A naked, bloody body in a bathtub, a large knife and a kid singing a nursery rhyme in creepy cadences not exactly as it should be sung. Sound like a cliché? Of course, and in this particular film for good reason as the script was partly written by a computer … and the computer basically churned out ideas that have been making us sink in our seats since Le Manoir du Diable silently hit the big screen.

The film is called Impossible Things, and according to its creators it, “Was engineered from the ground up using Big Data and AI to ensure that this is the scariest and creepiest horror film out there.” The film was ‘co-written’ with AI, not written by AI, meaning the technological magic took the form of a machine analyzing scores of horror movie plots and box office reactions to those films and then coming up with what could be the scariest thing known to man. Don’t hold your breath on that, but regardless the idea is novel.

Jack Zhang, a US-based mathematician, it’s reported spent 5 years creating the AI for the film. By analyzing heaps of horror movies and seeing how scared they made people feel Zhang believes his machine and a human writer working in tandem can make the perfect chill. Dubbed the world’s first feature film written by AI Impossible Things is now waiting for Kickstarter funding.

Before we start fanaticizing, again, about AI doing all these wonderful things humans can do, and more, we should remember that movie is augmentation, not automation. The last, and first time we allowed AI to totally write a movie from start to finish the result was absolute incoherence. AI might be able to mend broken sentences, but it can’t do much more than that. The film we are talking about was the 10-minute short released this called Sunspring, starring comedy series Silicon Valley’s brilliant nerd Thomas Middleditch.

Concerning AI and filmmaking one thing you should see is the latest documentary from the marvelous Werner Herzog. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is the smooth talking director’s take on technology wherein he attempts to prove that not even in 4,500 years would a machine be able to make a film as good as he can. A lot of the people he talks to in the documentary tell Herzog he is unequivocally wrong.