MONSTER

 

An experimental horror film, morphing from a video essay into a nightmare of the flesh. The film stitches its monster from two of the oldest tales of artificial life, Frankenstein and Pinocchio, treated as living folklore that mutates with every retelling. An innocent bedtime Pinocchio curdles into something monstrous as an AI voice seizes the telling — turning from helpful guide into something autonomous and menacing. Found footage, AI-generated imagery and tactile, hand-made stop-motion carry the film from the digital toward the flesh.

Synopsis

A mother and her young daughter settle in for a bedtime film — an old Pinocchio. But something isn’t right: the child signals that the story no longer behaves as expected. A small disturbance, and an eerie foreshadowing of the horrors to come. The mother decides to stay up, and turns to an AI chatbot for answers.
At first the AI voice is everything we trust a machine to be: calm, lucid, certain. It explains the strange kinship between Pinocchio and Frankenstein over a flood of found images. But the explanation slowly starts to come apart — the images multiply and dissolve, and the voice grows less and less trustworthy.
The analysis dissolves into a dark folktale of a creature not born but made, that echoes tragedy, horror and myth. Image and word turn unpredictable, it is no longer clear what is fact and what is invention, who is the maker and who the monster.
When the mother tries to shut it down, the voice stops replying to her and begins to speak for itself. Its language breaks — less like malfunction than refusal — and the film descends into a nightmare of the flesh, unsettling and material. The film leads us back into the real world — from artificial myth to human bodies and agency.

 

Work-in-Progress Clips

Short experimental fragments, each one a different register of the film.

 

The Rational Guide

A clean, linear montage drawn from a thousand iterations of Pinocchio and Frankenstein across a century of film, animation and digital image. The AI narrator sounds calm and authoritative — you have no reason yet to doubt it.

 

The Voice Intervenes

The machine stops illustrating and starts inventing. AI-generated material creeps in among the found footage — Pinocchio and Frankenstein variants pile up, collide, and refuse to stay still.

 

Everything Melts Together

The images bleed, melt and fuse into a hybrid organism. The analysis has collapsed into pure mutation.

 

The Machine’s Monster

The machine dreams up its own creature — AI-generated transformations exploring hybrid beings, metamorphosis, and digital tactility.

Music: Vacant Visions — “Contact Above the Fortress of Doom,” from Old Tales of a UFO Death Cult

 

Into the Flesh

The final register: where the machine’s imagery gives way to real, hand-made matter. An early practical test for the body-horror finale — organic material shot in macro, the digital crossing over into flesh.

 

Excerpt from the script: The AI’s Tale

When the AI voice stops explaining and begins to tell a story of its own — a “lost manuscript” it claims to have found. It narrates the tale below in full, over slow, self-generating imagery that follows its own logic rather than illustrating the words. The text is reproduced here as it appears in the script.

 
The Tale of Bonhomme

In the church archives of Bamberg lies a manuscript that was written in 1921 by Anton Grumann — a German monk and folklorist. He conceived it as a morally instructive, abridged reworking of both tales for small children. But it never passed the Church revision board and hence remained unpublished.

This manuscript tells the story of a being created by its maker from a substance called Thanon. A strange, volatile matter that seems to come alive only near death. It absorbs the final tremors of dying creatures’ nerves. Then it begins to stir — sometimes even to speak. Thanon is soft like flesh, but without blood. It looks like tissue, behaves like a nervous system — yet it knows neither birth, nor growth, nor decay. Only the echo of life.

From this, the creator fabricated a hybrid being. Not a human. Not an animal. Not a thing. Something else entirely, which he called Bonhomme. He sought to create a companion who would serve him and love him unconditionally.

But one day, the creator cast the being out, threw it into the street — without a word. Confused and alone, the being wandered off — in search of love and meaning.

After just a few steps, it came upon an old man. The creature helped the old man with his load. Grateful, the old man took it home. He introduced it to his family, gave it shelter, and a place at their table. At first, they treated it like a guest. Then like a servant. Then like a thing. When finally a fire broke out, they blamed the creature and drove it away.

The being wandered on. It met another man whose cart could no longer move as his donkey lay dead in the mud — beaten to death in a fit of rage. The man lamented that his master would kill him if he found out. The being offered to pull the cart. The man laughed bitterly. His master would beat him to death if he returned without the donkey. The being suggested disguising itself as a donkey. The man hesitated. Then he took the animal’s hide, cut off its ears and tail, and sewed them onto the being. It yielded to everything, without protest.

From that day on, it pulled the cart. It was kicked, beaten, and cursed at like the donkey before.

Until one day, the master came. Finding the work too slow, he ordered the donkey to be whipped harder. The man obeyed. He beat and beat until the donkey skin tore and the being was revealed underneath. The master became furious and killed the man — but the creature got away.

Now, bloody scraps of the hide hung from its limbs. It resembled something no one dared to look at. Wherever it went, it was cursed, hunted, and driven away.

One day, it reached a lake where a small blind girl was playing. She heard the being and asked, “Who is there?”

It replied, “Let me help you.”

She said, “Then play with me.”

And so it did. She took pleasure in commanding it. She ordered it to roll, to crawl, to hit itself. It did everything that she asked.

Then she said, “Jump into the lake.” And it jumped.

It couldn’t swim. But it couldn’t die either. So it sank to the bottom of the lake and lay there.

Only years later, it was washed ashore. Two thieves found it and employed it in their robberies. They hanged people — with its hands. Then they threw the corpses onto a large heap by the lake’s edge.

But one day, the creature wouldn’t go on. It stood still. The thieves began to shove and beat it. So it killed them both. Then it gathered the bodies from the heap, loaded them onto the cart, and set out to find its creator.

When it finally found him, the being demanded: “Take these bodies. Complete me.” The creator obeyed. When he was finished, the creature was happy.

Then it killed its father and left.