Nathan exits the lift at the basement level of the Blumhouse office building after the door pings open. He turns left as instructed. The cold fluorescent light illuminates a corridor that is much shorter than it looks. Second door on the left. James said that his swipe card should let him in. He walks over to the innocuous-looking brown plywood door labeled only with a sticker that clearly came out of a household labelmaker. “IT equipment.” A sophisticated swipe card terminal betrays the possibility that beyond the door something much less workaday might be hidden than coils of cables, stacks of disused macbooks and partially cannibalized network switches. Most doors at the office just have a tiny touch terminal that pings when a swipe card is placed in its proximity. This one is different.
He takes his ID card out of his pocket wrapped in its lanyard and touches the terminal. The screen lights up in Hal Jordan green and a text in black font is produced on it. Enter the 2FA key.
Nathan produces his phone, opens his authenticator app and scrolls down to find the Blumhouse 2FA code generator before he types the required six digits. Enter. The screen turns into a camera feed pointed at his face, the image tracking his eyeline with a thin yellow line. The prompt at the bottom of the screen asks him to stop moving. The camera shuts off and the screen displays Thank you, Nathan Elston. Access granted. He can hear the click of the magnetic door lock releasing. He enters the room.
To his right he finds an industrial shelving unit, stacked to the gills with IT flotsam. On his left he sees a server stack, rows of NVIDIA graphics cards visible from the outside awash in purple neon light emanated by the neatly coiled tubes of cooling liquid coursing over their GPUs. Just as James told him, he finds the terminal screen hanging on a hinge above a tiny desk right next to the rack, keyboard and mouse sitting idly under it basking in a purple haze.
Nathan neglects to turn on the overhead light and proceeds to sit down in front of the terminal. He takes out his notebook to find a bunch of scribbles he jotted down at his last meeting with James. Use 2FA–check. Server on the left–check. Turn on screen, button under left corner. His fingers search for an indentation under the bottom edge of the screen as he reads his barely legible handwriting. Click. The screen lights up briefly in white and then turns black. A grey cursor flickers in the top right corner. He was told this thing doesn’t have a UI just yet but it works. He looks down at his notes. Type: username: nelston. The screen responds with password. He then carefully types the twenty-three characters he was given on a post-it note. Enter. Hello, How can I help you? appears on the screen.
Before setting out to do his business, Nathan checks his notes once more. Of course. The post-it note. Shred post-it note immediately after use. Shredder under desk. He looks down and finds a compact household shredder beside his right foot. He feeds the post-it note through the slit and watches the shredder devour it. On to work.
James explained to him during their short briefing that he can interact with WanGPT exactly like he would with Claude or Gemini. Type in natural text and converse. Do not upload anything through external media. It has access to everything. When he asked James how, all he got was a shrug. Don’t ask. Plausible deniability. And under no circumstances do you tell anyone that this thing exists. Slip just one word and Jason is going to go medieval on your ass. This is your ticket into the inner circle. Don’t fuck it up.
“I won’t,” he mutters to himself as he types up his first prompt. I need us to make a movie together. Can you help me with that? He observes the screen as text is being produced in real time. Naturally. What are we making?
I need you to access my G-drive to retrieve a book to serve as a basis of the film. Can you do that for me?
Sure. Give me the file name and I will locate it.
Incidents_around_the_house.pdf
The cursor flickers for thirty seconds before new text is generated. Done.
Perfect. Now I need you to generate a script based on this file. 100-125 pages. We already have Jessica Chastain signed up to lead as Mommy and Other Mommy. Jay Duplass is the dad. We don’t have the girl just yet but write her as though you were writing this for young Dakota Fanning. Write in the style of an elevated horror. Scene direction notes to incorporate elements of Insidious, Poltergeist and The Conjuring.
Nathan presses enter.
OK. I’ll do that. Before I do, however, I would like to ask a few follow-up questions to help me draft a better output. Is that OK? Nathan responds with Yes, please.
First question: What is the scare level?
He’s not sure how to tackle this. Not very. Not quite Hereditary but not PG-13 either. Some jumps here and there, but only occasional suspense.
Got it. Second question: tolerance for violence?
Not violent throughout. Three or four gory moments will be enough.
OK. Nudity?
None. But leave the marital drama in the script.
The source material implies the need for special effects. How will you want to handle scene notes? Practical? CG?
“Nope,” Nathan says to himself. “No money for either, baby.” He can’t type this in. No idea who monitors this device.
The idea is to use generative special effects. I’ll give you some freedom to innovate. I want the spatial effects to have a Charlie Kaufman vibe but the character special effects of Other Mommy to have a Guillermo Del Toro feel to them. Does it make sense?
It absolutely does. I have everything I need. Generating script.
Nathan observes the screen as the cursor flickers in and out of existence for what feels like forever. At some point he starts counting flickers. He counts 339 of them before new text appears.
Done. Other_Mommy.md has been deposited on your g-drive. Is there anything I can help you with?
That’s everything Nathan is supposed to do here, but he feels this might be an opportunity for him to show some initiative. He begins typing.
Actually, it depends. What else can you do? Can you access other models?
The screen responds in a split second. Yes. I can access WanIMG and WanVID as well as the entire BH library. I can also access the internal actor database. In fact, I have Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass on file.
Nathan thinks for a second and reaches for his bag to retrieve his macbook, quickly powers it up and looks through his AppleNotes to find what he needs: “dream cast for new movie.” He proceeds to copy his entire list into the terminal, which responds with Sorry, neither of these names are in my database. Would you like me to match character descriptions from the source material with names we currently have access to?
Yes please. Before we do it: What else would I need to do in order for us to make the entire movie together?
Text appears. Nothing. I can take it from here. I will break the script into scenes, pattern-match characters to actors while preserving agreed choices of Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass as the leads, storyboard in WanIMG and then generate scenes in WanVID.
How long will this take?
For a script this length (93 pages) the entire process will take between 3 and 12 hours. Good news is that you don’t have to be here for it, or remain logged in. I will proceed to work in the background and deposit the complete movie on your g-drive. I will send you a Slack message after I’m done.
He smiles. This is perfect, he thinks and then types, followed by Proceed, please.
Roger that. Feel free to log out.
Nathan types logout: nelston and the screen turns completely black. He makes sure he’s got all his belongings with him as he gets up and leaves the room thinking he’s about to make James proud.
But did he make James proud after all? I have a reasonable idea to this end even though none of what you just read ever happened. There is no WanGPT as far as I can tell–even if a conspiratorially-minded person could assume that one exists based on the observably declining quality in mainstream horror filmmaking–and Nathan Elston probably didn’t spend an afternoon in the Blumhouse server room interacting with a clandestine LLM. But the movie he wrote and James (Wan) produced under direction of Rob Savage (The Boogeyman) sure does look as though its origin was vaguely similar.
To use “it looks as though AI had made it” as a proxy for describing poor quality of screenwriting or haphazard craftsmanship is already a worn joke. I should know, I’ve resorted to using it myself on a good handful of occasions. But this time it’s different because Other Mommy looks eerily as though it was written for the screen, storyboarded and at least partially generated using artificial intelligence tools. I can’t describe this any better than a hunch: a feeling of uncanny terror that belongs more in the realm of dreams and nightmares rather than reality as we perceive it. It’s the feeling of suspecting that what you’re looking at is fake despite looking lifelike. Like watching an interview with a serial killer who looks and talks like a real person but hides something evil, sinister and hollow behind their manipulative shark-like gaze. It’s all a facade, a front built to withstand only a cursory examination that reveals its fakery upon close contact.
Other Mommy starts much like you’d expect a modern elevated horror nested in a familial setting would. We observe a nuclear family ensconced in their evening rituals: a busy mom (Jessica Chastain) with her power-career barely making time for her young daughter (Arabella Olivia Clark), a stay-at-home dad (Jay Duplass) with his nurturing disposition a glue that keeps the family unit serene and united; a parental tag-team reality of raising a family without a village. But predictably something’s afoot. Little Bella occasionally refers to what her parents understand to be an imaginary friend she talks to when she’s alone before bedtime. We even see Bella get out of her bed and repeatedly open and shut her en-suite bathroom door, as though she was hoping her imaginary friend would materialize into existence, a child’s way of saying “Candyman” five times in front of a mirror.
The next morning, we sit there like a fly on the wall as daddy makes Bella some scrambled eggs and mommy busies her way out the door all glammed up and ready to rock. Bella is practicing for a show-and-tell where she’s supposed to tell her new class about herself. This is where the story plants a few seeds of foreshadowing in a rather unsubtle manner that suggest that not everything is hunky-dory in this household, or that at least things used to be rough, but we don’t know exactly why. Mommy leaves, daddy gets on with tasks (though we see him take a nap) and Bella runs around the house and plays.
But then mommy comes back, a bit stiff and performative, and asks if Bella would like some eggs. She just had eggs so mommy insists on cooking pasta and then starts talking to Bella about wanting to be in her heart, puts on a grin and sheds a tear, looking decidedly like someone who just accidentally hurt themselves and didn’t want to make a scene or let everyone know they are in pain. This is when Bella notices that mommy is levitating and her face is drooping. The pasta on the stove begins to burn and events escalate. Daddy shows up, notices smoke billowing out of the kitchen, rushes in to rescue Bella and a jump scare proceeds as the camera pans to a mommy-like figure contorted below a benchtop like a black widow spider casually waiting for a suitor to walk into her web. Camera shakes, glass breaks, the score spikes in screechy crescendos and we cut to the safety of a flickering blue-red haze of police vehicles in the aftermath of the event.
And you sit there and instinctively know that it’s all a bit too familiar. Not in the way that a simply unoriginal piece of filmmaking feels. In a way a dream about a bunch of movies you saw might feel in the moment. Uncanny and predictable, tied together with a yarn of barely perceptible déjà vu. What unfolds before your eyes is a story that you instinctively know how it would resolve and which steps it would take next, as though it was not following a plot and story structure concocted deliberately in the mind of a screenwriter prodded interchangeably by demands of the source material and their own proclivities and interests while second-guessing some of those decisions immediately by asking what viewers would like. No. Other Mommy plays out smoothly as though it probabilistically coalesced into existence frame by frame into a movie most likely to emerge based on the set of its guiding parameters and prompting instructions. It unfolds just like an answer generated by ChatGPT in response to your question: relentlessly, effortlessly, confidently, predictably.
And just like that generative answer, which collapses into existence with the speed of lightning passing through NVIDIA GPUs and occasionally drifts into hallucination, Other Mommy behaves like that as well. It’s a confidently generated sequence of images that occasionally betrays its probabilistic provenance when it defaults not so much to convenience but to almost exactly what a fake movie pre-trained on classics of horror would do. It rushes to obvious turns when you’d expect it to, like introducing marital tension, delivering exposition using deftly engineered clichés, or mapping themes onto the narrative in ways you’d definitely feel you’ve seen before. A team of professional ghostbusters materialize into existence; not as though it was inspired by Poltergeist or Insidious but rather as if these two movies were in the training set. The design of the Other Mommy character, oftentimes contorted into a Slenderman-like silhouette and occasionally suffering from what looks like diffusion-derived polydactyly, hulks menacingly slightly out of focus, unbound by laws of gravity as though it was never intended to be fully composited into the frame with actors in it, but mapped over top of it like a mirage. Consequently, all sequences of action and suspense, all supposedly intended to flip between reality and Bella’s dreamscapes, feel uncanny and upsetting in the way an AI-generated video of Will Smith eating pasta feels like. Confident and wrong. Like a Replicant gaslighting Deckard during the Voight-Kampff test. An abomination trying to disappear into the crowd.
Suffice it to say, that Other Mommy is borderline unwatchable and unsettling in the way it peddles its unoriginality with the bravado and bluster of a snake oil salesman on Adderall. At this point, it’s no longer enough to label this ungodly creation as “so braindead that AI could have done a better job.” Reality might be much more frightening than that. At the time when the use of AI tools becomes entrenched across industries, it’s not the true AI-generated movies that are the real threat but movies made by real people using established tools and processes that end up looking as though they were hallucinated because the baseline of what acceptable entertainment looks like has slipped under barrage of slop content carpet-bombing our sense of taste.
Or maybe I have it all backwards and Other Mommy is in secret a treatise on the arrival of AI to haunt our existence with its confident defiance of basic natural laws and middle-of-the-road probabilistic storytelling. Perhaps the character of Other Mommy, with its drooping face and extra fingers that Bella comments on, is a personification of the Replicant art attempting to replace what’s real with its demonic ersatz and the entire experience is engineered to feel uncanny and weird to make a point? Maybe. But to get on board with this elaborate thematic conspiracy I would have to lend the filmmakers a considerable length of rope, at which point I might as well prime myself to start believing that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that space is fake, too.
Today I choose to view this experience with the eye of a skeptic. If you hear the sound of hooves you think of horses, not zebras. And the most logical explanation is that Other Mommy is just a terrible, unwatchable mess that doesn’t have an original bone in its body and even its unoriginality is somehow unoriginal. But if anyone were to reappraise this steaming turd as a misunderstood Cassandra that spoke to the imminent threat of AI takeover of the entertainment industry–all while performing a full one-eighty degree turn and slapping five stars next to the title–it would be me. But this might be a conversation for a different day.
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