Lately, I’ve been experimenting with using Google’s Gemini AI model to generate short horror films. There is a strange, uncanny valley in AI-generated visuals that aligns perfectly with the unsettling nature of the horror genre.
For my latest creation, Sweet Dreams, I wanted to tap into that specific brand of anxiety.
Liminal Spaces and Nightmares
The concept is heavily inspired by two things that keep me up at night: the eerie, empty aesthetic of the Backrooms, and fragments of my own recurring dreams.
There's something deeply chilling about the Backrooms—those endless corridors of mono-yellow carpet, fluorescent hum, and non-Euclidean geometry. It mirrors the structure of a dream, where you understand the space you're in, yet it makes absolutely no logical sense.
By feeding Gemini descriptive prompts based on my own nightmare journals—focusing on architectural isolation, shifting perspectives, and that feeling of being watched by an unseen presence—I wanted to see if the AI could capture that distinct flavor of dread.
Here is the result of that experiment:
Let me know what you think. Does the uncanny aesthetic of AI footage enhance the horror, or is it too abstract?