Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | February 25, 2026
A lot of gormless tech bros and bean-counting studio heads are determined to push the narrative that AI-generated filmmaking is not only inevitable but a positive step forward for the medium. The big plagiarism machine’s move into union busting is good, actually! You see, the artistry of humans is just too expensive and what viewers really crave is retina-burning slop with a side-order of uncanny valley. While AI shills like Natasha Lyonne try to pretend their AI investments are working side by side with real artists, others have decided to drop all pretences and go straight for entirely-generated garbage.
The Living Corpse (怪奇！死肉の男, Kaiki! Shiniku no Otoko) is a horror comic by writer, mangaka, and director Hideshi Hino. Written in 1986, it was inspired by Hino’s own fears and an experience where he collapsed from overwork. It follows a man who seems to survive death but whose body slowly begins to decompose. It’s dark, sad, and suitably gross. A movie would seem like a good idea for some classic body horror fun. Alas, The Living Corpse adaptation we’re getting is entirely the work of AI.
According to AnimeHunch, ‘director’ Takeshi Sone is working from a screenplay developed using ChatGPT, and a suite of AI tools were used to ‘make’ everything else, including Midjourney, Sora, and Runway. The film’s voice cast does include a ton of legendary Japanese actors, but via AI replication and entirely in English. And, shock horror, it looks like crap.
Just slop all the way down. Bad lighting, uncanny ‘acting’, stilted voices, no sense of mise-en-scene, derivative music, and the gore looks cheap. What horror fan wants this? Or any human being with eyeballs, frankly?
This is especially insulting if you know anything about Hideshi Hino. In 1985, he directed a horror film named Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood. It’s one of the most notoriously disturbing and disgusting movies ever made. Its scenes of violence and mutilation were considered so realistic that many people thought it was real. One such person was reportedly Charlie Sheen. No, seriously, he allegedly watched this film and was so sure that he had witnessed an actual murder that he called the FBI to report it. Hino and his team had to show the authorities a making-of documentary to show how the practical gore effects were made. This story is maybe only partly true but it is true that someone in the UK was fined for importing a copy of Guinea Pig 2 into the country because, while it was not technically a snuff film, it was seen as so realistic that it might as well have been one.
You can choose for yourself whether or not this is a great achievement — certainly, I don’t recommend watching the movie as it’s just really disturbing and gross — but at least Hino made it himself. Who are these AI-generated movies for? I still don’t think there’s a real audience for 80+ minutes of this guff, although I am wearily aware that the increasing normalization of this slop has left a lot of people with a greater tolerance for it than myself. But this looks bad, right? It looks rubbish. If you love classic splatterpunk horror, surely the appeal is in the practical blood and guts, and the visceral fear of real humans? These studios and tech bros really think we’re dumb and will accept any crap if we’re told we’ve no other choice.
