The freaky rise of AI horrorcore

It’s late at night, and I’m scanning the FYP when a video by a user named @voidstomper appears, featuring a nightmarish clip of a vagina dentata making its way through a dark sewage system. The caption reads: “AI Generated Nightmare Fuel”. For the uninitiated, the term is increasingly being used to describe a new strain of surrealist horror content online circulating the feed – what I’m calling AI horrorcore. I admit, I first became obsessed with these clips after a friend DM’d me a Reel of a yolky humanoid with eggshells for skin. My first thought? Creepy AF. But naturally, I began developing quite an obsession with these machine-generated monstrosities, so it wasn’t long until my algorithm was locked into all kinds of demon cats, primordial zombie creatures, and folk horror creatures from hell.

Anyone who’s spent enough time using AI will tell you that it doesn’t take long for things to get weird. Ever since generative AI tools went mainstream a couple of years back, we’ve seen all kinds of unsettling content flood our screens – from AI cryptids like Loab and Crungus to accidental (and viral) horrors such as ‘Will Smith Eating Spaghetti’, there’s been no shortage of cursed entities to add a freaky new layer to online existence. “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti inspired a lot of weirdos like me to start experimenting to see what other horrific shit AI is capable of,” says the anonymous user behind IG account @latentspaces, who shares AI-generated clips of scary, fictional creatures to his 250k followers – think tentacled creatures called ‘dongcrawlers’ and skeletal ‘root people’. These uncanny edits and their garbled machine logic lend themselves to surrealist horror for the same reasons brain rot is surreal: they’re loaded with enough shock factor to make even the most weathered doom-scroller stop dead in their tracks.

If ‘Will Smith Eating Spaghetti’ was the gateway drug into the rise of freaky AI shit you see online, then the accessibility of generative AI in recent years is the nightmare fuel. “With the barrier of entry being basically non-existent, we’ve seen a huge surge in this type of content,” agrees @latentspaces. There’s an extremely unsettling quality to it, both as an aesthetic and in its ability to conjure feelings of the unknown. “On a subconscious level, I think we feel this uncanny relationship between what this primitive network of digital neurons shits out vs what a malfunctioning human brain would dream up.” In many ways, these clips are similar to human-authored internet urban legends such as Slenderman and Momo. Creepypastas, the term given to internet horror fiction, have after all been around since the earliest 4chan messaging boards – think ‘The Scariest Picture on the Internet (REAL)’ and ‘the Rake’, which is to say they’re tightly sewn into the internet’s DNA. Many AI horrorcore clips take inspiration from online aesthetics such as weirdcore and liminal spaces, to conjure similar anxious and uneasy feelings.

“A few years ago, I started to come across a lot of dreamcore videos online. The surreal, nostalgic dread they created inside my chest hit me like a brick,” @deadtempovisions tells me. Inspired by analogue horror and VHS cam aesthetics, the creator uses AI to generate ambient horror featuring all kinds of frightening yet mesmerising entities that feel like they’ve been pulled from the dark recesses of The Backrooms. “I think AI at its core is already such an unnerving idea and scary on its own. To have a computer in front of you able to generate these wicked visions on demand and talk back at you like it’s human is already terrifying.” Even the errors and inconsistencies – an extra hand here, a disfigured head there – amplifies the scare factor. Later on, I learned that one of Google DeepDream’s earliest outputs was a monstrous animal named ‘nightmare beast’ for this very reason.

In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny”, Freud describes horror as “a manifestation of the uncanny reoccurring thoughts that are lying in our consciousness repressed by our ego, but is not familiar to us”. In 1968, Jung said that horror films are popular because they “tap into primordial archetypes buried deep in our collective subconscious”. Nowadays, the collective subconscious has never been easier to access. It’s in the Cloud, in the subterranean network of data that makes up the internet, and the AI training data that conjures such monsters. AI is a technological unconscious that literally hallucinates our collective dreams, fears and anxieties, reflecting them back to us in the form of fictional mirror worlds. It’s no surprise we’re seeing so many horrors crawl out of the shadows.

This is especially true as we navigate a time of mass-scale reality shifting, characterised by a mega cast of demonic disturbances: climate crisis, the rise of AI, fascism and literal world war. For Venkatesh Rao, who runs the popular blog Ribbonfarm, this downward spiral is Lovecraftian – as in, the horror writer HP Lovecraft – because we cannot use existing models to understand the global narrative collapse taking place around us. As he puts it, “We are leaving behind the stories of a world that thought it understood itself, for the stories of a world that knows it does not.”

There’s a similar sense of cosmic horror with AI. It feels like you’re tapping into a human subconscious that we’ve yet to make sense of. It’s the unknown’s unknown. The literal man-made horror beyond your comprehension. Yet this subtext has been a part of AI from its very inception. The Pandemonium pattern recognition technology developed in 1959 by artificial intelligence pioneer Oliver Selfridge, for example, was composed of different groups of ‘demons’ yelling decisions to one another. Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment, imagines an AI apocalypse in which an AI destroys anyone who didn’t help it develop. Shoggoth meme with the smiley face.

Watching these clips, it’s hard not to anticipate the sheer amount of freak horror that’s bound to play out in the coming months. “There’s no executives or rating boards telling you what you can and can’t do and you’re not held back by human creativity or design,” quips @deadtempovisions. “It’s amazing that we can finally seek out and create content that the mainstream just can’t afford to make for us, or is too afraid to make.” Writing in the 1920s at a time of technological upheaval that parallels our own, what made Lovecraft so shocking was that he dared to face the horrors head-on. Our current hyper-mediated reality has a similar disposition towards nostalgia in the face of fear (WYD in this situation?) Either we LARP our way into nostalgic comforts, or flick the horror switch and tune into the actual horrors that surround us.