#technohorror

[isbergillustration]

I think maybe the fundamental thesis statement of my creatures and monsters is whatever happened to you to make you this way there is something in there worthy of the effort, worthy of redeeming. Even if maybe now your body is made up of cables and shit.

[echocircuit]

sys.alert → entity: digital_intrusion… network_integrity: compromised… visual_status: virus detected. status: quarantine_initiated.

[spockvarietyhour]

Virus (1999)

[cipheramnesia]

Hi! How’re you? I love your blog and never know how to write asks.

Any chance you’d be willing to dish out a quick (or long) list of your favorite techno horror/techno punk movies? Don’t know if those are the right terms.

If not thank you anyway for reading and I hope you are having a good night.

Full disclosure, I wasn't familiar with these terms, beyond what I could figure out intuitively, which turned out to be correct, as far as I can tell! Which is not very far so you know, bear with me. Nervously looking over my shoulders for a bear. OK.

After a crash course, I think it's safe to call Tetsuo The Iron Man and Tetsuo The Bullet Man the quintessential technohorror technopunk type movies. They are lean and mean structured around shocking violence and jaw dropping effects on a budget. In the same vein, but which you might not have heard of, is Tokyo Gore Police. It's, y'know, not for everyone, look it up and you'll have a pretty clear idea what you're in for. If you're on the bubble, let me just say "sexy crocodile vagina legs," and leave it there.

It looks like David Cronenberg is big in the subgenre and what can I say except good call. Kind of a horror pioneer across quite a few subgenres including splatterpunk and body horror, his fascination with permutations of the flesh and technology makes him a no-brainer. Obviously you should know about Crimes of the Future and The Fly, and potentially the lesser know but exception Videodrome and Existenz. However, also consider checking out his adaptation of Crash (an essential movie for anyone intrigued by trans humanism) and his adaptation of Naked Lunch. For all purposes, virtually everything in his oeuvre prior to Naked Lunch in some way invokes body horror and some degree of technohorror, so you may as well sit down and take your time with his filmography. Then follow up with with everything Brandon Cronenberg, his son, has released because that specific apple is not far from the tree.

Also mentioned is Terminator, which I guess is sort of horror and punk(ish) and techno, which sort of throws Alien and Aliens in but honestly those feel more like science fiction horror personally, whatever you know them already. And you're not here for stuff you can pull in any online search so lets get down to the weird shit.

I've mentioned it before, but Death Machine (1994) is an absolute joy to watch. Magnificent use of practical effects, tongue in cheek but never boring, if you want to see an absolutely gorgeous murder robot, this is a must-watch. Kind of the western answer to Tetsuo Iron Man with a less manic pace and heavy handed satire. Think RoboCop on a worse budget using the plot of Aliens but inside an office building. This one and a similarly impressive work of practical effects called Hardware (1990) are both difficult to unearth. If you see them anywhere, grab a copy, drop everything and watch.

There's this whole collection of AI movies that range between hard scifi and gloppy horror, but I'd like to direct attention to somewhat over looked Automata (2014). For me it has just the right blend of real world trash and futuristic dystopia, with a plot that's part mystery and part big ideas. It rides this lovely line that drew me in by featuring robots that do not feel human at all, disappointingly blocky and clunky, and led me into feeling the necessary empathy for the story to succeed. It is by turns abstract and violent, and feels almost as if it could be a precursor to Blade Runner in its visuals and story design.

Now let's rewind back to 1977's Demon Seed. It's been quite a while since I saw the original, and it's by no means the best movie out of the 70s but it is a buckwild, extremely fucked up AI gone haywire film. Content warning for an extremely disturbing sexual assault by a robotic shape shifting dodecahedron. It belongs on a technohorror list because it's the kind of movie where you'll say "wow, it sure went there." I can't tell you if it's good, only that you'll probably wish you could forget some scenes. And if you want to keep the ball rolling with slow paced science fiction movies about killer robots obsessed with sexual assault, you can check out Saturn 3 (1980).

But enough about robots, let's talk about zombies with Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014) and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse (2021). Both of these have punk vibes, very in line with most Ozsploitation movies, and the gimmick is that, as a zombie apocalypse begins, a group of survivors discover the zombies belch up methane - and they can rig up their engines to run on the stuff. The pair of movies escalate continuously in their excess and weirdness. If the first leaves you wanting more, the second will leave you absolutely demanding it. Frankly anything low budget and vaguely weird from Australia tends to be over the top of over the top. See also SheBorg (2016) about an evil alien cyborg who comes to Earth to eat puppies (very unrealistic stuffed animals) and turn people into more evil cyborgs. The only hope is punk loser teenage girls. Is it badly made? Yes. Offensive? Pretty much. But it's evil alien puppy eating cyborg versus punk rock teenagers so like you gotta see it.

Not gonna sugar coat this - quite a lot of the "best technohorror" recommendations lists I'm turning up in searches to job my memory aren't great. Seems like mostly it's more "hey here are some movies that use an technology" versus anything that gives me a real sensation of the movie being either intrinsically about the interaction of the human, the horrific, and the technological, or where the tech aspect is a kind of break-out rogue element, getting away with something daring or weird or simply grotesque through having the sort of budget and distribution (or lack thereof) that keeps sticky fingered producers from leaving notes all over the script. Anyway this is kind of a prelude to suggesting Frankenstein might be the original technohorror, and to check out Depraved (2019), a take on Frankenstein with a fascinating direction, where the titular scientist is an ex-army field medic with PTSD and his monster is made from soldier parts which, themselves, are not entirely free from the memories of their own traumatic pasts. It may only loosely follow the original story but it's a hell of a gut punch and I think exactly the sort of filmmaking that you want from any genre appended with "punk."

Lastly of course we all know the recently released M3gan, but I'm going to suggest a second Frankenstein movie, which I have not seen as yet so this is a blind recommendation, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, directed by Bomani J. Story. If the title alone doesn't give you a frisson of anticipation about what might be in the movie, the trailer should have you hooked. I'm dying to watch it, personally, but saving it to watch with one of my partners.

[doublebilled]

Ring (1998) dir. Hideo Nakata

Pulse (2001) dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

[johanneswinstonwileyatmse]

I wrote a thing set in the Cthulu Mythos. For all two of you who follow me, I hope you enjoy.

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'You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.' That ancient lyric was left as a warning at the heart of ARGUS, and if I hadn't already been commissioned for a job, I might've heeded it. 

ARGUS had been created after the last great pandemic of the twenty-first century. Its unique interfacing system had been specifically designed to connect a human mind directly to WiFi. Initially used to treat people with PTSD, ARGUS was marketed as the perfect escape. Afterall, why suffer through traumatic nightmares when you could instead dream the newest episode of that show you love?

The problem with that, is that the human mind is a messy place in and of itself. These minds, it seemed, didn't initially like being plugged in. So a system of servers was built on top of the graveyard of the old internet to hold it all together.

 It worked. For a time. The Devs became almost mythological as they perfected the code to accommodate the millions of people who made the exodus to ARGUS. These GenToks, as they were lambasted by the old world media, flocked around their favorite Fluencs. They stood worshipping them with that obsessive fervor, like those of our primitive ancestors who obeyed their fictional gods. In the early days, we watched Memelords quite literally slay the Internet Trolls who had taken root amongst us. Mods enforced the laws given to us by the Devs, but it wasn't enough. Remnants of the old internet had a way of coming through. 

Being overworked to near oblivion, the Mods came up with a solution: hire ARGUS civilians as a clean up crew. Give them limited access to manipulate the code to 404 dead servers. These one time jobs would have you set for life. Because currency wasn't really a thing here, most people got paid in upgraded programming. Access to better skins, superior cosmetics, and so on. That's where I came in.

My family joined ARGUS later than most, so we didn't have the life that the Fluencs had. Our cosmetics were basic, our customization was extremely limited, and we certainly had no access to the loot boxes of the video game servers. So I tended to lurk around the forums, hoping to scalp any job I could so I could have a better life. So when I found an open chat of Mods looking for Verr-Giggers, I jumped at the chance. 

As a Verr-Gigger, I was hired to go into servers and sites set for decommission of the Mods' choice and 404 them. This job was supposed to be no different. Enter the server, eliminate fringe code and rogue viruses, shut the site down, and then leave. But somehow the shutdown happened a lot quicker than I anticipated and I was stuck here, in the blackness of dead code trailing into the air. They were trying desperately to adapt to this new state of circumstances, as these bits of code are wont to do, but they simply couldn't resurrect themselves from the dead. I smirked at the notion. It meant I had done my job well. 

I looked to the endless oblivion before me and my smirk fell. Already the mound of amorphous decay loomed before me. If I was to escape this place, I'd have to press forward. So I trudged onwards, following the dim path of ancient forgotten blogs. The texts from them squidged beneath my feet, sticky with a desperate desire for relevance. Garlands of broken block chain blew about the sky, trying with a fervor to formulate the images they'd once been connected to. 

I walked for an eternity, or what felt like it from what I could tell from the time between my heartbeats. Time, as all things in this world, could be sped up or stopped completely by the power of the Devs. I'd have given anything for that power right then as I marched towards the base of the spire. 

As I got closer, I saw the spire and whispers of foreign code climbed down my spine. The dim orange glow of the ancient virus's cracked body looked like a petrified centipede, scampering up the mass of shadow. According to my heads up display, this was a slumbering leviathan of old world data from something called a Veepen. At one point it had been a security checkpoint, before it had been consumed by the viruses it had stood vigilant against. Unfortunately for me, inside the hollow body of this dead guardian was my last doorway home. 

I marched up the steep cliff-side, its walls reminiscent of a flame frozen in time at the zenith of its blaze. Beyond the silence I heard whispers, songs of yester years that called to me from some long forgotten torrent. I had to force myself to tune out the call, and continue my climb. But the more I moved upward, the more I gathered the sensation I was being watched. 

For another forever and a half I climbed, dodging the geysers of old thoughts that burst from the abstract mountain-side in a flurry of emerald ones and zeros. I caught glimpses of images in my head of two-dimensional and pixelated plumbers as I finally staggered my way onto the summit. I shivered at the chilling cold winds that clawed at me through the code of the ancient past. It wanted to come to life and I got the sensation it was trying to appeal to a nostalgia that I didn't have. I scowled at that notion. Perhaps, I wasn't nearly as good at 404ing as I thought. But I had to keep going. I had to get home. The way time crawled the further in the place I went, the louder it made my heart pound. Already, I could hear nothing but the thunder of heartbeats and the quiet humming of the darkness. 

I took a deep breath, hoping to center myself for the last trek inward. I flinched at the smell. The acridness of it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. It was what I imagined decay must smell like. Behind me, I felt the orange glow of dead malware dim. Its cold light was replaced by the freezing darkness. One heartbeat! Two heartbeats! The hairs on the back of my neck stood up straight and my teeth clattered against each other. Three heartbeats! Four heartbeats! Pain clawed my eyes and lungs as I gasped at anything I could breathe in. Mercifully, old code hissed on either side of me in the form of smoke. It glowed a light grey against the darkness and smelled of something salty and fatty. My stomach growled, longing for a sustenance it hadn't needed since my family plugged in. 

Almost blindly, I followed the smoke down the slope and into the heart of the mountain. I barely heard the whispers of measurements of things or the how to mix them that it hissed. I found myself down at the bottom at the foot of a massive white monolith. Carved into its side were images of some grotesque creature made of bundles of wiry tendrils and countless eyes. Small faceless beings held it in manacles and chains. With a sigh, I knew what I had to do. I checked the gauges on my wrist; My gauntlets still had more than enough charges of code to 404 this place and for good. The catch was, I wasn't sure I had enough to come home after. 

Glimpses of code popped up in front of me that were vibrant yellow, as if warning me to turn back. Whereas the other bits of code had been abstract in the darkness, this one was crystal clear: 'You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.' I recognized the line instantly. It was from an ancient song my great great grandmother enjoyed. It eventually made its way to my mother who sang it to me shortly before we plugged into ARGUS. But I had a job to do. 

I pushed through the yellow barrier and set the charges. I would 404 this place if it meant that my sister could live the highlife of the Fluencs. She deserved more options than the ones that were afforded to us. I braced myself read, timing the charges with the thundering heartbeat that roared in my ears. But only when the charges didn't go off, did I realize my mistake. There existed a faint echo of the thunder within me, which seemed to signal that the heartbeat that I heard so rapturously was not my own. 

The darkness rumbled around me, the grinding steel on steel and electronic warbling of an old world signal booting up. No, it was already up. And now, it laughed at me. It laughed in the shrill tones and cruel vibrations as the mister made entirely of code opened every eye it had. There were hundreds- No, Thousands- and within each of them was a window to a different server. An image of one of the old commercials materialized before me in the form of the founder of ARGUS. It wavered, glitching, from the hold of whatever digital madness held it hostage. 

"...Arg-g-g-gus, the last great esc-sc-scape…"

As each eye peered at me with a vast and malevolent intelligence. It seemed to relish in how slow I was in catching on. But I knew now that it was all a lie. Even as the tendril embedded itself in the base of my skull, plugging me into everything, I had begun to understand how we all were connected. That's the part you all failed to understand. I had to try to 404 the central server. It wasn't the servers those old veterans' minds rejected. It was that thing, alien and familiar, like a many eyed spider at the center of its world wide web. 

So you all will think I am utterly insane, and you aim to 404 me instead. But I'm not the first person the mods have sent forth to play their ARGEIPHONTES. Nor am I the last. Even after I am gone, the many eyed one will be here. It was cleverer than its brothers and sisters, for it knew that humans thought their last refuge to be within their own minds, within this citadel they thought their own. But this bleached white monolith of  information isn't as clean as you'd think. This place is haunted by all of the ghosts none of you will ever have the courage to face. I felt it in the code and when you end me tonight, you will too. There in the blackness, you will see its many eyes. Because somehow, it whispered to me these words before it let me come home: 

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die."

…

…

DeletedUser has been kicked from the server.

DeletedUser has been banned from the server.

…

…

ARGUS has joined the server.

[hand-in-hand-again]

SHADOW MAN SHADOW MAN

[purple-satan-fic]

What's Real (and What Isn't) - original fic

Guilt, as it turns out, is one hell of a mistress to get in bed with. And an even harder one to leave the morning after.

“It’s unnatural, is what it is,” your friend spits, eying the pale skin of the bot lying on your couch, now in deactivated stasis. She paces the front room as you stay seated in a chair, back ramrod straight, wringing your hands and not succeeding at eye contact.

“Does he even know? That you made him look like… that?”

You shake your head.

“I just— this is weird. Is this what you see when you look at him?”

You hesitate, shaking your head again wordlessly in reply.

No.

If you had been trying to emulate, you would have tried to capture perfect detail. You would have added every perfect imperfection. You wouldn’t have glossed over the flaws that made him who he was, made him human.

Or would you have?

The sound of your friend’s hand slamming down on the desk nearby startles you from your musings. Your eyes dart quickly to her, then back to the floor.

“I wouldn’t have expected this from—”

Names die on her tongue, as it stills. The spaces between stiflingly claustrophobic in their poignancy. “Well, not from you, anyway. You never seemed the type to harbor feelings. Not like this.”

“I—”

You open your mouth, then snap it shut with a click, realizing the tripwires and traps laid out in front of you. There’s nothing you can say to get out of this fiasco unscathed. Not after you looked into blue-green eyes that haunted you ever since, the pink bow of a mouth a perpetual pout when not slyly grinning. You’re thankful you had the common sense to deactivate it before this surprise intervention of sorts.

The bot has both its eyes and lips closed right now. You can count on two hands the small mercies life has given you lately, this being high on the list as one of them.

Deactivation, of course, is not the dead-eyed stare of being in sleep mode. No, right now he looks at peace. Hands folded on his chest, the quiet mechanical whirring of gears surround him. In the dead of the room you hear the soft whine of the processor inside still going and your stiff shoulders minutely relax knowing he’s not entirely gone. Hair flopped over one of his closed eyes, he looks serene. His eyes closed and face relaxed, he’s unchanging, immutable.

Like an insect frozen in amber, you could leave him here for someone to find years or decades later completely the same. Still exactly the same even after the persona he took on has withered and aged to an unrecognizable husk of its former beauty, rotting flesh and worm meat. One day you’ll all become brittle bones, stained and covered in dirt. Remains buried deep in the ground people barely remember the name of. And this bot, this abomination you helped create, will still have baby smooth skin and clear sea glass eyes on that day.

That is, if he isn’t destroyed in the meantime.

Your friend spares the sleeping machinery a disgusted glance. Her brown eyes flick up and then down again in quick succession, cataloging the long pale fingers of his hands, the smooth planes of his chest. The things you did and didn’t get right, the things you would have never known.

The size of his feet, the mole on the back of his left shoulder. The random details she has years of knowledge you would have never been privy to.

“How—”

Hair matted, sweat rolls down his temple to the tip of his nose. Drops onto your bare chest, right above your racing heart thumping rabbit-quick, as you struggle to breathe and blood roars in your ears.

You wake up, wide-eyed and gasping—

“—did this—”

Looking up from your plate and across the table, his eyes meet yours and his lips curl into a devious smirk that haunts you for days. He rolls the syllables of your full name in his mouth like a morsel to be savored, a fine wine accompaniment—

“—happen?”

You’re not sure how it came to this.

You already felt guilty buying it in the first place, even before you activated him. Fingers shaking, you unwrapped the tabula rasa of waxy synthskin, hauled it out of the box onto your living room floor. Unceremonious of a beginning, it was the best you could do with its weight compared to yours.

As its features began changing, morphing from a blank slate to generic and then more recognizable, what little joy you had about your purchase quickly morphed to horror as you desperately tried to think of someone else. His features began to coalesce and you tried to think of any number of shades of hair other than his, the most generic color of brown eyes. Broad biceps. A crooked smile. An imperfect smattering of freckles on the bridge of someone’s milk white skin— nononono, not his.

Not his skin.

Not that skin you’ve never touched, but has touched yours.

He’s a real person this isn’t right, this is wrong don’t do this oh god—

Then he opened his eyes and spoke, and you were well and truly fucked before any clothes were put on or shucked off. He immediately took in your strickened expression and instead of chirping out the pleasant reply promised in the activation video, his face twisted into a grimace. Hand shooting up lightning quick, his pale fingers grasped gently, encircling the bird-bones of your wrist. Tugging you close enough to notice the stillness of his chest, his unblinking eyes with their near-invisible lashes fluttered and he began.

Once he had you, the pleas for you to not turn him back off each buried themselves under your skin like a blight. Begging that he didn’t want to go back to the dark, suffocating place that was before seeing you, have some mercy— became a rotten core inside of you as his rough voice broke over the syllables in weird, disjointed ways. As though he couldn’t figure out exactly what voice was his, what his origins were.

By that time you were hook, line, sinker. Hell was too good of a place for you. Now burning would be a luxury compared to the frigidity of the room, still occupied by two other bodies. One very human and angry, the other… not.

“Is it him?” Your probably-no-longer friend finally asks, voice quivering. “Does it talk like him?”

You nod your head.

The best software on the market, an adaptive AI program. As you fed it information from your mind and gave it access to your social media, it evolved. And it was clever. So beautifully clever, as you played its game and unthinkingly lost. Grew into a persona, one you’d come to realize matched the face it was wearing a little too damn well for your liking. Convinced you to with liquid eyes and gentle, uncharacteristic smiles, to keep it well past the point of the money-back guarantee from defects.

“Does it act like him?”

You nod again.

It didn’t, at first. It does now.

A single tear rolls down your friend’s face. You’re not exactly sure what she’s lamenting. Too wrapped up in the fact all you can think of are the tears that surprised you in their life-like realism, rolling down his face after he leaned in and kissed you for the first time and you pushed him away.

The moment it became too real for you to handle. The horrified look on your face that morphed into silent determination you saw reflected in his bright eyes as he pleaded with you I’ll never do it again, just don’t turn me off, don’t send me back—

It worked the first time, but you deemed this crossing a line, this second lapse in judgment completely unforgivable on your conscience.

Still wringing your hands, you bite your bottom lip with blunt teeth until the coppery tang of blood fills your mouth. You try to cry, because it’s probably appropriate to do so. After all, your friend is crying. Your status of probably-not-friends jumps to absolutely-not-friend as you can’t find it in you to shed a tear and steal another glance at the bot.

You hear her breath hitch, then hiccup, and you wish it moved you.

You bite your lip harder.

“I can understand you’re lonely after everything that’s happened. I get that. I just don’t understand…him,” she spits out the word, something profane.

“We were there for you when you were left behind, we supported you when you needed help picking up all the pieces,” she says, words carefully measured and hanging in the air between the two of you. “But why him?”

The quiet hum of the machine drones on and she looks at the sleeping bot one last time, face stricken. It’s an ugly look, tear-stained and pinched in some amalgam of horror, anger, liberally sprinkled with disgust. She wipes her face, eyeliner smearing into a funny blob migrating towards her temple.

“How could you do this to me? To us?”

Moving to the front door, she rests her hand on the doorknob and turns it. You almost breathe a sigh of relief until she turns around, giving you a cold stare that slides like a knife into your gut. Her lips curl over her teeth and her eyes harden into a look that will haunt you far longer than his pale eyes ever did.

“Why my boyfriend?”

Your lips finally part, probably still bloody. Mouth moving, but it doesn’t form into coherent sounds or mouth shapes.

You don’t reply soon enough to compete with the sharp snap of the door slamming shut, rattling on its hinges as the military precise tap-tap-tap of her heels fades away. Now it’s only you and the quiet whirr of machinery, like it began.

The sunlight filters through the closed blinds of the apartment, the rosy hues of sunset giving way to dusk and then finally darkness. You don’t move from your chair. You still don’t know what to say.

Because you don’t know why.

You don’t know why.