Haunting

Images generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become quite popular on the internet. There are several applications and tools widely available that allow users to create such images by simply entering the text or phrase in AI text-to-image generators. But in recent weeks, a corpse-like figure has spooked social media, which the users claim "haunts every image she touches". The AI-generated woman was first discovered by Supercomposite, a Swedish musician, who has been posting images of the figure on his Twitter…

In a less stressful world, the premise of AMC’s new animated series Pantheon from Craig Silverstein would feel much more far-fetched and implausible the way some of Black Mirror’s more fantastical episodes used to. But at a time when people use phrases like “quiet quitting” with a straight face, a show about corporations racing to see who can perfect technology to turn workers into hyperproductive automatons stripped of their humanity feels far less fictional than it ought to. Pantheon tells a series of…

After almost 40 years, Wim Wenders’s Euro-Americanist masterpiece Paris, Texas feels as richly mysterious and mesmeric as ever: an outsider’s connoisseur-perspective on the US with its wailing, shuddering slide guitar by Ry Cooder which became as much of an instant classic as Ennio Morricone’s theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It mimicked the desolate beauty of the Texas desert and the micro-landscape of the star’s own weatherbeaten face. He was, of course, the unforgettably gaunt and haunted Harry Dean Stanton,…

For Jamil Jan Kochai, 30, fiction is a “comforting space” in which he explores his family’s collective memory. His debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar (2019), drew on his childhood memories of visiting Logar in eastern Afghanistan. His latest, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Penguin Random House), is a collection of 12 short stories. Excerpts from an interview: The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is about the inheritance of loss and the intergenerational sorrow running through Afghan-American…

A trailer has been released for the next instalment of the Layers of Fear series, Layers of Fears. The third game in the series will be released in early 2023. Layers of Fears will be developed by Bloober Team, the Polish outfit that created the series. The Layers of Fear series began in 2016 and was followed up with Layers of Fear 2 in 2019. Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno stated in a news release that the original intention was to remake these two games, however, this project eventually became Layers of Fears: “Our…

Dark fantasy is always a tricky sell at the box office, especially if the project in question deals with hard-hitting themes and emotional undercurrents that are either too hardcore or not appealing enough for younger audiences. Sadly, A Monster Calls didn’t come close to turning critical acclaim into commercial success. Armed with a budget of $43 million, J.A. Bayona’s haunting literary adaptation could only struggle to a $47 million global haul, despite an 86 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 81 percent user…

Ever wondered what a black hole would sound like? Black hole sounds are out of the human hearing range, but new technology has made it possible to create a wider range of tones so that it can be assumed how it may sound like. Listen here: New sonifications of well-known black holes have been released for #BlackHoleWeek⚫!#1 The Perseus galaxy cluster — famous for sound waves detected around its black hole by Chandra, some 57 octaves below middle C. And... (1/2)…