Backrooms

 Went to see Backrooms yesterday with my son – who is an ardent fan of horror movies – and I began sceptical and came away impressed. Our first anti-AI allegory! It makes sense that AI is best attacked from the horror angle – it rather comes out of horror gothic, out of Frankenstein. The movie, I feared, would be boring, but the director, a twenty year old youtuber, Kane Parsons, is pretty expert at playing the dozens with the scary story/scary film genre. The jump scares are all, or almost all, built from implication, from noises and shadows.

I think I have detected, from the Descent and As Above, So Below to Barbarian a subgenre, aptly named on Reddit as Underground horror, in which the primal memory of going down the birth canal (okay, perhaps there is none back there in the cortex, but still) is twisted into the adventure of being chased through ever narrower corridors, from which one must escape the monster.

But to return to the Anti-AI motif – AI slop really is monstrous, so why not draw the obvious conclusion? We always turn to some gothic motif to make our liberal political points – to dystopia or allegory in Animal Farm and 1984 (and as a piece of art, incidentally, Backrooms is far superior to 1984) – and now it is the turn of the evil empires churning out AI. It is apt that a Youtuber feels the danger here – it is not a fake Luddite sense of all technology being bad, but a real sense that this technology is debasing the internet technology we have, in the same way cryptocurrency debases money by creating fake money.

So, I was wrong to irritate my son by making the Dad joke of calling it Bathrooms consistently when we were discussing going to see it. My bad.