A complete guide to luddite horror films
Call it movies vs the machine — these are the 15 best SF horror films that tackle tech.
I was knocked out with a nasty cold all last week, which meant this newsletter is a little late. It also meant that I mainlined a bunch of horror movies in a feverish daze, it being Halloween season and all. I mostly opted for my favorite subgenre; science fiction horror. As I argued years ago, it’s a shame that there’s something of a dearth of this stuff. Hollywood is reluctant to touch it, which makes sense, since SF usually wants a big budget, while most horror films, by virtue of being horror films, automatically limit their prospective audiences. Fortunately, SF horror still gets greenlit in tinseltown from time to time, and independent studios and directors find ways to make it work—and when it works, it really works.
Not just because filmmakers can really push aesthetic and tonal boundaries here—this is the prime playground for Cronenbergian body horror and J-horror—but because it’s one of the most effective mediums in which to register a critique of tech and its corporate masters. To express technological anxieties and convey injustices on visceral level that even, say, reading brilliant blog posts by tech journalists can’t match. Especially in the sub-subgenre of SF horror that tackles tech, which is sometimes called ‘techno-horror’, though I tend to resist this term, as it sounds a bit too much like something that might happen at a Skrillex concert. I prefer ‘luddite horror.’
As regular readers of this newsletter know, the real Luddites were not dumb reactionaries who wanted to smash machines because they did not understand them. They were a well-organized and militant labor movement whose members fully grasped the threat certain machines posed to their livelihoods, when used by factory bosses to drive down wages and exploit child labor. The Luddites had a furious critique of technology, and they also knew that if it was being used to oppress or exploit, sometimes the moral thing to do was to destroy it.
SF horror is a genre particularly adept at channeling such moral rage, and expressing that gut feeling of dread and injustice that textual critique simply can’t reach, especially not at scale. It’s one thing to say ‘corporate AI can be dangerous’ and it’s another to forever imagine the foot of a T-800 crushing a human skull. And while plenty such films are blunt and effectively appeal to our lizard brains, lots of luddite horror films have sharp, even nuanced critiques of tech, too.
So, as I was pulling myself out of a stupor, and avoiding social media like the plague, lest my blood pressure spike and induce another trip to the bathroom, I assembled this list of essential luddite horror films; films that challenge, critique, or otherwise set out to smash the machinery hurtful to commonality. They range from classics you’ve probably already seen a few times to the obscure and occasionally grotesque and obscene. Since we’re talking luddite horror here, some of the all-time classics in the SF horror genre won’t make an appearance—SF horror films like The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the Platform have plenty of critical meat on their bones, but their chief targets aren’t tech. And I’m sure I’ve missed some, so do leave your favorites in the comments—and this Halloween, add some machine-breaking to your horror mix.
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*Note that some of these synopses include spoilers.
Event Horizon (1997)
Arguably the gold standard for horror films set in space whose titles don’t rhyme with mammalian, if only because the competition for said category is mostly limited to shark-jumping Leprechaun and Friday the 13th sequels. Event Horizon, famous both for flopping upon release and for that scene where they watch the tapes of the ship’s last crew tearing out their eyeballs and doing other such student film violence to each other, also happens to carry one of the biggest and bluntest ‘man should not mindlessly meddle with technology’ messages in horror.
This is because Event Horizon is essentially a Frankenstein movie that takes place in Neptune’s orbit, with the entire hell-traversing, semi-sentient titular spaceship taking on the role of the Monster, and Sam Neil’s Dr. Weir character and a behind-the-scenes US government sitting in for Dr. Frankenstein. See, Weir designed the Event to bend the laws of spacetime itself, and wound up opening a portal to hell—maximum Frankenstein, you could say, in terms of reckless sowing and humanity reaping. What makes this a good Luddite horror film is that our chief protagonist, Laurence Fishburne’s Captain Miller, takes one look those tapes and makes the correct moral decision to fire every missile he can at the Event Horizon. Weir, even before he gets possessed by the ship/demon, is dedicated to trying to salvage the hell portal. Fortunately, Miller succeeds in destroying Weir and most of the ship, potentially sending them all to hell in the process. But the final scene, in which one of the survivors has a vision of Weir returning, indicates that this impulse, to construct devices that could literally unleash hell on our world, has survived after all.
Double feature: Hellraiser (1987). Okay, it’s kind of a stretch to call Hellraiser sci-fi, but it does feature a device, the Lament Configuration, that when opened promises to deliver its users levels of pain and pleasure that transcend the earthly plane. And it implicitly contains the idea that people who seek it out will suffer an eternity of hell and pain and should maybe not do that.
Invisible Man (2020)
Invisible Man is a lowkey great horror film that shrewdly recalibrates a classic franchise to execute a loaded satire of tech CEOs, toxic masculinity, and (literally) invasive technologies. This is how reboots should be done, in other words. If its reign wasn’t cut short by the 2020 pandemic dead year for the film industry, I bet its cultural imprint would be oh twice as big. It’s top tier mainstream horror, expertly constructed, and also contains what is for my money one of the most ‘holy shit’ scenes of the decade so far.
Elisabeth Moss’s Cecilia Kass is married to Adrian Griffin, an abusive, domineering tech CEO; she escapes their surveillance fortress of a home, then news breaks that Griffin has committed suicide, and then an invisible presence begins tormenting her everywhere she goes. The film drew praise for Moss’s performance and the way it channelled the fear, PTSD, and gaslighting abuse victims endure every day, and it’s just as effective at skewering tech titans. Griffin uses his vast wealth and cutting edge ‘human augmentation’ tech to surveil and torment his ex, prompting we viewers to interrogate why such things are built and for whom. Better yet is the ending, in which the CEO tries to evade accountability for his crimes—his invisible man technology gives him plausible deniability—and Kass responds by taking matters into her own hands.
Double feature: Upgrade (2018) Director Leigh Whannell’s previous feature, Upgrade, also rules; it’s more of a violent revenge thriller than horror I guess, but it similarly puts a malevolent tech titan in its crosshairs, and raises some questions about who AI is serving in the process.
Ringu (1998)
Some four hundred years ago when the Ring movies were a pop culture phenomenon and I was a teenager, I remember everyone being more fixated on the haunted ritual that provides the primary plot mechanic—watch the cursed video, and you’re dead in a week—and the scary visuals, and less on the cutting critique of media technologies that sits at its core. Which is fair, it’s a great hook, a killer updating of the Bloody Mary myth, and who knows, I was a teenager, it is possible I missed some of the critical dialogue taking place at the time. But what struck me on rewatching these films more recently is how directly they transmit the theme that new technologies are bound to replicate the traumas of the past—only more violently, and more frighteningly, because our new technologies are ubiquitous. Every TV holds the potential of beaming in death, every ringing telephone a distant threat of violence. The source of the destruction—the recorded anguish of an abused, disturbed and malevolent child—is more resonant than ever; the kind of darkness that, real or imagined, animates the more harrowing corners of the curdled online media ecosystem.
Ringu in particular holds up, at least for those who retain the social context of VCRs and corded phones, even more so than the American remake. 2002’s The Ring is, naturally, blunter and more interested in leaning on stock horror imagery and generating jump scares, but is still nonetheless pretty solid. One difference I noticed; both films have a scene where the protagonist—a journalist and single mother in both—steps out onto the balcony of her sprawling apartment complex while her ex watches the cursed short. In Ringu, she considers the industrial sprawl, and the transmission infrastructure capable of beaming in such horror; in the Ring, she looks at all the TVs that are on in her neighbors’ apartments. The final twist, that the only way to escape the video’s curse is to copy it, today feels like a pitch black punchline—the way we survive is to grease the wheels, to share the cursed content; you know, to help it go viral.
Double feature: The Ring (2002). It’s still fun and well made, if distinctly hokier—try not to cringe as Naomi Watts makes her entrance, announcing herself as a hard-charging journalist by telling her editor to keep his hands off her column. But the jump scares that replace Ringu’s brooding dread are pretty good, actually.
Chopping Mall (1986)
We have to have at least one ridiculous, deep B-movie horror film on this list, right? Part RoboCop-esque Reagan-era consumerist satire, part cheap 80s slasher flick, and part Short Circuit minus Steve Gutenberg, the misleadingly titled Chopping Mall more than fits the bill. A mall adopts a high-tech security system designed to stop shoplifters, led by three armed ‘Protector’ robots; it goes haywire and starts misidentifying teenagers partying at the mall after hours as intruders and killing them. It’s campy, self-aware, and is essentially an extended screed against privatized security tech loaded with cartoonish violence. It also gets bonus points for including the very Luddite line, “Computer huh? Let’s go trash the fucker,” uttered when the teens set off to destroy the central surveillance system controlling the killer robots.
Double feature: Dawn of the Dead (1978). Perhaps obviously, Romero’s sequel to Night of the Living Dead is by far the superior film, and its satire of consumerism is funnier and more pointed, but I don’t think it quite qualifies it as luddite horror, unless you consider the mall itself a technology, which—the case could be made!
Threads (1984)
Ah Threads. Let’s just come out with it: This is one of the bleakest and most viscerally affecting movies you will ever watch. It’s less a ‘horror film’ and more just ‘horrific’ and that is because it attempts to methodically render, step by step, day by day, what a real-life nuclear holocaust would look like when the bombs started to fall.
Set in the thick of the Cold War, the nuclear powers snap, and the target is London. So you see the bodies vaporized by the blast radius, the horribly burned further out, the crazed and irradiated drive to survive among those left, sifting through the wreckage, dying from radiation poisoning, or ultimately freezing through the eventual nuclear winter. It’s not a found footage film, but the effect is like watching a documentary of a future that was and is always a few presses of a button away. That’s what makes it so vital—it forces you to inhabit such a future. If more people did, we might feel better about our chances of it never coming to pass.
Double feature: Mad Max (1979). Too much its own beast to be considered horror, the first Mad Max, often overshadowed by its higher octane siblings, presents a uniquely queasy and unsettling vision of the onset of the apocalypse.
Terminator (1984)
There’s a running argument among film buffs that the first Terminator is first and foremost a horror film—unlike T2: Judgment Day and the following sequels, which feature dramatic detours and action scenes and more science fictional exposition, the first Terminator is nonstop dread, and Sarah Connor attempting to flee a monolithic killing machine programmed to kill her.
SkyNet is maybe our most prominent modern Frankenstein; it’s universal shorthand for AI run amok, and in this first film it lurks in the suffocating undercurrent. There are a few glimpses of the unspeakably grim future handing our fates to the machines, but they’re fleeting; future installments would build out the contours of John Conner’s human resistance—a Luddite resistance, really—but here, our focus is laser-honed on Sarah, fleeing than fighting the relentless march of the deadly machine.
Double feature: Metalhead (2017). This isn’t a movie per se but a Black Mirror short that stands alone to such a degree it’s fair to include it here. There’s little in the way of irony or satire or dark twists that the show is known for, just a relentless chase scene through an apocalyptic industrial wasteland, where the pursuers are Boston Dynamic robot dogs set to kill on sight.
Cam (2018)
This thoughtful blast of indy horror rules, and seems like it didn’t get the attention it deserves, even though it was produced by the modern horror heavyweight studio Blumhouse. I don’t recall hearing much about it at all when it debuted in 2018. I discovered it through Naomi Klein’s book Doppleganger, and I’m glad I did. The film, which was written by a former cam performer, takes a sharp look not just at the perils of online sex work, but of precarious digital work of every kind; where the mad pursuit of rankings and microtransactions and always having to perform a self for customers. For creators, always having to push the envelope, to find new and often darker means of drawing new audiences and sustaining fidgety old ones.
And then there’s the issue of digital identity, which gives the film its central conceit—Lola, a rising performer on a popular cam site, finds herself suddenly locked out of her performer account, and a doppleganger there in her stead, making her money. Lola’s struggles with a distant and ineffectual and probably outsourced customer service rep, with the police, who dehumanize and barely register what she does for work at all, and with the growing sense of helplessness pervading her life, give the film a pulsing sense of dread. I wish the ending landed a bit more, but even so, this is biting Luddite horror.
Double feature: Emily the Criminal (2022). So this is definitely not a ‘horror’ film, more of a ‘thriller’, and unlike Cam, there’s no supernatural or sinister technological conceit. It’s just a really good film that packs the anxiety and precariousness of modern gig work into a powerful and stressful narrative.
Tetsuo - the Iron Man (1989)
Easily the most unhinged piece on this list, this surrealist cyberpunk seizure of a film is also maybe the hardest to watch, both due to the queasy, rapid-fire editing and the horrifying visuals on screen. There’s not much of a plot—a man who has just inserted some kind of metal device into his own leg is the victim of a hit and run, and both he and the driver of the car who hit him watch their bodies slowly become literally overtaken by steel, scrap, and wire. The result is sort of like JG Ballard on acid—the driver and his wife have sex after the crash and disposing of the body, in a nod to Crash—a visceral look at how we are willfully losing ourselves to technology, by choice, by force, or by assimilation. Tetsuo’s frenetic visuals revel in the blind ecstasies and exhilaration of being consumed by an uncertain sort of progress, and in the psychosexual allure of technological augmentation and violence (Spoiler: at one point the driver’s genitals transform into a deadly drill). Ultimately, it seems to suggests the two most plausible outcomes for a world in which our selves and our bodies are overrun by industrial technology is we either embrace its violent potential power, or we become servile to it.
Personal Shopper (2016)
With the rise of so-called griefbots, AI approximations of dead loved ones that startup founders say can help the bereaved cope with loss, it’s a good time to check out this sleeper Kristin Stewart-starring ghost story. A singular, eerie, and melancholic film, it follows Stewart’s character, who has just lost her twin brother Lewis to a congenital heart disease that she has, too. Working as a personal shopper for a celebrity in Paris, she looks for a signal from her brother, who promised he’d contact her, somehow, from the afterlife. She starts receiving text messages from an unknown sender, who she believes to be Lewis, and the film only gets darker and more haunted from there. There’s a critique both of technology and of consumerist desire woven throughout—even the video chat Stewart’s character logs with her boyfriend, who’s working as a contractor in Oman, feels quietly cursed—and how these things have distorted our ability to know ourselves, and what we actually want. And oh man, that ending.
Eraserhead (1977)
Perhaps no surprise here, but Eraserhead’s still got it, nearly five decades on. David Lynch became famous, nearly to the point of parody, for examining the dark underbelly of small town and suburban life. Eraserhead, however, is more concerned with the sickly effects of industrialization and poverty. (And with childrearing of course, but we’re here to talk Luddite horror.) Poor Henry Spencer must traverse long hostile wastelands of industrial rubble anytime he goes out, he fixates on the imagined inner world of his radiator, since there isn’t much else to do, and is treated to a dinner of lab-grown chicken that oozes a sickly blood when carved.
There’s an interrogation, absent in a lot of Lynch’s future work, of how industrialization; our factories, our technologies; amounts to hell for the poor—how in an environment like that, the prospect of raising a child might seem as frightening as rearing a wailing alien lizard. More than anything, Lynch conjures a mood of dread of living with little in such spaces, the cacophonous thrumming of machinery always in the background, a grim holding out for the hope, that, as the radiator girl puts it, “in heaven, everything is fine, you’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine.”
Get Out (2017)
What makes Get Out Luddite horror? Lots: the film’s big reveal is that white elites possess a technology that can quite literally reappropriate blackness—forcibly placing a white brain in a black body. All sorts of real technologies are used to do this in the real world, of course; social media platforms that harvest blackness for cultural cache, relying on black users while companies that profit from the content hire few black employees. Which is to say nothing of the horrific technologies of the past used for decades to control black bodies and exploit their labor.
Get Out is a great horror film, obviously—it deserves the accolades it’s received—and it’s a reminder that these technologies are still prominent, still serving the powerful, often tucked just out of sight, operating under the surface, even as the powerful are outwardly celebrating racial progress. Once again, as protagonist Chris finds, the only surefire way to push back is to fight, with necessary force, against the operators of such machinery.
Double feature: Nope (2022). Jordan Peele’s third film is less narratively propulsive, perhaps, its critique of racism less barbed, but it’s a great film, too, and takes aim at the machinery of Hollywood, and of producing our stained and unequal myths.
Godzilla (1954)
I still remember the first time I saw the original theatrical cut of Gojira, at a screening in New York—I was floored. I had always written Godzilla off as the hokey rubber-costumed creature feature that always seemed to be showing up in one interchangeable sequel or another on the deeper reaches of cable, fighting Mothra, or crab monsters, or whatever.
But if you haven’t yet, or if it’s been years and you barely remember it, go watch the original. Made less than a decade after Hiroshima, it’s such a powerful airing out of the horror, grief, and shock of a nation traumatized after being devastated by the single most destructive technology in human history. Godzilla is the gnashing hell unleashed by the bomb, of course, the populace of Tokyo fleeing in terror from its wrath. Even decades of cultural dilution and hammy monster matchups have done nothing to blunt its power.
Double feature: The Host (2006). Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature isn’t quite a horror movie, but it isn’t quite anything else either. Funny, dark, and riding a broadside against industrial pollution, anyone who dug Parasite will be into this one, too.
Pulse (2001)
This is maybe the film on this list that most filled me with a sense of sustained dread, which is really saying something. It also might still be the best cinematic treatment of how the internet and automation breed isolation and loneliness? Maybe not just in horror, but period? Two decades after its release, and long after the internet took over our lives? The next movie down may have the ultimate claim to prescience when it comes to critiquing how consuming technologically mediated content might affect us, but it’s a tossup for sure, and either way, Pulse is way up there.
Pulse takes place in the early days of the internet, when users who come into contact with something called the Forbidden Room begin either disappearing entirely, or killing themselves. There are haunting, disturbed shots of the site, grainy video feeds of lonely people staring into livestreamed webcams. There’s the cursed imagery when someone disappears, claimed by the ghosts of the Forbidden Rooms. But even more stunningly, to me, there are the vast and haunted empty spaces that the remaining characters occupy, in arcades and supermarkets (in what seems to be a cursed callout to the rise of self-checkout) and robotics labs. No, it doesn’t make sense, exactly (does the internet?????), but in a way few films have managed, it conveys the emptiness, the hollowness, and the potential for despair to arise from then-ascendent online networks. Most of us know someone who we’ve ‘lost’ to the internet’s darker spaces, and there’s an epidemic of teen depression, stemming from the same roots. Pulse saw it coming.
Videodrome (1983)
Alright, let’s be honest; this entire list could be probably be filled with David Cronenberg films—the Fly, eXistenz, Scanners, and so on all could have made the cut—but I decided to limit it to one, and it was obvious which one it would be. It’s honestly wild that, four decades ago, Videodrome not only anticipated the depraved race to the bottom that media technologies, helmed by unscrupulous executives, would facilitate, but so effectively communicate the feeling of being simultaneously transfixed, repulsed, and addicted to the content that would spew forth as a result.
There are so many incredible touches in the film—a shelter where the unhoused are ushered into cubicles to watch TV, the recurring image of the body opening up to literally consume a videotape, to consume content, and the hallucinatory dream state where violent and sexual impulses, inspired by the horrors we’ve witnessed on a screen, are simultaneously real and unreal. Even the maxim made famous by the film rings with undeniable truth. It’s hard to argue that the intense digital mediation that is utterly entwined with our daily being has not fundamentally altered us or how we think. Long live the new flesh, indeed.
Triple feature: The Fly (1986). eXistenz (1998). The Fly is great, but you probably already know that; it’s another classic Frankenstein story, albeit very gruesome and very moving. eXistenz is less seen, and came out in something of a fallow period for Cronenberg, but it takes on gaming and VR, and it’s pretty killer, too.
Alien (1979)
What else? The greatest science fiction horror film of all time is also the greatest luddite horror film of all time. Put aside the immortal HR Giger creature design, the infamous chest-burster scene, its immaculate pacing and all that, and you’ve got a largely blue collar crew of space rig workers thrust into the direst of horrors by corporate policy—policy that’s enforced by Mother, the ship’s AI, and Ash, the company android. Watching the film again recently, it’s bludgeoningly clear how central class politics are to the film, and how resonant they remain today. The first dialogue in the film regards a pay dispute between the lowest-paid workers—the mechanics—and management. And a brooding sense of inevitability governs everyone’s actions, even the captain’s, who despairingly takes his orders from Mother.
The Nostromo crew has, in other words, been intensely surveilled and controlled, via an AI, even deep into the reaches of outer space. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley would become an iconic action hero thanks to her unique ability to fight off the xenomorph, but she’s also the only one in the film who stands up to corporate power, and to the technology it owns—especially the android Ash—which she continues to do in subsequent films. She is iconic for putting humanity first, for fighting against immensely profitable biological weaponry and powerful corporate AI. Ellen Ripley is, in other words, one hell of a Luddite.
Septuple feature: Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Romulus. What can I say? I love the Alien films; they’re all worth watching, none are “bad” and some are great. I am even a Prometheus apologist. And these are all top form luddite horror films.
Proposed double feature with Pulse - Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue!
Brian: really excellent list