Good morning 🐣

If you’ve got a case of the spine-tingling creepy crawlies, you better listen to your gut; there just might be someone watching you… because these days you can be stalked from literally anywhere. The Internet is awash with photos and information never intended for anyone outside your immediate circle: a billion horror stories just waiting to happen.

As an experiment, Dries Depoorter recently wrote software that takes footage from online, publicly-accessible surveillance cameras and compares them to Instagram posts that have the same GPS coordinates and timestamps. It’s an interesting and terrifying project called “The Follower” that allows you to watch someone take a selfie as if you’re a stalker observing from across the street. “If one person can do this,” asks Depoorter, “what can a government do?”

Of course the project itself comes with its own privacy and copyright concerns, concerns that can also be found on an even grander scale in “A.I.-generated art.” You’ve probably seen or heard about that lately, where you can type up any scenario and the computer will generate its best visual approximation. The problem is that these programs are drawing from a massive trove of pre-existing photos and artwork, most likely without permission, and even somehow from people’s private medical records.

Perhaps one of the creepier products of this computer generated revolution is that one person seems to have cracked open a portal to an otherworldly dimension… and brought something back. A Swedish artist going by the name Supercomposite somehow created a haunting visage that just won’t disappear. No matter what they do, the face keeps reappearing in various permutations, folded into the code’s history: a digital ghost. The artist has named this woman Loab. Here’s one early appearance:

You can read more about the process that led to Loab’s creation and further experiments with the algorithm.

Sweet dreams.

A brief intermission 🍿

Now watch this 👀

We all have at least one stalker that will always catch up to us, no matter how many times we shake him: Death.

“It Follows” (2014 • Netflix and on demand • watch the trailer) is a fun, clever, kinda artsy little horror flick about a curse that gets passed on through sex. Some sort of entity will follow you — always on foot, always at a slow and steady pace — until it catches you or you’ve passed it on to someone else. Of course if it catches that person, you’re back to being next in line. And “catching you” ain’t pretty. The other hiccup is that it can take on the form of anyone, so you’ll never know exactly who it is or when it’s coming for you, and no one else can see it unless they too have been cursed.

Cue “always looking over your shoulder.”

Cue “paranoia.”

Cue “desperation.”

The movie’s working with a lot of themes: the steady marching of time, STDs, sexual assault and trauma, not being able to fully trust anyone, even socio-economic class and screwing over the poor to save yourself. Though not outright terrifying, it’s got some great moments, like when:

• the main character is on a date and only one of them can see a stranger standing in the back of a movie theater,

• a tall man emerges from the shadows directly behind her friends, and

• the entity takes on the form of a naked man on top of her roof.

There’s also some really interesting production design and camera shots. The movie focuses on a lot of empty spaces and everyday objects in broad daylight, lots of camera pans, lots of times from a distance, so you’re always waiting for something to happen. It’s a movie about apprehension and the terrible choices we make because of that.

What I absolutely adore though are the weird, little things that are wholly unnecessary but give it a little somethin’ extra. There’s lots of old stuff in this movie:

• vehicles from several eras,
• CRT TVs, even some stacked on top of each other, and
• landline phones.

But it’s not all vintage romanticism; the girl in the opening scene has a cell phone and another character has some weird futuristic clamshell tablet where she’s reading Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.” It’s just a quirky movie that’s trying to evoke a sense of timelessness. Also everyone drinks their cola straight out of the can with a straw. I love it.

Until next time! 👻