American Haiku's Awful Dreams is the stuff of nightmares

Back in the late '70s and '80s, visual effects teams relished the chance to dig out the ooze and slap on the gore for gloriously prosthetic- and animatronic-led body horror.

With this as reference, American Haiku founder and CCO Thom Glover began work in 2010 on a macabre short, Awful Dreams, utilising practical grotesquerie and the dulcet tones of legendary actor Sir John Hurt. However, plans got shelved, goo got put back in storage and Hurt's VO was relegated to a dusty shelf... until 2026.

Using the skills of American Haiku director and AI artist Michael Hess, Glover has been able to resurrect the project as an experiment in GenAI filmmaking, and wants to churn your stomach in the process.

Written as a gothic poem in blank verse, the film follows a butcher plagued by a nightmare in which the animals he has slaughtered return as a single, grotesque entity intent on exacting their revenge. Bodies warp, creatures merge and forms collapse into one another, with the film leaning enthusiastically into the glitches, distortions and hallucinations of generative AI rather than attempting to disguise them.

With visuals that are genuinely unsettling, cleverly exploiting the technology's ability to skirt the uncanny, Awful Dreams is a neatly produced short that intentionally leaves a bad taste in the mouth.