As Blumhouse celebrates 15 years of bringing horror to audiences, studio head Jason Blum looks back on some of his biggest triumphs (M3GAN) and misfires (M3GAN 2.0) in a new interview, which also draws out some of his more recent regrets—and his plans and hopes for the future. One thing we won’t be seeing, apparently, is a Blumhouse take on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre after the company came up short in the recent IP bidding war.

“We were in the mix. The deal isn’t closed, but we probably won’t get it,” Blum told Variety; the trade noted that A24, with a producing team that includes Glen Powell, is the clear frontrunner. There’s no elaboration on what a Blumhouse Texas Chain Saw might have looked like, but Blum noted, “I like taking IP that people are cynical about and turning expectations on their head.”

That definitely happened with 2018’s Halloween—though the excitement over David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy faded with each new entry, and Blumhouse is no longer steering the good ship Michael Myers. “We don’t own the rights anymore. I had a three-picture deal,” Blum explained, though he’s not closed off to future opportunities: “I would do another Hallo­­w­een movie.”

A franchise Blumhouse does have in its stable now is Saw, though there are no firm details yet on what shape that long-running series will take next. “It’s really hard to make 10 movies in a franchise—I don’t take that away from the original series’ producers. And I’m grateful to them for allowing us to continue,” Blum said. “My creative outlook is what I always preach: get the people who made the magic in the first place more involved. James Wan [the original director] will be hugely involved. That’s how we’re going to reinvent it.”

As for Blum’s dream projects… can you guess? Take a wild guess.

“Friday the 13th and Freddy Krueger, those are my two white whales,” he told Variety, which pointed out the rights for both Friday and A Nightmare on Elm Street are tied up elsewhere.

“We’re always haggling. I make a run at them every day. I will never give up the quest,” Blum said. (Presumably that means he’s talked to team Jason Universe.) “And if they make one without me, I’ll chase the next movie.”

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“Every frame has something unnerving in it,” Patton Oswalt says in the trailer for Chain Reactions—a new documentary about the enduring influence and impact of 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tobe Hooper’s grisly classic has often been imitated and has spawned some regrettable sequels and remakes, but the original remains a uniquely terrifying product of a very specific time and place, not just in pop culture, but also in the realms of independent cinema.

A new trailer for Chain Reactions is here, and it gives you a good idea of how it’s structured, focusing on five Texas Chain Saw fans in particular. Along with Oswalt, there’s Stephen King, Takashi Miike (director of Audition and Ichi the Killer), horror scholar Alexandra Heller-Nichols, and Karyn Kusama (director of Jennifer’s Body). As Texas Chain Saw‘s creepy hitchhiker might say, “A whole family of Draculas!”

It’s helmed by Alexandre O. Philippe, whose other films-on-film include Doc of the Dead, Psycho study 78:52, Memory: The Origins of Alien, and Lynch/Oz.

“I think of it as a role model,” Miike muses, noting he first watched Texas Chain Saw at 15 and realized what he wanted his future career path to be. With the IP’s rights holders making headlines recently—teasing all the big names in the running to make another version of Hooper’s tale—it seems we may see yet another version on screens eventually.

Still, as Chain Reactions will no doubt make crystal clear, there’s no duplicating the eerie, gritty quality that makes the original such a standout. Anyone can make a movie about a cannibal family running a roadside barbecue joint; anyone can don a human-skin mask, grab a chainsaw, and call themselves Leatherface. But it takes a rare film to infuse a story like that with such a documentary feel; it makes the audience think they’re peeping in on a nightmare that’s both awful and totally plausible. It’s also visceral as hell: you can practically smell the rotting interior of that iconic farmhouse and feel the drop of Grandpa’s shaky hammer come down on your own skull.

In other words, we’re more than excited to see this documentary—and then rewatch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre again. And again.

Chain Reactions opens in New York and Los Angeles September 19; according to Deadline, it will expand to more cities September 26.

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