Happy Halloweekend! On a recent episode of The Daily, they talked about one of the most terrifying costumes imaginable. Someone walked around a Halloween party taking pieces of other people’s costumes to use them as part of their own and drank a tremendous amount of water. I’ll give you a second to ponder… they were A.I.
We live in a horror movie of a planet right now. Who needs to fear fictional monsters when you can just open Twitter and be horrified within one scroll. However, more than anything, the rise of Artificial Intelligence has turned our modern world into a Saw trap of deepfakes, misinformation, and ridiculous A.I.-generated videos your aunt is genuinely sharing on Facebook. Like no Auntie May, this man did not jump into a volcano.
Technophobia isn’t anything new. We’ve been making techno horrors and thrillers about A.I., surveillance, and uncontrollable technological advancement for the better part of a century. Here are some of the recent best to spook you.
Streaming on HBO Max
“Kimi”
A thriller for the pandemic age. Angela (Zoë Kravitz) works as a quality assurance engineer for Kimi, an Alexa or Siri analogue, analyzing the recordings of failed requests and correcting the devices mistakes. However, one recording doesn’t sit right with her. Something sounds off. Sinister even. The discovery leaves her spiraling into a web of corporate intrigue, crime, and her biggest fear, the outside.
Director Steven Soderbergh captures the claustrophobic anxiety of living through the pandemic while slowly ratcheting up the tension as the saftey of Angela’s apartment is infiltrated by the technology she is meant to be helping improve. Kimi has shades of classic Hitchcock and mixed with an all-too-familiar modern backdrop. It creates a sensation of vertigo that will bring you back and make you anxious for what’s to come. 89 mins.
Read my full review.
Streaming on Hulu
“Strange Days”
Before director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Picture and Director at the Oscars for The Hurt Lockers, she was known as a genre filmmaker. However, amongst her largely underrated filmography is her sci-fi masterpiece Strange Days that I had the honor of seeing for the first time as part of an Angela Bassett retrospective at BAM. The movie takes place in an alternate present (at the time, 1999) Los Angeles where the police force has become militarized to battle a rise in crime. However, the efforts have largely targeted Black communities. Maybe not so “alternate” afterall.
Former LAPD cop Lance Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has spent his washed up days selling selling illegal virtual reality recordings that puts the user in the body of whoever made the recording. Sensations and all (you could imagine what they use it for). Things get complicated when Nero comes into possession of a recording that may just bring the entire city’s government to its knees. Teaming up with his limo driver and bodyguard friend Mace (Bassett), he attempts to bring justice.
Detailed world building, that feels not far off from our own world, a classic crime noir plot, and engrossing performances by a young Bassett and Fiennes, Strange Days feels like a lost classic. The kind of movie you watched on cable on repeat when you were a kid. At least we have it now. 145 mins.
Streaming on Shudder (Free Trial)
“Host”
Of course, I needed to include at least one real horror movie on this list. Similar to Kimi, the pandemic-era movie Host preys on our anxiety and dread around lockdown, particularly the eeriness of the isolation. However, this time instead of an earthly explanation, Host has a supernatural one. Released on July 20, 2020, it is one of the first movie directly about the pandemic, and one of the best.
A group of friends gathers on Zoom for their weekly virtual hangout. This time, however, they decide to hold a seance… because things weren’t already spooky enough. As the night progresses, unexplained incidents shake the fabric of what is real and what is hoax. That is, until the gravity of their situation becomes very clear when an unwanted… ahem, guest… joins the chat. A taut, thrilling and then terrifying horror that stalks the lonliness of a virtual world, it is the perfect Halloween fright. 54 mins.
Read my full review.
Streaming on Hulu
“Ex Machina”
Director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is so prescient about the current state of artificial intelligence that it’s a wonder it was made in 2014. Tech worker Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a trip to spend a week with his company’s elusive CEO in his isolated forest home. What he doesn’t realize, until signing a hefty non-disclosure agreement, is that he was invited by Nathan (Oscar Isaac) to spend time with Ava (Alicia Vickander), a humanoid robot that he invented, to see if she possesses true consciousness.
The sleek and calming mood of the movie, a sense of true technological marvel (it helps that the Oscar-winning visual effects to turn Vickander into Ava are so realistic), gives way to a tense atmosphere of doubt as Caleb begins to question what is real, what is fake, who is on his side and who is lying to him. Ava speaks like any number of LLMs we’ve come to know today—ChatGPT, Claude, Grok—where there’s a sense of real knowing laced with a dark subservience. But is that subservience to Caleb’s benefit or doom?
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