HORROR movie supremo Jason Blum has a theory as to why audiences around the world are happy to shell out their hard-earned pay for the privilege of being scared witless.

The boss of Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind over-achieving, low-budget franchises such as Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Insidious, as well as last year’s Oscar-nominated Get Out and the recent BlacKkKlansmen, believes that horror film fans delight in terrifying themselves in a confines of a cinema to better endure the terrors of the real world.

“The world has always been somewhat scary but I think the world is particularly scary at the moment,” he says, citing the present occupant of the White House as being the current sum of all his fears.

“I think for people to go into a controlled environment, where the scares are in their control and you can turn away because it’s make believe. I think there is something quite healing about that. It’s counterintuitive, but that’s my theory that it somehow provides a respite to the real scares in the world.”

And Blum should know, having carved out a niche in turning low-budget fright-fests into hugely lucrative franchises, ever since 2009 monster hit Paranormal Activity raked in well over $200 million dollars from a budget of just $20,000. Further success followed the next year when the Aussie team of James Wan (whom Blum calls “the best horror movie director in the world”) and Leigh Whannell spun out a $2 million budget for Insidious into $136 million at the box office and in 2013, when The Purge took $125 million from its $4.2 million budget. Each of those franchises sparked numerous hit sequels, mostly says Blum, because he kept the original creators on board in some capacity, rather than following the time-honoured Hollywood horror tradition of firing them and bringing on someone cheaper.

“That’s why I think so many horror sequels are disappointing,” Blum says. “We don’t do that. James DeMonaco has been on every Purge movie. Leigh Whannell and James Wan have done every Insidious movie. Oren Peli did every Paranormal Activity.”

And that’s why, having finally gotten his hooks into arguably the most influential horror movie franchise of all time, Halloween, Blum was adamant that original writer-director John Carpenter was on board.

“I didn’t want to do another Halloween without John,” Blum says of the Hollywood veteran who also directed classics such as Starman, Escape From New York and The Thing. “I just felt it wouldn’t work. And it wouldn’t have gotten the response we have gotten, without him.”

There have been 10 Halloween movies to date, ever since the masked, knife-wielding serial killer Michael Myers stalked babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut) in 1978. There have been direct sequels, spin-offs and reboots — most without either Carpenter or Curtis, and most of them stinkers.

For the 11th, which opens this week, new director David Gordon Green and his co-writer Danny McBride, had a radical idea — to pretend that none of the other sequels existed and simply pick up the story from the original, 40 years down the track.

That concept, plus the presence of Carpenter as executive producer and the endorsement of Green from godson Jake Gyllenhaal, was enough for Curtis to overcome her initial reservations and sign up to play a grizzled, survivalist version of Strode, still dealing with the effects that 40 years of murderous memories have had on her daughter and granddaughter.

“She was definitely nervous, she was definitely reluctant and she was not going to do it,” says Blum of Curtis. “She made it clear early on that she wasn’t going to do it. But we kept pressing on and I think the fact that John came back certainly influenced her decision to a degree.”

Curtis has said she was also attracted by the timeliness of the return of her most famous character, a survivor dealing with the effects of trauma, in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp era. Blum, who is effusive in his praise of Curtis’ portrayal of a powerful everywoman, agrees.

“The movie is a female revenge movie and you don’t see a lot of horror movies about what happens after the horror has happened,” he says. “So it’s a movie about the trauma that she has suffered and what that looks like 40 years later. And it’s three generations of women fighting evil, so clearly there’s a timeliness to it as well.”

Like any horror movie, Halloween, is only as good as its villain and with the relentless Myers, something between man and monster, the original film delivered one for the ages. Subsequent films, most notably Rob Zombie’s 2007 reboot, came up with elaborate explanations of what drove Myers to commit such atrocities, but Blum and Green thought that less was more when it came to making the relentless killing machine the stuff of nightmares for generations.

“I think he is terrifying because he is so simple and he has no backstory and no motivation — he is just pure evil,” says Blum. “Hollywood always feels a need to explain everything and I actually think the fact that it’s unexplained — not in all the movies, but in the better movies — makes him get under everyone’s skin in a way that no other horror movie villain has ever done.”

Halloween opens on Thursday.