A Blumhouse sour note that shouldn’t have been a horror movie unplugs muscular snowmen and singing animals on streaming

After almost a year of wince-inducing outings that would have bankrupted an unluckier production company, Blumhouse has finally found itself back on the upswing. The fall season of 2024 brought the likes of Speak No Evil and House of Spoils into the world, whose combined dramatic, technical, and thematic dexterity was precisely what Jason Blum’s horror factory needed.

After all, the company’s latest release prior to those two films was AfrAId, the Chris Weitz-schemed sci-fi horror that, perhaps appropriately enough, seemed absolutely terrified of being a movie. Even a paltry $12.6 million box office gross against a $12 million budget painted a far kinder picture than AfrAId deserved, and it has since enlisted Netflix in its latest campaign in failing upward.

Per FlixPatrol, AfrAId has nestled itself in fourth place on the United States’ Netflix film rankings at the time of writing, rising above the likes of Hot Frosty — Netflix’s Christmas rom-com of the moment that owes a debt to Duncan Milligan’s biceps — and Sing, Illumination’s chart-frequenter that we would take over the Minions any day.

AfrAId stars John Cho as Curtis, a family man and employee at a tech company who gets voluntold to test a new product called AIA, a smart-home software powered by a remarkably lucid and personable artificial intelligence. He brings AIA home and installs it in his house, after which the program quickly bonds with his family, which includes wife Meredith, teenage daughter Iris, and young sons Cal and Preston.

Somewhere in the bowels of Blumhouse, there’s probably a xerox of a contract that decrees that any film pitch will be accepted, so long as the studio reserves the right to reshape it into a horror movie, or at least something that vaguely resembles one.

This is ostensibly the fate that AfrAId was resigned to. Like Imaginary before it, AfrAId is weighed down by a horror throughline that seems as though it was forced into the production, resulting in a domino effect on the film’s narrative that left it with hardly an iota of coherence to spare.

But, beneath the incompatibility it seems to have with its own genre, AfrAId does play host to a few strands of thoughtful DNA. It’s at least somewhat aware that to tell a story about AI is to tell a story about a very specific emotional struggle that each and every human being faces within themselves and between each other. It also makes an admirable attempt at a twist ending, which perhaps could have stuck a more meaningful landing if there was any plot for it to twist.

In any case, this expectation of mediocrity is hopefully a thing of the past now. Up next on the Blumhouse docket is Wolf Man, the Leigh Whannell creature feature aiming to reimagine a classic monster movie with modern eyes. The filmmaker did a banging job with The Invisible Man back in 2020, and while it was too-little-too-late for the Universal Monsters shared universe, there’s never an inappropriate time to promise a great werewolf movie. Here’s hoping it’s a promise that’s lived up to.