Filmmaking is expensive, but bigger budgets aren’t always better. Jason Blum is one of the most prolific producers in Hollywood, having achieved great success with low-budget horror flicks like Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and The Purge. As a former executive at Miramax, he’s all too familiar with the downsides of big budgets.

“It’s hard to make a movie that’s very expensive and not be thinking of the results all the time,” Blum says in Episode 159 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I think generally the creative process is hurt if you’re thinking about the end as opposed to focusing on day-to-day decisions.”

As an executive, Blum made an early blunder when he passed on The Blair Witch Project, which went on to become one of the most profitable low-budget films of all time. He learned his lesson, later championing Paranormal Activity, which was headed straight to DVD, and turning it into a box office success. It’s a formula he’s followed with dozens of films, which eschew CGI spectacle in favor of basic storytelling.

“Unless you’re making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI,” says Blum.

He cites The Purge, about an America where crime is legal for one night a year, as an example of a quirky premise that would never get the $20 million treatment, but that can achieve great success as a low-budget film. Lower budgets also let filmmakers take risks with the story itself, for example by killing off the main character.

“That’s something big Hollywood movies don’t like to do,” says Blum. “And I understand why they don’t. But again, when you have a low budget you can kill your lead and it’s OK.”

Though Blum sometimes branches out, financing films like the Oscar-winning Whiplash, he’s irked by the suggestion that he must be exploiting low budget horror as a pathway to bigger and better things. He insists that scary movies are his main interest and will remain his primary focus for years to come.

“That’s what I love,” he says. “That’s what we do, that’s what I’m going to continue to do. I’m not doing it in order to do something else.”

Listen to our complete interview with Jason Blum in Episode 159 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below. And don’t miss Jason’s new anthology The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares, featuring stories by Hollywood figures like Ethan Hawke and Eli Roth.

Jason Blum on The Blair Witch Project:

“When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of The Blair Witch Project—of the full, completed movie—went to a lot of the buyers. And so we all saw it before the festival, and I passed, a bunch of people passed. … Then I watched the movie marching toward success, and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was. And I guess what was formative about the experience is that I saw so many people who were older than I was—and knew so much more than I did—also pass on this movie. When I first saw Paranormal Activity, I had gotten it in the context that it was going straight to DVD and it wasn’t going to be distributed. And I remember seeing it, and then I watched it with an audience to check myself, and saw how the audience responded, and said to the filmmaker, ‘I think there is an audience for this movie, and I think it could work in a theater.’ And even though everyone said no, everyone said no to Blair Witch and look at what happened to that one. So that gave me the strength and conviction to hang on when everyone kept saying I was a dope.”

Jason Blum on messages in horror:

“I think some horror movies actually have a lot to say. Definitely the horror movies in the ’70s started the tradition of laying in social messages to horror movies. The Purge for sure is a cautionary tale. … Both of the [Purge] movies, in Europe, everyone understood them as a cautionary tale of what would happen if we stay on the track that we’re going on—which is there’s a shooting of some kind or another and then the gun laws get less, not more. Where could that go? And James DeMonaco … who wrote and directed The Purge—it was his idea of where we could be headed. So there’s a real social commentary in The Purge, but what I was kind of alluding to before was that sometimes in the United States it was misinterpreted, a lot of people saw The Purge as like, ‘Yay, I’m going to kill someone!’ Which was not the director’s intent. But that’s not disappointing to me, it wasn’t disappointing to him. You can’t control what people take from what they see.”

Jason Blum on messages vs. entertainment:

“[Barry Levinson] has a house on the Chesapeake Bay, and he wanted to make a documentary about the pollution of it, and his agent said to make a horror movie about it, so we made a found-footage movie—we produced it—called The Bay. … The thing that went wrong with The Bay is that we got too much ‘message’ and not enough entertainment. The movie wasn’t widely distributed, it wasn’t widely released, it wasn’t seen by a lot of people. So as a result it didn’t have a big effect. We needed more entertainment DNA in it and less social message. And you really have to balance those two things. You could make a movie with a very important message, but if no one sees it then no one hears your message. … Whether or not [The Bay] got people talking about the Chesapeake Bay or not—I’m sure it did, but such a small number that it had no effect. Had it been the hit that Insidious was, I think that could have made it a much bigger part of the conversation.”

Jason Blum on the horror community:

“What I like about the community, and it’s a funny segue, but we have this movie called Jem and the Holograms which comes out in October, and to me what Jem and the Holograms is about is it’s a movie that not only says it’s OK to be different, but it says you should celebrate being different, and whatever’s different about you, you should push that. … And that’s probably why I love the fans of horror more than any other genre, is there’s a real embracing of people who are strange or odd or whatever, and within that community it’s OK to be that way. … The horror community, whether they’re writers or directors, they kind of get out their moroseness in their work, which makes them cheerier. Leigh Whanell is hilarious, one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and James [DeMonaco] and Scott [Derrickson], all those guys, they’re not the personality you would expect from horror people.”