Horror, it seems, is having a moment. After a lean period in the first decade of this century, when the genre was saturated with gratuitous and largely brainless torture-porn flicks, the past few years have seen a resurgence in imaginative, brainy and – most importantly – frightening fare; take your pick from terrifying supernatural STD parable It Follows, the wonderfully claustrophobic chiller The Babadook, gleefully nasty punks v neo-Nazis gorefest Green Room and the deliciously dark work of Ben Wheatley, to name but a few.

Most recently, there has been Get Out. Jordan Peele’s satirical tale of a young black man’s unhappy first encounter with his white girlfriend’s parents has become that rarest thing in the horror genre: a critical and commercial hit. Reviewers have raved about its sly depiction of white liberal racism, while audiences have stampeded to see it, with the film grossing a remarkable $200m (£155m) from a relatively tiddly budget of $4.5m.

Of course, Get Out’s success will be less surprising to those familiar with the company behind it. Over the past decade Blumhouse Productions has become the Hammer Horror of its age, producing a series of small-budget films that have gone on to scare half the planet. They are the people behind the enormously successful Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Insidious franchises, and their powers have even extended to reviving the flatlining career of M Night Shyamalan, releasing his smash-hit comeback film Split earlier this year.

Clearly, Blumhouse has a handle on what gets people screaming, which is why we asked CEO Jason Blum for his six-point plan to creating a great 21st-century horror film. “If you follow these rules, Jason Blum guarantees a horror hit,” he says. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ll give you my address for all future litigation.”

Make it feel fresh

This is more important than anything else. It has to feel new and fresh and different. Take Get Out: the notion about doing a genre movie about race had never even occurred to me. It doesn’t feel like anything people have ever seen, and that’s why it’s resonating with people.

Creating something original is much easier said than done, of course. While it’s not that hard to come up with something unique, it certainly is hard to come up with something that’s unique and good. The Purge, on paper, is an impossible sell. It’s easy to look back on it now, and to say that the idea that crime is legal 12 hours a year is an obvious idea, but it could have gone wrong in so many different ways. That’s why that script sat around for three years. For Get Out, an executive who worked for another company said: “I read the script, I love it. My boss passed and thinks I’m an idiot but I’d love to see it get made.” And he sent me a script and I made it, and that executive now works at our company.

Make it relevant

Horror films need to feel current, specifically because the first audience to show up at the cinema and see a scary movie are people under 25. So you have to have it feel real and familiar and relevant in the lives of the people onscreen. I think a 21st-century horror film really benefits from being political. I don’t think it has to be political, but I think it really benefits. John Carpenter started a great tradition of politically themed genre movies. The world is a scary place at the moment, so it’s very fertile ground. We’re seeing work that reflects the Trump administration. Art takes time, but now it has been 100 days, it’s starting to seep into the scripts we’re reading in interesting ways. I’d rather have bad art and a better president, of course, but one of the only benefits of the incumbent is that we will have better art.

Use diverse voices

Jordan Peele is African American. [Split director] M Night Shyamalan is Indian American. There are more women making horror films: Jennifer Kent, who did The Babadook; the director from France who did [cannibal horror film] Raw, Julia Ducournau. I think it makes for better movies. If you’re open to hearing what scares people who are not like you, who are a different race or gender, I think that’s very effective. The audience is very mixed now and we’re overly saturated by stories told by white men. So when you find someone who isn’t a white man, it resonates.

The great thing about Get Out is that, if you watch it with a mixed audience, when the movie opens, the white people are relating to Allison [Williams’s character], and the black people are relating to Daniel [Kaluuya’s character]. But by the end of the movie, everyone is on Daniel’s side. For a minute, we’re all on the same fucking page, everyone is suddenly seeing the movie through the eyes of a black protagonist. I love that.

Remember, it’s art

With Get Out, had that script been directed by 99 other people out of 100, if the execution had been off, the same script just wouldn’t have worked. Jordan executed it tonally perfectly. You need good acting, good character and a good story. I think horror films aren’t more or less art than any other kinds of films. There are spectacular horror movies and there are crap horror movies. There are spectacular dramas and crap dramas. It takes great artists to make great art. One of the challenges I always pose to our team is, if Hitchcock were alive today what would he do? I feel like Get Out is the best example of that. It feels like today’s Hitchcock.

More money, more problems

Make it on a budget. It gives you creative parameters that makes the story better. Not all movies need to be low-budget. I don’t want to see a low-budget Marvel movie. But our movies benefit from low budgets. I think when all you have is the money to tell your story, and you don’t have money for CGI, it forces the director to focus on the most important part of the movie. How a movie looks is secondary. You can have the greatest-looking movie in the world and if the acting and story aren’t good, no one is going to see your movie. Conversely, if the acting is great, the characters are great and the story is great and the movie doesn’t look so good, it could be a hit. So I think the most important thing, and this is coming from the son of an art dealer who’ll be upset about this, but the storytelling and the actors are the most important and the look is secondary.

Don’t forget the scares

It’s got to have great scares, sure. But key to making a film scary is what comes in between the scares. You could have the greatest scare in the world but if you’re not involved in what’s going on and the psychology of the character, it doesn’t work. It’s what knits the scares together that’s the crucial part … But only people who really love scary movies understand that.