A short horror film featuring a previously unheard performance from Sir John Hurt has finally been completed – nearly 16 years after it was first conceived.
Brooklyn-based creative agency American Haiku has released Awful Dreams, a long-dormant project written by founder and CCO Thom Glover and originally developed in 2010 as a practical-effects horror film inspired by The Thing and Alien.
The film centers on a butcher haunted by a nightmare in which the animals he has slaughtered return as a single grotesque entity determined to destroy him. Written as a gothic poem in blank verse, the project gained early momentum when Hurt recorded the film’s narration.
But repeated funding setbacks prevented the production from moving forward, and the materials — including Hurt’s performance – were ultimately shelved.
That changed in 2024, when Glover connected with director and AI artist Michael Hess.
Rather than recreate the film as originally envisioned, the pair rebuilt it using generative AI tools, leaning into the technology’s unpredictability instead of trying to hide it.
“Most AI films are trying to show how close the technology can get to reality. We were much more interested in where it breaks,” Hess said. “There’s something deeply unsettling about imagery that almost makes sense but doesn’t quite resolve. That tension became the visual language of the film.”
The result is a deliberately unstable visual world where bodies shift, forms collapse, and images hover somewhere between recognizable and wrong. Take a look below:
For Glover, that aesthetic ultimately gave the project a form it had never found through more traditional means. “Awful Dreams is a project we tried to get off the ground in multiple different ways for many years,” he said, “but it found its true expression in the nightmareish qualities of early AI models.”
Hurt’s narration provides the film with its human anchor. The actor, who died in 2017, recorded the performance for a version of the project that was never produced and never made it into the finished film.
REELated:
REPORT: D&AD warns AI could erase junior roles in advertising
That contrast – a human performance preserved from 2010 paired with a production process that only became possible years later – became central to the final work.
“This project sits at the intersection of old and new in a way you rarely see,” said executive producer Mateo Suarez. “A script from 2010, a performance from Sir John Hurt, and a production process that only became possible recently.”
Suarez added that the team viewed AI less as a replacement for traditional filmmaking and more as a tool that made this version of the film possible.
“For us, it’s less about what AI replaces and more about what it enables,” he said.
At a moment when AI filmmaking is often discussed in terms of efficiency, automation or realism, Awful Dreams takes the opposite route. Its filmmakers use the technology’s flaws as part of the storytelling, turning distorted movement and unstable imagery into an extension of the film’s nightmare logic.
The project has also found an audience on the festival circuit, drawing attention both for its experimental use of AI and the unusual 16-year journey that finally brought Hurt’s performance to the screen.
