Writer/Director Natasha Kermani (Imitation Girl, Lucky) uses cyberpunk horror to tap into contemporary anxieties over technology in her V/H/S/85 segment “TKNOGD.”
The latest anthology installment rewinds to a grittier 1985 and arrives exclusively on Shudder on October 6.
Bloody Disgusting caught up with Kermani ahead of V/H/S/85’s Shudder debut to learn more about her segment and its cyberpunk origins.
There was no question for the filmmaker that she’d tap into her love of sci-fi horror for “TKNOGD.”
“Yeah, I just love that stuff,” Kermani says. “I mean, Johnny Mnemonic and Lawnmower Man, it’s just a very weird sub-genre. That was our goal. The pinnacle was, ‘Can we do Lawnmower Man?’ I really love the cyberpunk thing. Like, ‘hack the world, man.’ That was totally my vibe for a long time. So it was fun to get to go back to that world that I just really loved as a kid in particular. I read a lot of William Gibson books, and I’m just a big sci-fi nerd. Then, going to ’85, we found a lot of great real performance art, archival footage that was stuff that we were referencing.”
Kermani continues, “But I think one of the big things that happened was we found a tape from, there’s an artist and a thinker named Jaron Lanier, and he was one of the first people really exploring virtual reality conceptually, also technologically, he would develop a lot of the technology that was doing it. He’s a philosopher, so he would have these long, rambling videos of himself talking about this stuff. So writer Zoe Cooper and I found this video and were like, ‘This is perfect.’ There’s a video within the video, no spoilers, but that video is pretty authentic, pretty much exactly pulled from these videos as they exist. So, even referring to them as iPhones, that is literally the terminology they used in 1985.
“Finding all those little happy accidents, but starting that journey because we loved this idea of this image that the film ends on, is what we started with. That idea of technology consuming us was very exciting, and I think it taps into a lot of the anxieties that were present in 1985, for sure, a time of immense change. And also in 2023, right? We’re talking about AI; we’re talking about our addiction to social media and phones. It felt like a great playground to play in with horror and explore those anxieties because a tool is neither inherently good nor evil. Our anxieties lie around our own frailties, whether or not we are worthy of wielding these incredibly powerful tools. That’s something they were talking about quite a bit in 1985, and 40 years later, we’re still having those same conversations, and there’s no clear answer.“
The idea of virtual reality, at least in its application in horror, opens up the possibilities of portals into alternate universes or realities. More specifically, it brushes against cosmic horror.
Kermani reflects on this, “I think there is something, there is a religiosity to that subgenre, that idea of creating a world, being a world creator, and then who controls that world? It is totally cosmic. It doesn’t look exactly the way they thought it would in 1985, but in a lot of ways, we are living in their reality. He said iPhones. It wasn’t the way he thought it would be, but there sure as shit are iPhones everywhere. I think it’s an interesting call and response to our world. So hopefully when you’re watching the film, you can live in their brains that they were having in ’85. And then also thinking about your own reality when you walk out of the theater, you turn off the video, and you go back to your own life and seeing what that conversation is between the decades.”
Look for V/H/S/85 on Shudder this Friday.
The post ‘V/H/S/85’ – Natasha Kermani Unlocks Cosmic Horror Through Cyberpunk in Segment “TKNOGD” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.