Schofield soon realized that he was not alone. A small group of moviegoers and artists have harnessed the power of generative AI tools to reimagine classic films, or create entirely new ones, from some of the world’s most recognizable names. In December, creator Johnny Darrell went viral for by Jodorowsky thunder, a reinvention of the classic film under the gaze of avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. Inspired by Darrell, Tacoma, Wash.-based Rob Sheridan, former art director of Nine Inch Nails, used AI to create by Jodorowsky Frasier.
Sheridan, 42, calls this AI-enabled move “The New Unreal.” Practitioners include a New Zealand-based illustrator creating a Western space on Instagram and a sculptor from Austin, Texas, make fake retro sci-fi tv shows. Another Indian creator is using AI image generators to create his own rich vein of Sci-fi with a flavor of Southeast Asia.
“We’ve started to see this technology as something of a dream engine,” Sheridan said, “harnessing a kind of distorted visual consciousness to explore things that never were, or never will be, or could never be. They hit you in a weird way, because they feel so plausible.”
Schofield said he doesn’t know why his reworking of Cronenberg caught fire so quickly. He had posted multiple previous experiments on Imgur, Reddit, and Twitter, all of which only got 50-100 likes. “The intention was not to create clickbait, but I think it became that,” he said. “Many people reposted it and said: This one is terrifying. This guy doesn’t understand Cronenberg at all.“Every time they did that, it would spread more and cause another wave of criticism, which caused another, and another, and another.
Schoefield said the text of his tweet, simply “David Cronenberg’s Galaxy of Meat (1985)”, might have given the wrong impression that he was trying to fool Twitter. “There is no real intent behind this title other than, Oh yeah this looks like this could be that,” he said. “But it seemed to really piss people off, and I think someone like Cronenberg is maybe famous enough to have a fan base.
“There are a lot of people who have opinions about what is Cronenberg’s aesthetic and what isn’t,” he continued, “and what a misinterpretation of his style it is.” He fears that people will think he is trying to reduce Cronenberg’s work to mere body horror.
The frames themselves were generated by giving Midjourney the notice of a “DVD screenshot” of different scenes from the film. The Empire Strikes Back. “So it was like: All made of skin and joints, tendons, nerves, umbilical cords, stomachs, arteriesadded Schoefield.
Getting the imager to gore was quite a challenge, as was getting Cronenberg’s style. “You can’t even write ‘Cronenberg’ in Midjourney,” Schofield said. (Sheridan thinks this is because of him: He did a series of Cronenberg-inspired images of the Met Gala in May, and soon after, the term “Cronenberg” was banned from the tool.)
