10 “tech horror” films to choose and enjoy this Halloween

Halloween is here, which is a good excuse to watch some films from one of cinema's most underrated genres: sci-fi horror. Horror science fiction is one of the most effective ways to critique technology and its corporate masters, express technological anxieties, and forcefully denounce injustice.

This is especially true in the sub-subgenre of science fiction horror that deals with technology – and is sometimes called “techno-horror”, although I tend to resist that term. I prefer “Luddite horror”.

The real Luddites were not ignorant reactionaries who wanted to destroy machines because they didn't understand them. They were a well-organized and militant labor movement whose members fully understood the threat that certain machines posed to their livelihoods.

Luddites were furiously critical of technology and felt that if it was being used to oppress or exploit, sometimes the right thing to do was to destroy it. Sci-fi horror is a particularly effective genre at channeling this kind of collective rage.

So, I've put together this list of essential Luddite horror films; films that challenge, criticize or, in some way, seek to destroy the mechanisms that are harmful to the common good.

The Horizon Enigma (“Event Horizon” / 1997)

This is essentially a Frankenstein-style film set in the orbit of Neptune, with the semi-sentient ship Event Horizon taking on the role of the monster and the character Dr. Weir representing Dr. Frankenstein.

Weir designed the Event Horizon to bend the laws of spacetime, but ended up opening a portal to hell. What makes this a good Luddite horror film is that the main protagonist, Captain Miller, makes the correct moral decision to fire every possible missile at the Event Horizon.

Weir is determined to try to save the portal from hell. Fortunately, Miller manages to destroy Weir and much of the ship, potentially sending everyone to hell in the process.

But the final scene, in which one of the survivors has a vision of Weir returning, indicates that this impulse to build devices that could unleash hell on our world has survived after all.

Available on Apple TV

The Invisible Man (“Invisible Man”/ 2020)

Cecilia Kass is married to Adrian Griffin, an abusive and controlling CEO of a technology company. She manages to escape the surveillance fortress that is their home, but news soon breaks that Griffin has committed suicide. From then on, an invisible presence begins to torment her everywhere.

The film received praise for Elizabeth Moss' performance and the way it presents fear and gaslighting that victims of abuse face every day, while also being equally effective in criticizing tech moguls.

Griffin uses his fortune and state-of-the-art “human augmentation” technology to surveil and torment his ex-wife, making us viewers question why these things are built, and for whom.

Available on Mubi

Nuclear Catastrophe (“Threads”/ 1984)

It is not exactly a “horror film”, but simply “horrifying”, as it tries to methodically represent, step by step, day by day, what a real nuclear holocaust would be like when the bombs start to fall.

Set at the height of the Cold War, the film begins with the nuclear powers losing control, and the target is the city of Sheffield. We see bodies being vaporized by the explosion, people horribly burned further away, and the maddened fight for survival among those who remain, dying of radiation poisoning or freezing in nuclear winter.

The effect is like watching a documentary about a future that was, and always is, a few button presses away. The film forces us to face this future. If more people did it, maybe we'd feel more confident about our chances of it never coming true.

Available on Mubi and YouTube

The Terminator (“Terminator”/ 1984)

There's a recurring argument among moviegoers that “The Terminator” is, first and foremost, a horror film – unlike “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and its subsequent sequels. The first “Terminator” is a non-stop thriller, with Sarah Connor trying to escape a killing machine programmed to kill her at any cost.

SkyNet is perhaps our most iconic modern Frankenstein. The powerful computer network that ends up dominating the world has become a universal reference for out-of-control AI.

In the first film, she hides in the suffocating atmosphere. There are some visions of the dark future at the hands of machines, but they are fleeting. The sequels expanded on the human resistance led by John Connor – in effect, a Luddite resistance. But here, the focus is on Sarah, more on the run than facing the relentless march of the killing machine.

Available on Prime Video

Personal Shopper (2016)

A unique, dark and melancholic film that follows Kristen Stewart's character, who has just lost her twin brother Lewis due to a congenital heart disease, which she also has. Working as personal shopper For a celebrity in Paris, she seeks a sign from her brother, who promised to contact her, in some way, after his death.

She starts receiving text messages from an unknown sender, who she believes to be Lewis, and the film becomes increasingly dark and haunted from there. There is a critique of both technology and consumerist desire permeating the film, and how these factors distort our ability to self-knowledge and understand what we really want.

Available on Globoplay

Eraserhead (1977)

The film is more concerned with the harmful effects of industrialization and poverty. Henry Spencer must cross long, hostile deserts of rubble every time he goes out. He clings to the imaginary world of his radiator, since there's not much else to do, and is fed a meal of lab-grown chicken that releases strange blood when cut.

Shot in black and white, the surrealist horror was director David Lynch's first feature film, produced with the support of the American Film Institute (AFI) while he was studying there.

There's a critique about how industrialization – the factories, the technologies – represents hell for the poor, and how, in such an environment, the prospect of raising a child can seem as daunting as caring for a sniveling alien lizard.

More than anything, Lynch evokes a climate of terror of living with little in such spaces, with the deafening noise of machines always in the background, in a dark wait for the hope that, as the radiator girl says, “in heaven, everything is fine , you have your good things and I have mine.”

Available on Prime Video

Run! (“Get Out” / 2017)

The film's big revelation is that white elites have technology that can literally appropriate blackness, placing a white brain in a black body.

Many real technologies are used to do this in today's world, of course, like social media platforms, which use blackness to gain cultural recognition by taking advantage of black users – while companies that profit from content employ few black employees. .

“Run!” is a great horror film and reminds us that these technologies are in the spotlight, serving the powerful, often hidden in plain sight, operating beneath the surface, while racial equality is celebrated in public. Once again, as protagonist Chris discovers, the only way to resist is to fight the operators of these machines.

Available on Netflix

Godzilla (“Gojira” / 1954)

If you haven't seen it yet, or if it's been years and you barely remember, watch the original film. Made less than a decade after Hiroshima, it is a powerful expression of the horror, pain and shock of a nation traumatized after being devastated by the most destructive technology in history.

Godzilla is the destructive hell unleashed by the nuclear bomb, with the people of Tokyo fleeing in terror from his wrath. Even decades of cultural dilution and exaggerated clashes with monsters failed to mitigate the impact of this work.

Available on Prime Video

Alien, the Eighth Passenger (“Alien”/ 1979)

The greatest sci-fi horror film of all time is also the greatest Luddite horror film of all time.

We have a crew of mostly space workers having to face the most terrible horrors due to a corporate policy, reinforced by Mother (the artificial intelligence that controls the ship) and Ash, the company's android. The Nostromo crew is intensely monitored and controlled, via AI, even in the farthest reaches of space.

Protagonist Ellen Ripley would become an unparalleled action hero thanks to her unique ability to take on the deadly alien. But she is also the only one who opposes corporate power and the technology the company possesses – especially the android Ash.

She becomes iconic for putting humanity first, fighting the lucrative bioweapon and powerful corporate AI. Ellen Ripley is, in other words, a true Luddite.

Available on Disney+

Videodrome – The Video Syndrome (“Videodrome”/ 1983)

It's incredible that four decades ago, “Videodrome” not only predicted the morally degrading race that media technologies, driven by unscrupulous executives, would facilitate, but also communicated so well the feeling of being simultaneously fascinated, disgusted and addicted by the content generated.

The film has numerous striking details – a location where homeless people are herded into cubicles to watch TV, the recurring image of the body literally opening up to consume a videotape, consuming content, and the hallucinatory dream state in which violent and sexual impulses , inspired by the horrors we see on screen, are at once real and unreal.

Even the film's motto (“Long live the new flesh!”, an expression that suggests the fusion between human beings and technology) sounds like an undeniable truth. It is difficult to argue that intense digital mediation, fully integrated into our daily lives, has not altered us on a fundamental level or changed how we think. Long live the new flesh, indeed.

Available on Mubi

This article has been republished with permission from Blood in the Machinenewsletter about AI, Silicon Valley, work and power.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Merchant is a technology writer and journalist. find out more

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