Terrorgram’s materials, which include viable bomb-making instructions, camouflage and tactical guides, and instructions on how to disable critical infrastructure like electrical substations, water treatment plants and dams, have radicalized at least one so-called “saint,” or mass shooter, and are alleged to have been connected to a series of power grid attacks in North Carolina as well as several active federal prosecutions.
“William Pierce doesn’t build bombs,” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Rolling Stone a quarter of a century ago. “He builds bombers.” In many ways, the Terrorgram Collective fulfills the same role now, and its publications have become the modern-day version of the Turner Diaries. Disseminated worldwide through the moderation-free wilderness of Telegram, the group’s message of hate and violence is now circulating independently of any organized group or ideology for disaffected, unbalanced “lone wolves” to latch onto as justification for future atrocities.
While The Order remains firmly rooted in the past save for one passing reference to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in a title card, during production there was no escaping the drumbeat of resurgent far-right militancy in the United States. Kurzel, the director, recalls watching news coverage of the January 6 insurrection and remarking on the gallows erected outside the Capitol building—a drawing of which features in the book and the exposition scene with law. “The Turner Diaries started to become more visible in a present-day setting in a way I was kind of shocked by,” he says, speaking to WIRED from his Tasmania residence. Indeed, following January 6, Amazon removed The Turner Diaries from its online inventory.
Hoult’s bravura portrayal of an ice-cool, controlled yet menacing Mathews through the Order’s campaign of armed robbery, counterfeiting, murder, and armed confrontation with the FBI is one of the film’s dual anchors. Aside from a striking physical resemblance to the Silent Brotherhood’s founder, Hoult closely studied his subject, aping Mathews’ mannerisms and movements from old documentary footage, studying texts that radicalized his subject, lifting weights, and cutting alcohol from his diet.
“Mathews was someone who thought and planned so in advance of what his ultimate goal was, I think he always kept in sight. That’s something Justin and I spoke about, that he wouldn’t lose his head on trivial things or things that would potentially harm his cause. In his mind, he’d already, in some ways, planned his destiny,” Hoult tells WIRED.
Zack Snyder doesn’t seem to be all that worried about AI disrupting the filmmaking world, bringing scores of novices to the fold. At WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the director told managing editor Hemal Jhaveri that “every single person has a pretty good movie camera on their phone and yet we don’t have—right this second, anyway—millions of awesome movies being uploaded out of peoples’ pockets.”
That doesn’t mean he thinks Hollywood creatives can avoid AI altogether. “Educating yourself and understanding what it can and can’t do is important right now, especially where it exists in image-making and storytelling,” Snyder said. “You have to understand what it is and what it’s not capable of, and you have to be able to use it as a tool as opposed to standing on the sidelines with your hands on your hips.”
While Snyder says he still sometimes questions the “why” of AI filmmaking, asking what the point of using the technology would be if you just want to shoot footage of someone sitting in a chair in a living room, for instance, he also acknowledges the technology’s potential to make some shots more accessible. “AI doesn’t care if a house is on fire or if it’s on Mars or whether it’s underwater,” he told Jhaveri. “All the things that might cost a filmmaker a lot of money to shoot are, to the AI, no different.”
Snyder says he’s especially intrigued by the idea of an AI that could understand a movie or filmmaker’s aesthetic core, like if he was able to shoot an actor’s performance and then sync it up with a production designer-created world of sets in some sort of “aesthetic bank.” If an AI could understand what he truly wants—the “motes of dust,” a backlight, overall set design—rather than just convey its interpretation of what it thinks he’s asking, then, he thinks, “the concept is pretty awesome.”
As a director who’s made a number of movies, superhero and otherwise, with a massive range of VFX, Snyder says he’s no stranger to “a very virtual world when it comes to filmmaking.” Still, he says, he’s always seen artistic performance at the front of what we eventually see on screen. Everything that’s not an actor is just “context,” he says.
“My favorite movies are the ones where I can feel the director’s hand. I want that human point of view to be moving me in a narrative way through a story in a way I wouldn’t have thought of or couldn’t imagine what would happen next,” Snyder says. “As audiences, that’s what we pay for and that’s what we hunger for. How we get to that very human thing, though … well, that could change.”
How audiences see movies could also change, Snyder says, acknowledging that streamers like Netflix have become an absolute juggernaut in the cinematic world. Movies and shows he’s made for the platform have been seen by millions more eyes than might have seen them in the theater, he asserts, and even films classified as “blockbusters” have and will undoubtedly draw a bigger audience if they’re on a bigger streaming service than they would at the box office.
As a director, Snyder says, as long as he’s aware that he’s making something that’s exclusively for streaming, then he’s up for the challenge. “It feels rude to say that I’m not an artist if my movie isn’t in the theater,” he told Jhaveri. “If you’re the streamer, you’re paying for the movie, and if you say, ‘This is our format and 250 million people are going to look at it on their phones, probably’ at the very beginning of our conversation, then I have to know that’s the reality. And if that’s the case, then I should be fine with everything that happens afterwards.”
A lot has changed in the past few years when it comes to holiday traditions. Yet one thing hasn’t: gathering around the TV to watch new and classic movies with family and friends. The problem, if it can be called a problem, is that with each new streaming service comes a shift in which streamers offer what films. We’re here to help—and give you a quick and handy guide to a few holiday gems you may never have seen before. Below are 15 titles sure to get even the grinchiest of revelers into the holiday spirit.
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Hot Frosty
Yes, Hallmark Channel is the premiere destination for holiday rom-coms about people who in quaint towns who find love and drink from giant mugs at the holidays. Still, one should never discount Netflix’s ability to eke out a new niche in a market already saturated with cozy movies starring Lacey Chabert. That niche? A little something we like to call Too Horny for Hallmark. In Hot Frosty, Chabert plays a widow and diner owner who throws her scarf around a, uh, very well-sculpted snowman (Dustin Milligan), bringing him to life. Naturally, he falls in love with her and the film becomes a race to see whether she can return his affections before he melts (?) or gets apprehended by the local sheriff (Craig Robinson), who believes he’s responsible for some very small crimes around town. Think of it as a new way to Netflix and chill.
Carol
It’s hard to argue Todd Haynes’ heartbreaking 2015 film is strictly a Christmas movie—it’s about a young woman named Therese (Rooney Mara) who begins an intense relationship with Carol (Cate Blanchett), an elegant woman who shops at the store where she works—but it is set during one Christmas in the 1950s, and that’s good enough. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, the film lays out what happens to Therese and Carol when they embark on a road trip and draw suspicion from the man Carol is attempting to divorce. Both lush and subdued, it’s wrenching right up to its gut-punch finale.
Home for the Holidays
If you’re feeling guilty that you won’t make it to your parents’ for Thanksgiving this year, this ode to dysfunctional family gatherings—directed by Jodie Foster—might serve as an all-too-realistic reminder of what it’s really like when your relatives reassemble under one roof. Holly Hunter plays a recently unemployed single mom who heads from Chicago to Baltimore to spend Thanksgiving with her family—only to immediately regret the decision. (Yes, we’ve all been there.) Hunter’s character might summarize the feeling best when she asks, “When you go home, do you look around and wonder: Who are these people? Where did I even come from?” A very pre–Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. costars.
Happiest Season
Given the increased output of original products that the major streaming networks like Netflix and Amazon Prime are releasing, it was only a matter of time before they all caught the Christmas bug. Last year, that honor went to Hulu, which assembled an impressive cast of actors you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in a holiday rom-com (see: Kristen Stewart) for Happiest Season. When Harper (Halt and Catch Fire’s Mackenzie Davis) invites her girlfriend Abby (Stewart) home for Christmas, she neglects to tell her one thing: Harper has never told her ultra-conservative family that she’s gay. Though it’s a setup that sounds like it could easily reach Three’s Company levels of slapstick and double entendres, the earnestness with which it’s played by its stellar cast—which includes Dan Levy, Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, and Mary Steenburgen—pushes it neatly into that enjoyable space between farce and family drama.
The Best Man Holiday
Broadly speaking, the holidays are just the backdrop for Best Man Holiday, but when a movie features Taye Diggs, Terrence Howard, Harold Perrineau, and Morris Chestnut doing a New Edition dance and lip-sync number, does it matter? Nearly 15 years after they all gathered for Lance’s (Chestnut) wedding (and nearly 15 years after the release of The Best Man), a group of old friends gathers in New York to celebrate Christmas together. As with all friend reunions, everyone simultaneously remembers their closeness and long-simmering issues. No need to spoil it here, but suffice it to say the laughs are heartfelt and the drama—cancer diagnoses, pregnancies, marriages—is high. The perfect film for your Friendsgiving.
Miracle on 34th Street
Natalie Wood is the epitome of precocious as Susan Walker, the wise-beyond-her-years daughter of Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara), a straight-shooting single mom executive at Macy’s who has always discouraged her daughter from buying into make-believe. But when a Santa Claus look-alike (legally) named Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) comes into their lives, he challenges their shared distaste for fairy tales—for the better.
The Preacher’s Wife
This remake of the 1947 film The Bishop’s Wife, directed by Penny Marshall, stars Denzel Washington as an angel named Dudley sent to help a pastor (Courtney B. Vance) who is struggling to keep his New York City church afloat. What happens, though, is that he ends up crushing on, yes, the preacher’s wife, a one-time nightclub singer turned choir star, played by Whitney Houston. Comedy and heartbreak and, ultimately, redemption ensue. If all that heartwarming content isn’t enough, it also features a fair bit of Houston’s forever impeccable voice.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
No, Tim Burton didn’t direct The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick did). But he did come up with the stories and characters and produced it, and his stop-motion-animation-loving fingerprints are all over this masterpiece, which works just as well as a Halloween movie as it does a Christmas film. When Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, accidentally discovers Christmastown—a place that’s less about scaring people and more about comfort and joy—he concocts a plan to kidnap Santa Claus and bring him back to Halloweentown so that his fellow townspeople can experience yuletide joy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the caper doesn’t pan out as Jack had hoped. Even today, nearly 30 years after its original release, The Nightmare Before Christmas remains a masterful work that shows the true magic of stop-motion animation.
Home Alone
By now, there are few people who don’t know the Home Alone story, but we’ll give you the rundown anyway: The night before the McCallister family is headed to France to spend the holidays in Paris, Kevin—annoyed that he has to share a room with his bed-wetting cousin, not to mention that someone ate his pizza—wishes his family would just disappear. While that’s not exactly what happens (they just sort of forget he’s sleeping up in the attic when they wake up late for their flight), it does mean that an 8-year-old is left to his own devices at Christmastime. Among the issues he’s forced to confront? A neighbor he believes might be a serial killer and two bumbling burglars who are set on ransacking his family’s home. Lucky for Kevin, he’s got a seriously sadistic side that allows him to come up with all sorts of inventive ways to nearly murder these intruders as he learns to appreciate his family a little bit more. (Same goes for them.)
If you want to see what happens when a family leaves their young son alone a second time, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is also streaming on Disney+.
White Christmas
If contemporary stresses have you wishing for a kinder, gentler time, few movies (holiday-themed or otherwise) are as saccharine as White Christmas. That’s not a slight, just a very upfront warning that if you’re looking for even a drop of cynicism, you’d better look elsewhere. This holiday romp—which features Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, and some of the fakest snow ever seen on camera—is shamelessly sentimental, which is part of its charm. What is it about? Two WWII buddies turned big-time showmen putting on a Christmas spectacular to help their former commanding officer, whose Vermont snow lodge is about to go under.
The Man Who Invented Christmas
In 2012, Dan Stevens ruined Christmas for millions of Downton Abbey fans when his beloved character, Matthew Crawley, met an untimely—and rather bloody—ending. Five years later, in what might have been an attempt to make up for that heartbreak, he became The Man Who Invented Christmas. In this meta-ish take on A Christmas Carol, Stevens plays Charles Dickens, who hasn’t had a hit book since Oliver Twist. With the Christmas season playing out all around him, inspiration strikes in the form of what will become A Christmas Carol, as the characters reveal themselves to Dickens, and real life and the fictional world merge into one.
The Muppet Christmas Carol
Speaking of A Christmas Carol: There have been dozens of adaptations of Dickens’ book over the years in virtually every medium. Among the best takes are the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim (which you can rent from Amazon Prime), Richard Donner’s Scrooged with Bill Murray (which you can also rent on Prime), and The Muppet Christmas Carol, directed by Jim Henson’s son Brian (in his directorial debut). While it’s as Muppet-y as you can imagine, with Gonzo taking on the role of Charles Dickens and Kermit as Bob Cratchit, the film also stars Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge and features some pretty complicated puppetry.
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
If you grew up with HBO in the ’80s, you no doubt have long considered Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas one of Jim Henson’s best movies. For anyone else, it’s only in recent years that the film has made its way back to the masses with sold-out theatrical screenings nationwide and a new Blu-ray edition in 2018. If you still haven’t seen it, or have never even heard of it, it’s time to rectify that horrible wrong. A Muppet-fied take on The Gift of the Magi, the story is about the widowed Ma Otter and her son Emmet, who are struggling to pay their bills but do what they can by picking up odd jobs. When they hear about a talent competition happening in a nearby town with a grand prize of $50, they each—unbeknownst to each other—make a major sacrifice in the hopes of being able to win and give each other a much-wanted gift for Christmas. Then the Riverbottom Nightmare Band shows up. Emmet Otter may be more than 40 years old, and sure, you can see the puppets’ strings, but that’s just part of its charm. And the soundtrack still slaps.
It’s a Wonderful Life
Frank Capra was a filmmaker who loved a Hollywood ending—and he delivered a big one in It’s a Wonderful Life. While the film’s final moments may be kind of sappy (even if they do make you tear up), the bulk of the movie’s running time is actually pretty dark. George Bailey (James Stewart) is a beloved member of the Bedford Falls community with a lovely home, an adoring wife (Donna Reed), and four beautiful children. But George is sick and tired of being “the dependable one” in his family. For years his own dream has been to see the world beyond his hometown, but each time he tries, a new tragedy seems to strike that keeps him there. But Christmas Eve proves to be the breaking point, and George, drunk and suicidal, wishes he had never been born. Sort of like A Christmas Carol, an angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) shows George what his life—and the lives of those he loves—would be like had he never existed. Cue the waterworks.
Elf
While a fresh crop of holiday movies seems to pop up every year, it takes a special kind of movie to become a true Christmas classic. Elf began spreading its Christmas cheer almost immediately after arriving in theaters, and it has only grown more popular in the nearly two decades since. Jon Favreau’s direction and David Berenbaum’s script deserve much of the credit. But it’s Will Ferrell who steals the show with his endearing performance as Buddy the Elf—a syrup-loving human who, after being raised in the North Pole among Santa and his elves, travels to New York to find his biological father (James Caan). Though Buddy and the Big Apple don’t get off on the right foot, his childlike charm eventually gets the best of those around. Well, most of them. Though audiences have been clamoring for a sequel, Ferrell has said no way.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Not everyone wants their holiday fare sugar-coated and sweet. For those people, there’s Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Something strange is happening in the mountains of northern Finland, where kids are disappearing and reindeer are being murdered. Two young boys—Pietari (Onni Tommila) and Juuso (Ilmari Järvenpää)—think they know what’s going on: A group of local drillers has uncovered the tomb of Santa Claus. But the man they eventually capture hasn’t got a jolly bone in his body.
If you want more holiday horror, be sure to check out Bob Clark’s Black Christmas—the original, 1974 version only. Though it’s less well known than John Carpenter’s Halloween, it’s the movie that inspired it—and pretty much all slasher movies that followed. It also doesn’t hold back on its scares or gore, so it’s best for an adults-only evening. Fun fact: Nine years after Black Christmas, director Bob Clark made yet another holiday classic with 1983’s A Christmas Story. Talk about range!
Another option is to find the surround sound setting for your TV or streaming device and make sure it’s correctly configured for the number of speakers you have. If your hardware is set up for a 5.1 surround sound system but you’re only using two speakers in a stereo configuration, for example, some dialog might be lost.
If there’s nothing on your streaming device, check your soundbar, if you’ve got one. These soundbars very often come with features for boosting the volume level of speech. With any Sonos soundbar, for instance, you can turn on Speech Enhancement inside the Sonos app for Android or iOS: Get to the Now Playing screen for your soundbar, then tap the Speech Enhancement icon (it looks like a small figure speaking).
Listen Through Headphones
Another option you’ve got here is listening through headphones, which means you can turn up the volume as much as you like without annoying the people you live with (or the people who live next door). We’ve previously written in more detail about connecting wireless headphones to your TV, but in short you simply need to find the right setting on your television and then put your Bluetooth headphones in pairing mode.
Let’s take Roku TVs, streaming sticks, and streaming boxes as an example. One option is to install the Roku app on Android or iOS, then connect a pair of wired or wireless headphones to your smartphone, and listen to the audio through your phone while the movie or show plays on the big screen.
Most Roku devices and TVs support wireless headphone connections.
Courtesy of Roku
Another option is to connect a pair of Bluetooth headphones wirelessly to your Roku TV or device. (Not every Roku device can do this, but a lot of them can.) From the main Roku menu on the home screen, choose Remotes & devices > Wireless headphones > Add new wireless headphones and follow the instructions on screen.
This is one advantage of watching movies and shows through streaming apps running on a game console (like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X): They’re set up with wireless headset support in mind, so you’ll find plenty of headphones on the market that can connect to your console in seconds, and then stream the audio from your movies and shows straight to your ears.
On Friday, TriStar Pictures released Here, a $50 million Robert Zemeckis-directed film that used real-time generative AI face transformation techniques to portray actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright across a 60-year span, marking one of Hollywood’s first full-length features built around AI-powered visual effects.
The film adapts a 2014 graphic novel set primarily in a New Jersey living room across multiple time periods. Rather than cast different actors for various ages, the production used AI to modify Hanks’ and Wright’s appearances throughout.
The de-aging technology comes from Metaphysic, a visual effects company that creates real time face swapping and aging effects. During filming, the crew watched two monitors simultaneously: one showing the actors’ actual appearances and another displaying them at whatever age the scene required.
Metaphysic developed the facial modification system by training custom machine-learning models on frames of Hanks’ and Wright’s previous films. This included a large dataset of facial movements, skin textures, and appearances under varied lighting conditions and camera angles. The resulting models can generate instant face transformations without the months of manual post-production work traditional CGI requires.
Unlike previous aging effects that relied on frame-by-frame manipulation, Metaphysic’s approach generates transformations instantly by analyzing facial landmarks and mapping them to trained age variations.
“You couldn’t have made this movie three years ago,” Zemeckis told The New York Times in a detailed feature about the film. Traditional visual effects for this level of face modification would reportedly require hundreds of artists and a substantially larger budget closer to standard Marvel movie costs.
This isn’t the first film that has used AI techniques to de-age actors. ILM’s approach to de-aging Harrison Ford in 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny used a proprietary system called Flux with infrared cameras to capture facial data during filming, then old images of Ford to de-age him in post-production. By contrast, Metaphysic’s AI models process transformations without additional hardware and show results during filming.
Rumbles in the Unions
The film Here arrives as major studios explore AI applications beyond just visual effects. Companies like Runway have been developing text-to-video generation tools, while others create AI systems like Callaia for script analysis and pre-production planning. However, recent guild contracts place strict limits on AI’s use in creative processes like scriptwriting.
Meanwhile, as we saw with the SAG-AFTRA union strike last year, Hollywood studios and unions continue to hotly debate AI’s role in filmmaking. While the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild secured some AI limitations in recent contracts, many industry veterans see the technology as inevitable. “Everyone’s nervous,” Susan Sprung, CEO of the Producers Guild of America, told The New York Times. “And yet no one’s quite sure what to be nervous about.”
Even so, The New York Times says that Metaphysic’s technology has already found use in two other 2024 releases. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga employed it to re-create deceased actor Richard Carter’s character, while Alien: Romulus brought back Ian Holm’s android character from the 1979 original. Both implementations required estate approval under new California legislation governing AI recreations of performers, often called deepfakes.
Not everyone is pleased with how AI technology is unfolding in film. Robert Downey Jr. recently said in an interview that he would instruct his estate to sue anyone attempting to digitally bring him back from the dead for another film appearance. But even with controversies, Hollywood still seems to find a way to make death-defying (and age-defying) visual feats take place on screen—especially if there is enough money involved.
In just a few short weeks, it’ll be nothing but Hallmark movies and Lindsay Lohan rom-coms, but right now it’s spooky season and if you’re looking to relax with a chainsaw-wielding serial killer, a telekinetic teen hellbent on revenge, or a homicidal merman, we’ve got you covered.
Just in time for Halloween, we’ve pulled together a list of dozens of the best horror movies you can stream right now, from tried-and-true classics that never get old to more recent scare-fests that you might not know exist. The only decision you have to make is which one to watch first, and whether you actually want to share that bag of fun-sized candy.
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Suspiria
If you’re not familiar with the work of Dario Argento, prepare for your eyes to be dazzled and your brain to melt. Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is an American ballet student who hops a plane to Germany after being invited to study at the prestigious Tanz Akademie. From the moment she arrives, however, Suzy suspects that all is not what it seems. Especially when her fellow students start disappearing. Turns out Suzy was right to be suspicious, as the school is more of a front for a coven of powerful witches. While much of the script is admittedly nonsensical, it doesn’t even matter. With its breathtaking production design, innovative camerawork, and earworm of a theme song by Goblin, Suspiria is the kind of film that will never leave your head. (If you find yourself wanting more, Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 reimagining of the film, starring Dakota Johnson, will scratch that itch.)
The Babadook
Ten years ago, Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent turned the horror genre on its head with this gem of a “creepy kid” film. Amelia Vanek (Essie Davis) is a young widow and mother to six-year-old Sam (Noah Wiseman), who is acting out in increasingly violent ways. Sam blames his behavior on The Babadook, a monster he claims lives in his pop-up book. Slowly, as weird things continue to happen around the house, Amelia starts to believe that her son might be telling the truth. Now if only she could get someone else to believe her. In the hands of a less talented filmmaker, The Babadook could have been a one-note story. But Kent, Davis, and Wiseman manage to turn it into a compelling and moving psychological thriller, where the real villain turns out to be grief.
Barbarian
Between Uber and Airbnb, the collaborative consumption era has led us to regularly put our trust—and lives—in the hands of complete strangers. Zach Cregger’s Barbarian may convince you that such transactions require much more thought. Tess (Georgina Campbell) rents an Airbnb, only to discover that it’s been double-booked and there’s already a guest staying there. Fortunately for Tess, Keith (Bill Skarsgård)—the current occupant—seems like a kind enough guy who is happy to go out of his way to help accommodate her. Which should have been her first indication that something was amiss.
Late Night with the Devil
Siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes co-wrote, directed, and edited this new(ish) found footage flick, where a late-night talk show host named Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) decides to boost his ratings by hosting an occult-themed episode for his Halloween night broadcast. Among the invited guests are a psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon), and a teenage girl (Ingrid Torelli) who is purportedly possessed by a demon. When Jack accidentally unleashes the demon on his audience, he realizes that there’s nothing “purported” about it.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Leatherface may have just turned 50, but he’s still got the upper body strength to swing around his beloved chainsaw just as he did in the 1970s. There are now nine films in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, but not one of them can hold a candle—or a chainsaw—to the original. A group of teens take a road trip through Texas, in part so that siblings Sally (Marilyn Burns) and Franklin (Paul A. Partain) can visit the cemetery where their grandfather was laid to rest after reports of graverobbing in the area. Then, wouldn’t you know it, they run out of gas on their way home … then find themselves contending with a family of cannibals. Hey, it happens. The movie, which is partly based on the life of grave robber Ed Gein, remains as potent today as it did when it was originally released.
Halloween
Is it really Halloween without Halloween? While you have plenty of sequels, reimaginings, and reimagined sequels to choose from today, there’s a reason why horror fiends still make a point to watch the original—and utterly perfect—1978 original today. John Carpenter’s tale of a babysitter (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends being stalked by an escaped killer set the bar for every slasher film that has ever followed, and very few have managed to even come close to it. If you want to keep the Michael Myers theme going, there are now 13 films in the franchise—including Rob Zombie’s gritty reboot and its sequel (which are both streaming on Peacock) and David Gordon Green’s recent book-end trilogy, which kicked off with 2018’s Halloween (which you’ll find on Netflix).
The Exorcist
Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) may be the precocious 12-year-old daughter of a well-respected Hollywood actress (Ellen Burstyn), but that means nothing to Pazuzu, the hell demon who comes to inhabit this could-be nepo baby’s tween body. You’ll never want to eat pea soup again. After tinkering with Halloween, David Gordon Green took a stab at resurrecting The Exorcist with last year’s The Exorcist: Believer, which didn’t fare as well (it’s a “skip” for us, but is streaming on Amazon Prime Video if you want to give it a watch).
Hereditary
Ari Aster achieved instant icon status with Hereditary, his feature directorial debut, which makes a compelling argument against rolling down the windows on your car—ever. An artist (Toni Collette) and her shrink husband (Gabriel Byrne) seem to be living the American Dream with their two teenagers, Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Until a series of tragedies turn the family’s life upside down and all hell breaks loose—seemingly literally.
Carrie
“Creepy” Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a teenage pariah who is brutally mocked by her high school classmates and doesn’t find much solace at home with her totally unhinged mom (Piper Laurie). Sometimes a girl’s just gotta let loose, and sometimes that means using telekinesis to burn your bullies down to the ground, along with the high school gym in which they’re dancing. Make sure to keep watching all the way to th end!
The Blair Witch Project
Nearly a quarter-century after Jaws became a masterclass in doing more with less, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick did much the same with this found-footage flick that had many people believing the film’s own backstory: that a group of film students got lost in the woods while attempting to make a documentary about the Blair Witch, who supposedly trolls the area near Burkittsville, Maryland, looking for youngsters to murder. That people believed the story, and that the footage they were watching was indeed only later discovered, is a testament to just how effective the found-footage format can be when employed in just the right way, as well as the filmmakers’ brilliant marketing acumen.
Get Out
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Jordan Peele went from being one half of the hilarious Key & Peele to a modern horror icon. And it all started with Get Out, Peele’s stunning directorial debut, in which a young couple have gotten serious enough that Rose (Allison Williams) invites new love Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) to leave the city for the suburbs to spend the weekend with her family. While Chris seems more concerned that he is Black and Rose is not, she assures him it doesn’t matter … until he realizes that’s kind of the point. Peele brilliantly blends elements of horror, comedy, and psychological drama with a pulsing commentary on racism, and won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his efforts. The film also received nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Kaluuya—all massive achievements for a horror movie. Make it a twofer by pairing Get Out with Peele’s impressive follow-up, 2019’s Us, which is streaming on Hulu.
The Fly
David Cronenberg’s mind works in some truly demented ways, which is a blessing to horror movie fans. Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a scientist who is much cooler than he should be; Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) is a science journalist tasked with interviewing Brundle but quickly falling for him. If only he hadn’t decided to use himself as the subject in a teleportation experiment gone horribly wrong, these two kids could’ve maybe had something. Instead, Brundle slowly morphs into a housefly with some pretty putrid habits and a tendency to randomly lose body parts.
It Follows
For decades, young women in horror films who dared to be sexually active—and actually enjoy it (gasp!)—could usually be counted on to be the killer’s next victim. But in this smart indie from writer/director David Robert Mitchell, doing the deed is the conduit by which the supernatural spirit that’s haunting Jay (Maika Monroe) is able to move from one host to the next. Which is bad news, as she just slept with her new beau, who just happened to be infected and has now passed it on to her. While she could just fuck some guy and pass it on, Jay’s a much more complicated heroine.
The Witch
Puritanism in and of itself is pretty creepy. Add in the bizarre disappearance of a child and it gets even scarier. Robert Eggers, who went on to make The Lighthouse and The Northman, deftly balances what is essentially a period piece/supernatural horror film hybrid about a family that ends up living in the woods, secluded, after being banished by their Puritan community. This is when even creepier things start happening, all building up to an unforgettable climax (though it’s admittedly a bit of a slow burn).
The Shining
Stephen King just may be the only person who didn’t love Stanley Kubrick’s take on The Shining. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a writer looking for some quietude so that he can finally finish writing the novel he’s been working on, agrees to take a gig hotel-sitting the Overlook, an enormous resort, while it’s closed down for the winter, bringing his wife (Shelley Duvall) and young son (Danny Lloyd) in tow. For Jack, the Overlook feels like home, and he quickly settles into a work routine; his wife and son aren’t as enthralled, especially when they begin to suspect that malevolent forces didn’t vacate for the winter along with the rest of the guests.
The Strangers
What’s more terrifying than a masked psychopath on the loose knocking off victims as revenge for a childhood trauma? How about a handful of masked sociopaths on the loose knocking off victims at random? James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler) are a couple who find themselves at an unexpected crossroads while spending the night at a secluded vacation home. (Is there any other kind?) But they don’t have much time to wallow in what the future of their relationship looks like, because there are people at the door. And in the house. And on the swing set. You get the picture. Creepy imagery abounds in this vastly underrated film, which saw its storyline continue this year with Renny Harlin’s The Strangers: Chapter 1.
Paranormal Activity
For better or worse, The Blair Witch Project kicked off a found-footage movie flood, which has really yet to end (though they’re definitely in much shorter supply these days). For all the mediocre efforts we had to suffer through, there was also Paranormal Activity, a beyond solid effort that was made on virtually no budget. Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a young couple in love, looking forward to spending their lives together. But when they move in together, so does the evil spirit that’s been trailing Katie for most of her life. Katie wants to rid the house of it once and for all; Micah wants to videotape it (which only seems to embolden the angry spirit).
Scream
The meta horror movie to end all other meta horror movies, the original Scream might have outgrown some of its more garish fashions (most of them worn by Courteney Cox’s Gayle Weathers), but the story is still solid. And the many nods and winks to modern horror tropes are still true. High schooler Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) is a teen spiraling from the recent murder of her mom but who suddenly finds herself in the crosshairs of a new hatchet-wielding serial killer who keeps picking off her pals.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
OK, so maybe it’s not a straight-up “horror” movie. But if you’re looking for something kind of creepy that the whole family can get in on, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better choice than this stop-motion classic that works equally well as a Halloween film or a Christmas movie. Jack Skellington is the pumpkin king of Halloweentown, a place where it’s Halloween—hijinks and all—24/7. But when Jack accidentally discovers Christmas and its holly, jolly traditions, he decides to co-opt both holidays with the help of the hooligans of Halloweentown. (Kidnapping Santa is all part of the plan.)
An American Werewolf in London
Horror-comedy is not an easy genre to pull off—especially when a movie like John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London has been around for comparison for more than 40 years. American pals David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) get slightly lost as they backpack their way through England and end up being attacked by a werewolf. While Jack is torn to bits, David survives but wakes up weeks later in a London hospital with little recollection of what happened. Fortunately, his old pal Jack—looking very much worse for the wear—shows up to warn David that a full moon is coming and if he doesn’t kill himself before it arrives, he too will transform into a flesh-craving canine. Landis expertly balances laugh-out-loud humor with genuinely terrifying frights—most of them courtesy of special effects makeup wizard Rick Baker, who won a much-deserved Oscar for his work on the film. (The werewolf transformation scene is iconic for a reason.) Throw in a killer soundtrack and one of cinema’s most satisfyingly efficient endings and you’ve got a horror-comedy for the ages.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
When she reviewed it for WIRED, senior writer Kate Knibbs called this horror flick a “coming-of-age creepypasta.” It’s all that and more. Director Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature is about a young girl named Casey (Anna Cobb) who becomes increasingly obsessed with an online role-playing game that asks players to do a series of rituals that over time summon a supernatural force that ultimately overtakes them. Less jump-scare-y than mind-bend-y, We Are All Going to the World’s Fair is the kind of horror that sits in the back of your brain, just waiting to scare you again long after the credits roll.
Jaws
Jaws is to horror movies what Star Wars is to sci-fi films. It’s just hard to believe there are people who haven’t seen it. Still, whether you’ve never seen it or have watched it 100 times (Steven Soderbergh claims to have seen Jaws28 times in theaters alone!), the story of a water-phobic police chief living on an island who sets off to sea in pursuit of a ginormous great white shark that’s killing his residents and scaring off the tourists never gets old. It’s also a masterclass in less-is-more filmmaking—even if that approach was more the result of a perpetually busted machine shark than anything else. While the film’s sequels in absolutely no way live up to the original—and get worse with each successive entry—all four Jaws movie (including the charmingly cheesy Jaws 3-D) are currently streaming on Netflix).
Bodies Bodies Bodies
Bodies Bodies Bodies is, bluntly, a slasher for the TikTok generation. Beginning with a very old-school premise—a group of friends goes to a secluded house for a fun getaway—it quickly surfaces the horrors of the very online: no cell service, toxic friends. But just because it’s full of hip actors—Pete Davidson! Amandla Stenberg!—and very-now dialogue doesn’t mean it won’t also freak you the hell out. And maybe even make you laugh.
Night of the Living Dead
Had George A. Romero only ever cowritten and directed this one movie, his feature directorial debut, he’d still go down in history as a horror pioneer. Because even though the word zombie is never uttered in Night of the Living Dead, it’s clear to the audience that that’s what his half-living monsters are. It all kicks off when siblings Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) pay a visit to their father’s gravesite and are subsequently attacked by a strange man. Barbra, seeing a farmhouse nearby, runs there for help—only to discover the dead body of the home’s owner—and many slow-walking creatures coming her way. That’s when the ever-resourceful Ben (Duane Jones) shows up to help. Though many critics of the time attempted to declare Night of the Living Dead DOA because of its extreme gore, its reputation as a game-changer in the genre has given it continued life, with several sequels and even a couple of remakes, including Tom Savini’s 1990s redux, with Tony Todd in the role of Ben.
Nosferatu the Vampyre
Over the course of his near-60-year career, Werner Herzog has proven that there’s nothing he can’t or won’t at least try to do for the love of filmmaking (eating his own shoe included). Over the years, he has long maintained that F. W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu is the greatest film to ever come out of his native Germany. So on the very day that Bram Stoker’s Dracula entered the public domain, Herzog set about creating his own version of the film—one that, unlike the 1922 original, could legally use parts of Dracula without any legal headaches. What Herzog did, however, was create one of the most human versions of the legendary bloodsucker we’ve ever seen, as portrayed by Klaus Kinski. In Herzog’s mind, Dracula’s immortality and vampirism are burdens that make him a more sympathetic character. “He cannot choose and he cannot cease to be,” Herzog toldThe New York Times in 1978. If you want to expand your understanding of Dracula’s cinematic arc, pair this with a screening of Murnau’s original Nosferatu. Then take it one step further by adding to the mix with My Best Fiend, Herzog’s 1999 documentary about his tumultuous relationship with Kinski.
The Cabin in the Woods
Much like Scream before it, Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods takes a meta approach with its material, turning what could otherwise be a by-the-numbers horror movie into an immensely clever take on the “a group of attractive twentysomethings end up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere that just so happens to be surrounded by malevolent forces” sub-genre. All of the standard tropes are set up—the weird old townie who tries to warn the kids off, a creepy old basement filled with bizarre and ominous paraphernalia, etc.—though maybe they’re set up just a little too perfectly. The Cabin in the Woods is a loving wink to serious horror movie fiends and goes off in surprising directions that you’ll never see coming.
Fright Night
We’ve been through enough vampire crazes over the years that there are times when some moviegoers would happily agree to never see another bloodsucker in their lives. Then they remember Fright Night, Tom Holland’s iconic love letter to the golden age of horror movies and late-night television schlock jocks who entertained us with tales of blood and guts. Like Jerry Dandrige (Chris Sarandon)—the glowing-eyed vampire in serious need of a manicure living next door to teenager Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale)—Fright Night doesn’t really seem to age. It still stands out as a perfectly subtle horror-comedy with just the right balance of both genres to make it as seductive as Vampire Jerry on the dance floor. (Its 2011 update, starring Colin Farrell and Anton Yelchin, which is streaming on both Hulu and Peacock, is one of the few horror remakes that is worth your time.)
The House of the Devil
In 2002, Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever brought the horror genre back to its 1980s heyday. Ti West managed to successfully recapture that same spirit at the end of the decade with The House of the Devil, which sees a broke college student (Jocelin Donahue) in need of cash to pay her rent reluctantly agree to “babysit” an allegedly frail old lady for a few hours. You know something’s going to happen, but you’re not quite sure what: Is the house haunted? Is there someone outside stalking the babysitter? Is it all in your head? Is it all of the above? While you wait for the other shoe to inevitably drop, West takes advantage of his very clear time frame—the satanic-panic-ravaged ’80s—to showcase a treasure trove of horrifying cultural relics of the past, including one particularly high-waisted pair of jeans.
The Host
South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho became a household name, and a force to be reckoned with, in 2020 when he stormed the Oscars with Parasite (which is streaming on Max, by the way). If that was your first introduction to his work, you should immediately seek out all of his previous films, including The Host. Like Parasite, it’s a horror movie with a social message. In this case, more of an eco-minded one where the pollution in Seoul’s Han River leads to the creation of a gigantic sea monster with a taste for humans.
Let the Right One In
Having a vampire as a BFF just might be the greatest thing a bullied kid could wish for. But the relationship that picked-on tween Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) builds with his neighbor Eli (Lina Leandersson)—who does just happen to crave human blood—is much deeper than a simple revenge fantasy in this Swedish slow burn. In fact, Eli being a vampire is really secondary to the story. Like Werner Herzog with Nosferatu, Tomas Alfredson puts character-building first and paints Eli with a kind of sadness, which is what connects her with Oskar. Sure, it’s bloody, but it’s also kind of sweet.
Many lies get told on TikTok; also, many truths. One such truth came last weekend when a user with the handle @madallthatime explained that all the people looking for distinct Halloween costume ideas on social media were just being served the same videos by the algorithm—thus negating their uniqueness. Instead, this internet sage explained, they should be looking somewhere else: the #HearMeOut trend.
TikToks of the trend, also known as #HearMeOutCake, encompass a simple premise: A group of friends, or enemies, or coworkers, sets a cake on a table and then takes turns placing sticks in it. Upon each stick rests the image of a person—or fictional character, human or otherwise—on which the friend/enemy/coworker has an embarrassing crush. Sometimes it’s Mr. Burns, sometimes it’s Fidel Castro. Always, it’s uncomfortable. That’s the point.
What @madallthatime was suggesting, though, was that all the faces on those cakes represented a font of untapped Halloween costume potential—a series of obscure characters perfect for All Hallows’ Eve partying.
Every October the internet-savvy among us look for smart, creative outfits and decorations, and every year many of the best stem from bizarre memes. This is why that person who made a “Pink Boney Club” of skeletons in their yard in honor of Chappell Roan (er, Chappell Bone) has already been all over social feeds this fall. (Just me?) But meme-as-costume, as an idea, doesn’t trend the way it used to. If anything, it’s millennial cringe. When The Atlantic publishes “The Chronically Online Have Stolen Halloween,” it’s time to pack up your Target Lewis look and go home.
Which is where @madallthatime’s plan comes in. As algorithms, particularly TikTok’s, get more adept at serving viral-ready content, a homogeneity takes over. If everyone is going to be some version of Roan—or, perhaps, some green-clad Brat—then maybe the best costume is an obscure character from the C-plot of an animated series. Right now, the #HearMeOut trend is offering loads of them.
Four score and seven internets ago—OK, maybe more like a decade or so—celebrating what became known as HallowMeme was a cultural moment. People dressed up as “double rainbow” or Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women.” Unlike the “total slut” lore of Halloween costumes given by Mean Girls, HallowMeme outfits were mostly demure. Sometimes they were political. It was the Obama years, before the power of 4chan revealed itself as a true political force.
The new animated Transformers movie is ostensibly about the early lives of the characters from Hasbro’s 1980s toy line, but it also may be about a class uprising and civil rights. I think Transformers One even takes a jab at former president Donald Trump. Actually, it takes two: Main villain Sentinel Prime (voiced convincingly by Jon Hamm) says, twice, that the truth is what he says it is.
All of which is to say, Transformers One isn’t exactly as hokey as it looks. Sure, it’s basically a kids’ movie, but much like the Transformers cartoons of the ’80s, it does have a message.
Or, at least director Josh Cooley thinks so. Cooley, who won an Oscar for his work on Toy Story 4, left Pixar on March 13, 2020, to make Transformers One. He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly.
Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”
Is that a lot to put on a bunch of robots that turn into cars, even if their tagline is “more than meets the eye”? Yes. Still, I sat down with Cooley to ask what, exactly, led him to the Transformers movie he made and how he ended up having Scarlett Johansson as the voice of a robot right after she went toe-to-toe with OpenAI.
ANGELA WATERCUTTER: So, you won an Oscar with Pixar, built your career there. What was it about a Transformers movie that persuaded you to make this shift?
JOSH COOLEY: Well, first of all, Pixar was my first job.
You were a storyboard artist, right?
Yeah. First I was an intern in the story department, and then I became a storyboard artist and then just kind of worked my way up. I just kept wanting to keep going. So after Toy Story 4, I was like, “Well, I just worked on a Toy Story movie,” you know what I mean?
Yeah, “What now?”
Like, how do you top that? So I read the script for Transformers One, and I was like, oh, being that it’s an origin story, it was unlike anything that Transformers had done before. I love the idea of the relationship between these characters. I was like, “I have to do this.”
The most recent Transformers movies have been a combination of live-action and CG characters. The Transformers: The Movie, in 1986, was animated by hand. Transformers One feels like a return to animated Transformers, but it was all done with CG animation.
But zooming in reveals that the long lens isn’t attached to a regular camera body or a high-end modular system such as the Achtel 9×7. Instead, it is connected to a protective cage holding something that could be an iPhone, a professional camera operator not involved with the movie told WIRED.
The use of Apple smartphones as the principal camera system on 28 Years Later was subsequently confirmed to WIRED by several people connected with the movie, detailing that the particular model used to shoot was the iPhone 15 Pro Max. (Evidently, filming took place too early for Boyle and Mantle to get their hands on the new iPhone 16 series.)
The iPhone in the paparazzi photo is held by an aluminum cage fitted with a lens attachment adapter. Beast makes such cages and adapters, adjusted with distinctive red knobs (there’s such an adjustment knob visible in the photograph), and its latest DOF (depth of field) adapter allows the attachment of full-frame DSLR lenses to smartphones. The lens-shaped adapter, released in March, projects the image from the DSLR lens onto the surface of its screen, and the smartphone records this projection.
Several arthouse films have been shot with iPhones, including Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) and the Steven Soderbergh drama Unsane (2018), but these movies were limited-release, low-budget offerings compared to 28 Years Later. The new film’s $75 million budget is only part of the franchise’s total, with 28 Years Later being the first of a new trilogy; all three coming zombie films are being scripted by screenwriter Alex Garland, who is reuniting with Boyle and Mantle after helming Civil War, released earlier this year.
Another key team member from the 2002 movie is back for at least one film in the new trilogy: Long before his razor-blades-in-flat-caps role in the gritty TV show Peaky Blinders—or his Oscar-winning, Bhagavad Gita–quoting performance in Oppenheimer (2023)—Cillian Murphy’s breakout role was as the lead actor in 28 Days Later. A full-frontal wide shot of him lying naked on a gurney was Murphy’s introduction to the limelight. (Murphy didn’t appear in the Boyle-produced 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later. This movie, starring Robert Carlyle and Idris Elba, and directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, was shot on film, and enjoys the same cult status as the first.)
There are no details yet on the plot for 28 Years Later, or whether Murphy stars in all three movies of the upcoming trilogy.
In the original movie, Murphy, then just 26, played Jim, a confused bicycle messenger waking from a coma in a deserted London hospital a month after being hit and injured in an unseen crash. In memorable scenes of a desolate London, Jim walks from the hospital and slowly discovers he’s one of the few not to have caught a virus that causes “infecteds” to feast on human flesh.
It’s hard not to feel the ripple effect when big shifts happen. One such shift came Wednesday when Lionsgate—the studio responsible for the John Wick, Hunger Games, and Twilight franchises—announced it had teamed up with artificial intelligence firm Runway for a “first-of-its-kind partnership” that would give the AI firm access to the studio’s archives in order to create a custom AI tool for preproduction and postproduction on its film and TV shows.
Runway’s forthcoming tool will “help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors, and other creative talent augment their work” and “generate cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway’s suite of controllable tools,” according to a press release announcing the deal.
If that sounds like it might pique the interest of those who have been watching AI’s influence on creatives’ work, it did. Hours after The Wall Street Journal broke the story, writer-director Justine Bateman, who was vocally critical of AI during the Hollywood strikes last year, made a post on X that almost felt like a warning: “Over a year ago, I told you that I assumed the studios were NOT sending lawyers to the #AI companies over their models injesting [sic] their copyrighted films, because they wanted their own custom versions. Well, here you go.”
If anything, the new deal could serve as a test of the AI protections that unions like the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) got in their contract negotiations with studios last year. Under those protections, studios must get consent from actors before making a digital replica of them. Because, according to Lionsgate and Runway, the tool will be used only for preproduction and postproduction work, it’s within the realm of that agreement, says Matthew Sag, a professor of law and AI at Emory University.
“It seems like a significant development, but the movie industry has been using all sorts of technology and automation for years,” Sag says. “So you could also see this as a natural evolution. The difference is that now we are seeing more things we had thought of as creative and artistic being automated.”
The announcement came the day after California governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation aimed at protecting actors from having their work cloned without consent. Set to take effect next year, Newsom’s move comes at a time when video game workers, specifically voice and motion-caption actors, are on strike, partially over AI protections.
“We continue to wade through uncharted territory when it comes to how AI and digital media is transforming the entertainment industry,” the California governor said in a statement. “This legislation ensures the industry can continue thriving while strengthening protections for workers and how their likeness can or cannot be used.”
Even if actors’ and other performers’ work won’t be impacted by the new tools, it’s hard not to wonder about what effect new generative AI tools could have on those who work in preproduction and postproduction. Per the WSJ report, Lionsgate initially plans to use Runway’s custom tool for things like storyboarding. Eventually, the studio plans to use it to create visual effects for the big screen. According to Sag, “it’s impossible to know for sure which productivity tools will be job creators or destroyers,” but it does seem possible these tools could impact jobs.
According to Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela, though, they will not. “Our core belief is that AI, like any powerful tool, can significantly accelerate your progress through creative challenges,” Valenzuela says. “It achieves this by helping to solve specific tasks, not by replacing entire jobs. Artists are always in control of their tools.”
Like Valenzuela, Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns sees AI as a boon to moviemaking, one that will help the studio “develop cutting edge, capital efficient content creation opportunities,” he said in a statement, noting that several of Lionsgate’s filmmakers were excited about the new tools without naming which filmmakers. “We view AI as a great tool for augmenting, enhancing, and supplementing our current operations.” What it will do to their future operations remains unknown.
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