BlumFest 2021 dials up Donald Sutherland for Stephen King's 'Mr. Harrigan's Phone,' teases upcoming scary slate

The second annual BlumFest kicked off today, teasing a whole bunch of Blumhouse movies and TV shows getting ready to scare us.

BlumFest 2021 is streaming now on Blumhouse’s YouTube channel and Facebook page (and shown below), highlighted by a livestream Q&A tonight with super producer Jason Blum and Halloween Kills director David Gordon Green at approximately 10:00 p.m. PT, after the film debuts at Beyond Fest.

Here’s a rundown of what TV shows and movies BlumFest is highlighting. Just be prepared to be scared.

The first BlumFest project featured is the limited television series, The Thing About Pam, which stars Renée Zellweger. The NBC show is set to come out in 2022, and is based on the real-life 2011 murder of Betsy Faria, a murder that Pam Hupp (Zellweger) was deeply involved in. The show also stars Josh Duhamel, Judy Greer, Katy Mixon, Gideon Adlon, Sean Bridgers, Glenn Fleshler, Suanne Spoke, and Mac Brandt. You can check out Zellweger’s interview with Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison here at about the 4:30 mark.

The Welcome to the Blumhouse anthology of horror films also gets their own time at BlumFest, with directors of three of the new Welcome to the Blumhouse movies. Bingo Hell director Gigi Saul Guerrero, Madres director Ryan Zaragoza, and The Manor writer/director Axelle Carolyn talk with TikTok creators about monsters and crafting stories.

BlumFest also touches on a John Logan-directed project that will stream exclusively on Peacock. We don’t know much about the project yet, but we now know that Quei Tann, Austin Crute, Anna Lore, Monique Kim, Cooper Koch, Darwin del Fabro will be starring in it.

Blumhouse also has two films in the works at Epix — A House on the Bayou and American Refugee. We've got a new trailer for A House on the Bayou, and now know it will premiere on Epix on Nov. 19. American Refugee will premiere on Dec. 10.

Check out the new trailer below:

DASHCAM, which just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, also gets some BlumFest love. Director Rob Savage joins the stream to discuss the film about a horrific road trip that stars Annie Hardy and Amar Chadha-Patel end up livestreaming.

Last but not least, we also get casting news for Netflix's adaptation of Stephen King’s story Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, which appears in his latest collection of novellas, If It Bleeds. The film will be written and directed by John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks) and produced by Blumhouse and Ryan Murphy. Production begins this month, with Donald Sutherland (The Hunger Games) and Jaeden Martell (IT: Chapter Two) starring. Sutherland will play Mr. Harrigan and Martell will play young Craig, the latter of whom is able to communicate with a deceased Mr. Harrigan via an iPhone. The horror thriller is due out sometime in 2022.

That's a lot of terrifying projects, and those are just the highlights! Check out the entire BlumFest 2021 video (here) for the rest of the fun, and Blumhouse’s YouTube and/or Facebook channel around 10:00 p.m. PT for the Halloween Kills live Q&A.