Awful Dreams
A short introduction, excerpted from a news report:
What happens when a 16-year-old voice recording from Sir John Hurt meets AI filmmaking? Brooklyn-based creative agency American Haiku decided to find out.
In 2010, Hurt recorded narration for a short horror film that was ultimately shelved after years of funding setbacks, leaving his previously unheard performance in the vault. Nearly 16 years later, American Haiku founder and CCO Thom Glover revived the project with director and AI artist Michael Hess, using generative AI to finally bring Awful Dreams to life.
But rather than use AI to recreate the realism the filmmakers originally envisioned, they leaned into the technology’s imperfections – its distortions, hallucinations and unpredictability – to create a nightmarish visual language that would have been impossible to achieve when the film was first conceived.
The result is an unusual collision of archival performance and emerging technology: a film anchored by Hurt’s voice, but visually shaped by AI in ways that embrace its limitations rather than conceal them.