Interviews
‘#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead’ Gets Bloody with Seven Deadly Sins-Inspired Killer [Interview]
A group of friends and influencers staying at an Airbnb are picked off one by one in #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead, directed by Marcus Dunstan (The Collector) and starring Jade Pettyjohn.
The upcoming slasher film, written by Josh Sims and Jessica Sarah Flaum, releases in select theaters, Digital and On Demand August 2.
The plot sees “a group of college friends rent an Airbnb for the biggest music festival of the year. A weekend of partying quickly takes a turn, as the group is murdered one by one, according to their sin.” Bloody Disgusting spoke with Marcus Dunstan and Jade Pettyjohn during the production of the film about the vibrant, candy-colored slasher with a bloody streak.
Dunstan, having co-written Saw IV-3D, is no stranger to the realm of slashers and gory horror. #AMFAD presented the filmmaker with a chance to play with the slasher formula, especially through the prism of social media and influencer culture. For Dunstan, it was the idea of how social media offers a blank canvas for identity and reinvention.
He explains, “There’s a number of details about this one that made me lean in. It was a chance to do a murder mystery through the prism of a civilization that’s still forming in that ever-evolving youth culture and in the way that they can create these characters in their lives. There’s the person they were before they picked up their smartphone. Once they picked up the phone, they could be whoever they wanted. Then, there are ramifications to those actions that result in who they become. In this case, from a writing standpoint, there’s a great character arc; we begin a tale with who they were and catch up with who they are. Oh, and someone from somewhere may not be done with them yet.”
“I enjoyed putting Agatha Christie into something that has the nice torque of a murder mystery thriller engine,” Dunstan continues. We’ve had so much good fortune up here in Vancouver with production design, special effects, and mostly with cinematography and performance, raising all these components together. I find myself always reaching back to Mario Bava and Dario Argento to add a little bit of that style into it and bring that into the mix, which is great. So, the slasher mystery gets an upgrade with this.”
For star Jady Pettyjohn, #AMFAD kept her guessing, and that hooked her immediately. “I remember getting the script, and it was the first time in a really long time when I read the script and didn’t actually expect what ended up when it ended up happening,” she said with excitement. “I’m usually pretty good at predicting, like, ‘okay, the script’s gonna go here, gonna go there,’ and it just didn’t work out that way. I was so surprised. I love that feeling.”
She continues, “I felt like the script does a really great job of paying homage or an ode to the older ’80s horror films that we all love, but it puts a new twist on it that is unique and different. I loved that. Then also Sarah, specifically my character. She’s super interesting, and I’ve never played a character like her before. So, that combination of both was just sort of the perfect storm.” Sarah stands out immediately as the kind-hearted one of the group, but expect this bunch of friends to harbor a variety of dark secrets.
Dunstan is also no stranger to horror comedies, having recently helmed Unhuman, and details how #AMFAD will first lean into humor before pulling the rug out from under audiences.
He teases, “We want to introduce these characters at their most brash, their most loud; their false personas, if you will, the personas through the phone, the three by four window to their entire lives. In doing so, how are they entertainers to the populace of strangers watching them? It’s outrage humor like, ‘ooh, avarice,‘ everything to come to the fore. Then to bring that a little bit into the second act, when things are getting a little more creepy. Well, the humor then becomes the stakes of how they innocently wander in by the time we have to get bloody and nasty. Then, the shock value, I think, replaces some of the jokes because you should surely be jumping and laughing at the same time. Then we’ve hit our stride.”
The filmmaker also knows that #AMFAD isn’t the first horror movie set in and around an Airbnb, or influencers, for that matter.
“Well, the nice thing about this is I wanted to lean into some things we’ve heard of before in this,“ Dunstan says. “There has been Airbnb thrillers. This is a movie that takes place knowing there’s a movie called Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. This is a movie that takes place knowing there’s a movie called Seven. These people have been exposed to all that pop culture, and this is that little pocket that’s reacting to it, almost as if, like, ‘Wait, is this? Uh, is this someone trying to get attention for stuff that we already kind of know?’ Once we begin to card flip the twist, you see how that plays off.“
It’s also worth noting that the killer themes their kills around the seven deadly sins, and that played a crucial role in the film’s visual language.
“Oh, in terms of the visuals, it was instantly collaborating with our production designer Trevor Johnston to come up with the benchmarks,“ Dunstan explains. “We wanted to build up and around the biblical interpretations of the deadly sin, going into the psychology of them and how some of each sin has been assigned a color spectrum throughout time. Some are kind of flip-flopped here and there. So then simply saying, ‘Okay, if this character is courting towards this particular sin, what is the color pattern of that sin?‘ In doing so, there’ll be a flourish in the clothing and the act and whatnot. By the time you get to a potential demise or threat level, well, what if the lighting was also accompanying that? So it begins as a hint and graduates into a fever dream. You can turn the sound off and see the colors are also telling the story, and the set is also telling the story as something innocent, tiny, and offered through social media or whatnot, come back and it charges in as a reality and then all-encompassing, kind of like real punch of color, sound, and violence.“
But how bloody will #AMFAD get, you might be wondering?
Pettyjohn laughs, “There are so many dead bodies behind this camera. But oh my god, it is so much fun. You know, obviously, the piece is really dark, and there’s lots of murder and blood and guts and stuff. But making a horror film is, in a weird way, incredibly joyful. We have such talented people that are doing just absolutely incredible work. It was so funny. I was having this conversation with the makeup artist, and she pulled out a chest full of different kinds of blood. Like, okay, where are we going to do it? Here, here, this, this consistency is perfect for this and all of that. And it’s an absolute joy, honestly, to play with so much blood and guts and special effects.”
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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