The Javits Center's north wing took on the smell of fog juice and stale popcorn Friday night as Blumhouse and Atomic Monster converted a stretch of New York Comic Con into a walk-through carnival of things that go bump in the dark. Branded BlumFest, the two-hour presentation was less a traditional panel than a haunted open house, with cast members wandering between curtained alcoves and a live audience herded from room to room by costumed attendants who never once broke character.
What the crowd got for its patience was a dense stack of first looks, release-date confirmations, and the kind of loose, unpolished banter that suggests the people making these films actually enjoy scaring each other. Jason Blum and James Wan appeared together midway through, trading jabs about who greenlights sequels faster, before handing the stage to filmmakers with projects further out on the calendar.
Five Nights at Freddy's Sequel Brings the Animatronics Back to the Stage
The loudest reaction of the night belonged to the returning cast of the Five Nights at Freddy's follow-up, who emerged flanked by two practical animatronic puppets built for the panel rather than the film. The performers described long, sweaty hours inside the suits and hinted that the new installment leans harder into the games' lore without abandoning the franchise's oddly tender streak. Footage shown was brief and deliberately incomplete, mostly atmospheric shots of empty arcade corridors and a flickering security monitor, but it was enough to send the room into a sustained roar.
M3GAN Returns With a New Wardrobe and Worse Manners
A separate segment devoted to the M3GAN universe opened with the doll itself wheeled onto the stage in a glass case, which lasted roughly ninety seconds before a performer in a replica costume stepped out from behind a curtain. The creative team framed the next chapter as a escalation rather than a reset, with the titular android graduating from household menace to something closer to a cultural contagion. No release window was announced, and the panelists were careful to say the project remains in active development.
New Horror From Familiar Producers
Two original titles drew quieter but genuine interest. The first, a contained thriller set almost entirely inside a single apartment building, comes from a first-time feature director who cut her teeth on short films released through Blumhouse's emerging filmmaker program. The second pairs Atomic Monster with a writing duo known primarily for television, and was pitched on stage as a monster movie in which the monster is largely absent until the final act. Casting for both remains under wraps, though Blum teased that announcements would arrive before the end of the year.
The Panel's Unscripted Moments Stole the Show
For all the marketing, the evening's most memorable beats were accidental. An audience member asked Wan whether he ever gets scared watching his own films; he admitted he watches them mostly to check the sound mix. Blum, pressed on how many projects his company currently has in production, gave a number and then immediately revised it downward, twice. And a question about practical versus digital effects prompted a long, animated defense of rubber, latex, and corn syrup that ran well past the segment's allotted time.
The convention's horror programming has grown steadily in recent years, and BlumFest fit neatly into a Friday night slot that once belonged to comic-book adaptations. Whether that shift reflects the genre's commercial strength or simply the calendar's convenience is an open question, but the crowd filing out into the October chill did not appear to be debating it. They were too busy comparing notes on which puppet blinked first.
BlumFest returns to the convention circuit later this year, with stops expected in several cities ahead of the studio's winter releases.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter