the last 40 years. The curse has carried through the generations. Her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) see the Strode matriarch as a shattered woman holed up with a tinfoil hat. That all changes when the three women become targets of Myers, who has busted out of jail. As they combat a murderer’s vengeance, Halloween erupts both as a classic slasher and the story of mothers and daughters warding off the extreme measures of violent men.

Shortly after the release of Green’s 2000 debut feature, George Washington, Blum met the director and vowed to work with him. The producer says that, when Blumhouse Productions was in full swing, he threw every percolating project Green’s way. “Anytime we have a movie that is available, I shot him a quick email. Usually he would say, ‘Not for me.’ For Halloween, I just emailed him one word. And he said yes.”

Green brings what Blum describes as “auteur” quality to Halloween, and it shows. Through methodical camerawork and a sensitivity to performance, Laurie’s journey — and even more so, Allyson’s, who deals with both Michael Myers and the horndog boys of her high school — is charted with a heart-racing tension that rarely lets up. But after coming down from the movie, I couldn’t help but wonder: what would a female director bring to the film that Green could not?

Green, one of my favorite filmmakers working today, delivers potent in Halloween, but the question of a woman telling this particular story lingered in my mind, in large part thanks to recent reporting on the issue of gender imbalance in Hollywood. A study published in January by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that, of the 1,100 top-grossing films released between 2007 and 2017, 95.7 percent of all directors were male and 4.3 percent were female. That means for every 22 male directors hired for major releases, one female director earned the same job. Another report published by Martha M. Lauzen, Ph.D., and the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film earlier this year found that women accounted for 11 percent of directors working in the top 250 films of 2017. As someone who looks to the film medium for perspectives and experiences outside his own, the numbers stunned after their initial publication, and continued to shade the machinations of an industry, consciously or unconsciously, set in its ways.

Blumhouse Productions has been in the scare business since 2006’s Paranormal Activity, and in that time, despite dozens of movies behind it, the company has not produced a theatrically distributed horror film directed by a woman. With more and more female voices emerging through the festival circuit, from which many of Blumhouse’s directors emerge, the omission struck me as odd and compelling. When I ask Blum about hiring a woman to direct one of the company’s horror films, he too seemed jolted by the idea that it hasn’t.

“We’re always trying to that,” he says. “We’re not trying to do it because of recent events. We’ve always been trying.”

Blumhouse has produced films directed by women, though none could be easily classified as horror in the ilk of your Ouijas or Happy Death Days: In 2013, Blumhouse produced and released Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke’s erotic thriller Plush straight to video; Karen Moncrieff’s supernatural drama The Keeping Hours trickled out on to DVD this past August; Blum notes that the company just wrapped production on The Killing creator Veena Sud’s The Lie, though he also admits the film is “squarely in the thriller genre.” On the TV side, Blumhouse produced Marti Noxon’s adaptation of Sharp Objects, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée for HBO. While terrifying in its own right, Blum wouldn’t call the mini-series “horror” either.

“There are not a lot of female female directors period, and even less who are inclined to do horror,” Blum says. “I’m a massive admirer of [The Babadook director] Jennifer Kent. I’ve offered her every movie we’ve had available. She’s turned me down every time.” (Kent was not available for comment at the time of publication.)

Universal Pictures

During our call, there’s another name Blum struggles to recall — a woman to whom he’s thrown projects left and right — but he’s so driven to figure out the name that, in a true Hollywood move, he summons an assistant, then later a Blumhouse exec, onto the phone to help him remember.

“Who was the woman that we met with a bunch of times on the movie that we have at Sony?!” His associates rattle off names: Karyn Kusama? Mimi Leder? Zoe Lister-Jones? Sarah Shapiro? Katie Aselton? Lynn Ramsey? (“No, she wouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole,” says Blum’s exec colleague) The Blumhouse Rolodex runs deep.

Eventually Blum and his team land on the name: Leigh Janiak, who directed the SXSW-dominating Homecoming in 2014. According to Blum, Blumhouse offered her every project under the sun, but nothing panned out. (Janiak, writing in a follow-up, confirms the meetings, and adds that scheduling prevented her from signing on for a Blumhouse movie, but that she’s confident “we’ll work together on something, someday soon.”)

Though executed by a core team of men, the producer firmly believes a film like the new Halloween can find female perspectives thanks to other creative talent involved. In this case, Jamie Lee Curtis.

“I was very reluctant to do [the movie] without her,” he says. “Her involvement was very important to me, and in retrospect, I just don’t think there’s been any version of a movie that really would have worked anywhere as well as this one does without her.”

Curtis served as an executive producer on Halloween, and according to Blum, was “a very powerful, creative leader” when it came to script development, casting, production, post-production and marketing. “If one person embodies [the] Halloween [franchise], I would say it’s a toss up between Jamie Lee Curtis and John, but because Jamie was on the set every day, she was much more involved in the day-to-day. So I think everyone kind of turned to her for leadership.”

Blumhouse’s future is bright, even if the subjects are grim: Films on the docket include the Happy Death Day sequel; a hush-hush project from Damon Lindelof and his Leftovers director Craig Zobel; an R-rated Spawn movie from Todd McFarlane; an adaptation of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video games; a handful of new-concept genre movies; and, according to a hopeful Blum, the next chapter in his Halloween franchise. Does a female director factor into the horror plans?

Based on Blumhouse’s current slate of announced projects, not yet. That could change as Hollywood reckons with its industry imbalance, and the boutique company brokers deals with fresh talent. For now, Blum says he’s trying, but if locking down the in-demand Jennifer Kent or Leigh Janiak is standing in his way, the struggle may provide yet another creative win. He does love a challenge.