Gareth Edwards didn’t set out to change how blockbusters are made — it just happened to end up that way.

“I had no agenda for anybody else, but I definitely wanted to change how I made films,” The Creator director tells Inverse.

Edwards is careful not to name names, or even to speak to his own experience within the “Hollywood machine,” but when he opines on the state of blockbusters it certainly feels like a reference to his own career.

“I always scratch my head when they pluck up out of film festivals these amazing filmmakers who have done these stunning debuts,” he says. “And then they go and put them in the Hollywood machine and guess what? It comes out the other end quite similar to all the other things that have been made in the machine.”

Ryan Turek may be the most influential person in horror cinema you’ve never heard of. Since as early as 2017’s Happy Death Day, he’s been a producer at Blumhouse, hired by Jason Blum himself for his “horror encyclopedic brain.” Since then, Turek’s credits have included everything from M3GAN to Blackphone, along with serving as “boots-on-the-ground producer” for Blumhouse’s Halloween trilogy, and now, The Exorcist: Believer.

So with Halloween in the rearview mirror and The Exorcist making a comeback, there’s never been a better time to check in with Blumhouse’s encyclopedic horror brain on the state of the studio and the genre in general. Inverse spoke to Turek about what Exorcist: Believer means for the franchise’s complicated canon, writer-director David Gordon Green’s vision for the movie, and the return of horror icon Chris MacNeil.