Why Eli Roth’s Use of AI is a Terrible Sign of Things to Come for Horror

Welcome to Knockout Horror. Today, I’m just going to rant a little because, quite frankly, I’m feeling a little bit disenchanted and a little bit pissed off. Let’s talk about Why Eli Roth’s Use of AI is a Terrible Sign of Things to Come for Horror.

A Quick Catch Up – The Ice Cream Man Controversy

For those of you who don’t know, Eli Roth has caused a whole heap of controversy lately with the release of his latest movie Ice Cream Man. Aside from how awful the film is, viewers noticed the liberal use of generative AI scattered throughout.

Naturally, people were pissed off and they related that directly to Roth, himself. Roth, in a staggeringly misguided attempt at damage control, denied ever using AI in the movie at all.

Now, apparently Roth didn’t realise that horror fans aren’t complete idiots. They had already spotted the AI studio that was listed in the credits of the film and they immediately fired back with that information.

Roth, eating a huge slice of humble pie, walked back his comments and admitted to using generative AI, which only pissed viewers off even further.

Anyone who may have enjoyed Ice Cream Man for its crass, and completely tasteless, approach to horror was now far less likely to give the movie a pass.

Now, it may seem like the viewers won and the public panning that Roth and Ice Cream Man received will be enough to deter future horror filmmakers from using generative AI, but allow me to explain how I really don’t think that is the case.

AI can be a useful tool but…

AI is an enormous hot button topic at the moment, as I am sure most of you know. Allow me to be honest with you, for a second.

AI, as a tool, is pretty valuable for content creators; I have even used it on this site extremely sparingly. Luckily, I learned to code a decently long time ago so I am more than capable of managing a website without the need to vibe code using AI. I do, however, use AI to do some of my proof-reading.

As I have mentioned tons on this site before, I have bipolar disorder and, much of the time, my concentration levels are not where I would prefer them to be.

AI helps to cut a bit of time and stress from me having to re-read an article over and over to check for spelling errors, etc. I’ll sometimes use it to generate my schema, as well, because that’s just repetitive and mindless.

As a tool to help with dirty work, AI is useful and I don’t believe people necessarily deserve criticism for using it. But…

Where does the line between tool and paint brush blur?

Where AI is an enormous problem is when the line between useful tool and paint brush begins to blur.

I’ve seen people actively arguing the point that the generative AI images and videos that they are sharing are their creations because they fashioned the prompt that led to it being generated.

People are legitimately, and unflinchingly, arguing that AI is a tool to produce content in the same way that a paint brush is a tool for an artist or a piano is a tool for a musician.

That’s a ludicrous assertion to anyone with a brain but the people who believe that will stand by it.

Imagine someone’s dog taking a crap on the sidewalk and it happening to look somewhat like the Mona Lisa. Only for the person walking the dog to claim that it is their artistic creation because they fed the dog that produced it. It’s ridiculous!

The problem comes when that train of thought spreads. Sure, to most people, it looks and smells like dog shit. If they ramble on about it long enough, however, someone else will eventually wonder whether their dog can produce some free artwork that they can lay a claim to and they will do the same thing.

The repercussions are hugely damaging because, eventually, people will become used to this way of thinking.

The problem hits the little people first

So let’s talk about how important it is that people loudly object to generative AI in horror by focusing on the little people that make this extraordinarily special genre work.

I’ve covered tons of tiny indie horror movies on this website. Most were made by very small teams on microscopic budgets and many reached out to me requesting that I give honest criticism of their films. After all, sites like mine are some of the only media coverage they will get.

Titles like The Death of Us, New Fears Eve, and Loner, among many others.

In fact, these movies are what made me adapt my scoring system to grade on a curve. Such is the dedication and talent of these filmmakers that horror absolutely depends on.

These people become so tightly invested in their projects that it almost borders on obsession. It’s not just the organisation of the production or the monetary aspect. It’s the relentless promotion that they undertake for years and years after that doesn’t pay them a single cent.

When all is said and done, these movies (many of which are bloody great) arrive to virtually no fanfare, limited views, no monetary gain, and a completely unforgiving audience.

Loner was one of my favourite found-footage movies in quite awhile but it’s currently sitting with a baffling 4.8/10 score on IMDb. These guys are fighting an uphill battle from the very get go because most horror fans simply don’t enjoy low-budget films.

If we accept the use of generative AI in horror movies, eventually it will crush these guys completely. Sure, it’s just a few scenes here and there at the moment but, eventually, it will be entire movies. In fact, it’s happening as we speak; we will go into that a little later.

Studios will absolutely dominate the entire genre with AI slop made for virtually no money at all and the little people who fill in the gaps in the horror industry will get even less of a look in than they do at the moment.

Don’t believe me? Go and have a look on YouTube. It’s absolutely packed with AI slop that’s sending genuine, hardworking creators into the abyss.

It’s even impacting people like me

I hope you don’t mind me talking about myself for a few minutes. You can skip this if you like but I promise it is relevant to the discussion.

I’ve been grinding on Knockout Horror since 2019. I’ve not always been consistent but the past few years I’ve been relentless and I’m at well over 650 articles as just one person working entirely alone.

The site almost entirely vanished off of Google for multiple years back in 2023 due to the CMS that I was using creating tons of duplicate links. I didn’t even realise the issue until late 2024 when I corrected it. July of the following year, I bounced back in a huge way.

I was easily hitting 70,000 views a month and I suddenly felt a reinvigorated desire to make the site exactly what I wanted it to be when I first started. Thus, I began restructuring articles to prioritise people who struggle with concentration, phone users, and people who simply had busy minds.

I wanted Knockout Horror to be the only horror website that you could come to and get answers almost instantly. Is a film worth watching? Is it scary? What happened in the ending? You can visit any of my reviews or ending explained articles and the answers are there in the first scroll.

Unfortunately, I timed it very poorly. I was making the changes right in the middle of a major Google Core Update. Anyone who works in web design knows that is a terrible idea. It floored my google rankings completely for the second time.

I’m pretty much a ghost on the world’s biggest search engine while still ranking impressively on Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. When you look into my actual statistics, my average user engagement rate and engagement time is insanely enviable.

There’s nothing wrong with my content, I’m just being arbitrarily penalised.

How does this relate to AI?

While Google is almost completely ignorant to my existence, life still goes on and I still have to add content to this website.

Server bills still hit and my access to early review copies of movies is drastically reduced. I’m later than everyone else with content, my audience is entirely narrowed, and my site is essentially devalued.

The only thing that is the same is the amount of work I put in.

I’m still writing and I am still working but I am not getting anything out of it. For every article I sit down to type, I have to find a justification to step away from doing things that I enjoy and don’t, frankly, resent.

All the while, every opportunity for me to claw my way back up is made more and more unlikely due to content farm style horror sites that use generative AI to produce dozens of articles that mean I simply can’t keep up.

Now, we don’t need to go into discussing the sites that explain the ending to practically every film. They are just mills that pump out derivative content by copying other legitimate writers. It’s the huge sites that we really need to focus on.

Two of the largest horror websites (I am sure you can guess which ones) both boast about AI usage when you dig into their credits and tons of their articles are, very clearly, AI generated.

The owner of one of them is currently about to work on a hybrid horror project utilising significant generative AI, in fact.

I thought it was a conflict of interests when these sites began producing horror, only to relentlessly praise and promote said movies, but this is a whole new level of bullshit.

Horror content creators are suffering

Just from my perspective, these large horror websites adopting AI is a terrible thing but the impact on the genre will be worse.

I mean, let’s be honest; when you are just one person running a small indie site, it’s hard enough to keep up and carve out your own niche as it is. When you have massive sites producing more fluff content than they normally do by using AI, it’s almost impossible.

Hell, I have even had my own ending explained articles paraphrased by AI content farms and pushed out as “original” content by other sites on multiple occasions.

One site literally did this within 24 hours of me putting an article up. That article, by the way, took me hours and hours to write and fact check while watching and rewatching the movie in question.

It’s to the point where the vast majority of the visitors to my site are AI bots scraping my content.

Let’s pivot back to the movie we talked about earlier, Loner. Here’s a screenshot of me asking ChatGPT whether it is worth me checking the movie out:

Yep, that’s my website it is paraphrasing there while telling me the movie is great. Hours of work summarised in a few sentences. At least it puts a link to my review though because most of these thieving pricks don’t.

People’s attitudes have changed

The thing that makes it so much worse is that people’s attitudes have changed so much in recent years and it is opening the door for AI.

Loyalty outside of YouTube content creators and TikTok stars is incredibly rare. Repeat visitors are a luxury that most websites just aren’t afforded. Even websites like mine with high reader engagement.

The vast majority of horror fans immediately head to those AI using content farms for updates. They no longer care about the one-to-one connection you develop with a particular writer.

There’s too much information around that’s too easy to access without ever showing love to the person who wrote it.

I’m not sure Knockout Horror will ever get back to where it once was. One day, perhaps quite soon, I will simply have to accept that there is no point in me doing this any more.

What’s more significant, though, is how this relates to AI use in movies.

People are already deeply ingrained in the AI ecosystem. They will adapt to its use in movies and lose their revulsion and that’s exactly what these big studios want.

The change is already taking place

In my opinion, we are currently in the boiling frog phase of AI usage. We are being gradually introduced to it and have no clue that the water is getting warmer.

People already accept and enjoy the quick answers that ChatGPT can give them; they almost never click on the links to show love to the people that ChatGPT stole those answer from.

They like the fact that Google will summarise the ending of a movie after stealing the information from creators like myself.

People already want to get to the point; they prefer reading with all the meandering and rhetoric that makes the writing human stripped completely away.

There isn’t a single thing to suggest that it won’t be exactly the same for movie making.

The largest horror media machines will normalise AI

Massive horror media conglomerates are going to sell you AI generated news updates and opinion pieces to the point where you won’t even recognise it as AI anymore.

You will have forgotten what it feels like to read the ramblings of a real person, warts and all.

How many of you are currently reading articles right now, but have no idea they are AI generated? How many of you don’t notice that you don’t actually feel a human connection to the person delivering that information to you anymore?

Eventually, those uncanny scenes in horror movies aren’t going to hit so hard.

When that happens and when the big sites that should gatekeep the genre and protect it also adopt the same technology, we are fucked.

Studios are going to pump out massive amounts of AI generated horror slop and people are going to buy into it because they will have stopped caring.

Tiny indie filmmakers will be crushed under a torrent of media generated at the small cost of billions of tons of water and extensive damage to the environment.

It’s happened before and will happen again

If all of this sounds unlikely to you due to the outrage Ice Cream Man caused, you need to look outside of the horror genre.

Look at those AI generated animal videos from South East Asia that generate billions of views on social media. Look at the legions of AI slop videos burying real creators on YouTube. Look at the enormous productions that are already using AI and nobody even seemed to notice.

It’s going to happen to horror, too.

Eli Roth is just the first director to stand in the firing line and take some flack for this. If the movie was better, would people have cared? Would they have even noticed? Did you notice the AI that was used in the last V/H/S movie?

We are already at the point where people who are, essentially, in control of weaving the narrative when it comes to the horror genre are embracing AI. The temperature of the water is increasing and we are sitting there enjoying the ambience.

This is going to happen and the vocal groups on Twitter and Reddit campaigning against it don’t represent the average person who simply doesn’t give a fuck.

The internet is an amplified echo chamber that doesn’t represent the majority. I hate to say it, but it is true.

Joe Average just worked a nine-to-five all week and wants to relax with a horror movie and a beer. He isn’t going to sit through the credits to check whether an AI studio was involved. He doesn’t give a crap, the same way he isn’t going to check whether the worker who made his Primark t-shirt was treated well and had a decent wage.

I hope I am wrong!

I really hope I am wrong but I doubt it. Studios are going to jump on this and see the controversy surrounding Ice Cream Man as a wave they just have to ride out.

It will pass!

Creators will suffer, film-makers will suffer, actors will suffer, special effects teams will suffer, and content creators like myself will suffer.

Of course, viewers will suffer too but they will have been in that pot of water so long they don’t even realise it is boiling over.

I feel so sad for the people who spend their time making low-budget horror movies on the off-chance that people just watch them. They work so hard and it is about to get so much worse.

If you do one thing today to help protect people from this storm, don’t just rant about it on Reddit. Hit up Tubi and watch a horror movie made by a group of people simply trying their best and sit through the ads so they earn a few cents.

It’s the least we can do for the people who make this entire genre so damn special.

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