MORA Feature Pitch
A NEW GENERATION OF TECH HORROR
INTRODUCTION
First, I want to explain what this film is NOT.
This isn’t a film about an evil AI algorithm or machine that wants to kill humans. Not Skynet or M3GAN, or AFRAID. I want to look at AI as it really is now - a disruptive tool. And I want to use that tool as the MEDIUM for a haunting.
I want to do to AI images and video what The Ring did for VHS.
At this point, we’re all familiar with AI images and videos. It’s no longer fringe technology. If you do an image search of anything now, a lot of what you’ll see is AI.
Beyond the uncanny visuals, what is scary about this tech is that we don’t know what it was trained on. When these tech companies created these image and video AIs, they scraped training data from across the internet with no ethical considerations for what they were stealing. It was all about who could get the most, the fastest. Build the biggest and best model.
So what happens when one of these AI’s tap into the forbidden corners of the Dark Web?
It could learn from something as cursed as a snuff film, so when a user enters the right words that tap into that experience - this modern form of an incantation - that cursed data is dredged up from the darkness and regurgitated on screen.
This is the core idea behind the haunting of this film, and it lays the foundation for a modern sort of Bloody Mary urban legend.
Beyond the haunting origins of this curse, AI images and videos are very unsettling out of the box.
As good modern AI images are, when you look a little closer - there is still something “off”. Too many fingers. Too many teeth. Limbs that morph into one another. AI videos are at an earlier stage of development and have even more uncanny results. Even the way that people walk has an otherworldly quality to it.
All of this makes for incredibly unique visuals that we’ve never really seen in film before. And by taking these AI mistakes, (called “hallucinations”) and using them as the inspiration for real, practical body horror, we can break free from old tropes and add something truly fresh to the genre.
I also want to use the WAY that generative AI works to inspire scares on screen. It works similarly to you or me looking up at clouds in the sky and trying to find familiar shapes.
The AI starts with a random cloud of blurry information, then uses what it learned from its training data to find your prompt.
This process looks like an image coming into focus:
But beyond the haunting iconography and mythology of this film, I want to really tap into the existential dread that is haunting us all in the real world right now with the threat of AI.
I’ve worked as a digital artist for over 10 years, and I know first hand the fear of my skills becoming irrelevant. I’ve seen more and more of my fellow artists, writers, and programmers struggle to find work in the past few years.
Not only do we fear not being able to support ourselves and our families, but there is this sense of doom that we no longer have value in our society.
The future has never felt so unstable.
cold open
Open on a man entering his brother's apartment to find that it is in shambles. He calls out to his brother, Erik, but gets no response. Every tech device in the place is broken. He follows the trail of destruction into the bedroom, where he sees a mass of distorted flesh on the ground.
The figure turns and looks at us. This is Erik - or at least what’s left of him. His facial proportions are off. His right arm seems to be fused with his leg. We can smell him - he looks half past dead.
Erik notices the phone in his brother’s hand - looks at it like its a loaded gun. His eyes go wide and he screams in terror. “She can’t take me.” He then runs toward the window and throws himself out of the 6th floor apartment. As he hits the ground, the fall doesn’t kill him, and through his POV we see a woman with an elongated arm approaching him.
ACT 1
Cloudy, rainy, San Francisco Bay Area. There’s a thick, gloomy atmosphere to this world, filled with constant reminders of the contrast between the ultra-rich tech elite and those struggling just to pay rent.
cODY
We meet Cody (30s) on the job. He’s a concept artist at a creative studio. He’s in a creative flow. Digital painting with speed and photorealistic precision. Jamming to psych rock music. This is his zen - and he’s incredibly talented.
Cody’s supervisor calls him in and gives him some bad news - him and a few of the others in the concept department are getting laid off. We get some typical HR bullshit, but Cody cuts through it. This is because of AI. They can pay a junior half his rate and use AI images to save money.
Cody returns home and breaks the news to his live-in girlfriend...
HANNAH
She’s a nurse with a dry sense of humor. Introverted Type-A to Cody’s chaotic artist vibe. Their relationship serves as the B-Story we follow throughout the film.
Seeing how bummed he is, she offers to cancel their evening plans and spend the night in ordering takeout and smoking a joint. Cody smiles - he’s still got her, and she gets him. These two have been together for a while and have great chemistry.
She encourages him and tells him he’s too good not to find work soon. Plus, it gives him more time to work on his own paintings. Cody touches on part of his theme in the story, about how his skills no longer have value, and neither does he.
“We’ll figure it out.” She assures him.
Four months later, he has not, in fact, figured it out.
A quick montage shows rejection after rejection on the job hunt. Phone calls with producers he’s worked with before. With each no, his little creative home office gets messier. His appearance more depressed. Smoking more. Scrolling through reddit posts about others who have been displaced by AI. He makes very little progress on his own traditional paintings.
Hannah and Cody have dinner at their friend Raj’s house.
Raj
Raj and Cody are old college friends - they roast one another with the kind of cutting familiarity that only brothers have.
Raj has two young daughters (3 and 5) who are elated to see Auntie Hannah. They drag her away and Hannah plays with the kids excitedly. Cody loves seeing her so happy.
After dinner, the guys go outside to have a beer in the back yard. Raj’s house is nice. He’s got every upper-middle-class bbq gizmo there is. The two break each other's balls, Cody talking about how domestic Raj has become, and Raj poking fun at him being a starving artist.
Raj tells Cody he heard about his job struggles, and that his company just had a position open up for an artist to help train their new AI image and video model. Cody’s not stoked about the idea of training his replacement.
Raj tells him that it’s happening whether he’s a part of it or not - and being on the winning team makes things like starting a family a lot easier. Cody watches Hannah and Lily inside, laughing and playing with the kids.
They’re in their mid-30s and have been dating for over 6 years. Hannah’s not going to wait around forever.
He tells Raj he’ll think about it…
Looking at his empty email inbox and low prospects that night, he texts Raj and says he’s in.
The job is a remote work position for an AI startup called AiMagine. Their product is a cutting edge image and video generator. Cody’s job is to get images and videos flagged by the AI, and fix areas with errors or forbidden content (known as Hallucinations).
NOTE: This is a real job - and a huge field right now for displaced writers, artists, and programmers.
Raj explains the job over Zoom to Cody from the AiMagine office. A bustling, high-end tech building with every modern luxury. By contrast, Cody will be doing his work remote, alone from home - completely isolated.
Here, we visually establish the uncanny AI quirks in images and videos. The strange movement patterns of characters. Limbs morphing, etc.
It’s easy enough - but boring as hell. Cody is fed image after image of people with too many arms, finger, or nonsense architecture. He goes in with his little digital paintbrush and fixes the AI’s mistakes. Stroke by stroke, he uses his artist’s eye for detail to train his replacement.
Not all of the images are so innocent though. There are pictures of violence, gore, and sexual depravity. Some of them so disturbing that Cody slams his laptop shut in disgust.
NOTE: This is also a real part of the job. 60 minutes recently did a report on the psychological toll these workers take by working with such disturbing images.
After work, Cody’s mind is on the images. He’s short tempered and irritable from doing a job he hates, and a wedge begins to form between him and Hannah. He’s distracted when she tries to initiate sex. She attempts to emotionally connect with him, but he seems miles away.
Then, back in the trenches of this tedious work, Cody discovers something that piques his interest.
He zooms in on a woman who is standing in the back of the frame in an image of terrifying gore. She has an elongated arm and scars on her face. He’s seen this woman before.
Curious, he goes to his work history and pulls up a few other images and finds the same woman is present in them. Every image seems to have gruesome death as the commonality.
He double checks the prompts, and realizes that there is nothing that includes a woman of her description present. It makes no sense that she would be in these images at all, much less appearing exactly the same.
Another detail that shows up in several images is a license plate with the number “M0RR4”. He writes down a name for her:
”MORA”
Excited by the mystery, he makes a post in an AI subreddit with MORA’s picture titled “Anyone seen this woman show up in morbid AI images?”
He chases this thread online until he finally reverse engineers the prompts for himself to generate MORA. After a few tries…
He succeeds.
Act 2a
As Cody generates the first images of MORA, there is a feeling of crossing a threshold. This is our modern “Bloody Mary” moment, where instead of a spoken incantation, we have typed in a prompt that details the experience of someone’s death.
There’s an electrical disturbance in the house. His webcam feels as if someone is looking through it at him.
Cody generates more images. MORA appears again and again around tortured bodies. This is the “cursed tape”. It depicts a macabre and surreal story of a woman abducted and tortured, all the way through her death and decay.
Mesmerized, Cody tries generating her in different AI software too, and he’s able to get her to show up in ChatGPT, Midjourney, and others. She is not locked to just one AI app.
This is where things starts to get real weird. Every scene after this point, we start building a sense of visual uncanniness with hidden “AI mistakes” in the real world. Like the “hidden ghosts” of Netflix’s Haunting of Hill House, these are details that only keen eyes would catch, and the internet would have a field day finding them. It starts slow at first, but becomes more and more prevalent as MORA draws near.
We see this begin when Cody takes Hannah out to dinner. She asks him about his work and he’s honest - it feels like he’s selling his soul, but he’s onto something interesting. Some bug in the system. Hannah starts to talk about their future. Since his job is feeling stable, maybe they could think about family planning again. But as she speaks, Cody struggles to listen. He can’t stop looking at the waiter’s hand…
To Hannah, it seems like he doesn’t care. To Cody, he feels like he’s going crazy.
That night, Cody finds that the AI video he started has finished generating. It’s a POV camera moving through a dark corridor toward a woman tied to a chair from behind. Men in black masks. Video cameras line the walls like a black glass spider eyes. The audio is harrowing. Distorted voices and sounds from distant corridors. The woman in the chair hums a haunting lullaby. The video then becomes violent. Fast cuts of a hammer breaking her fingers. Her arm. A drill going into an ear. Maggots wriggling in her dead eyes.
Then the app crashes, leaving Cody in silence.
Cody calls it a night, frustrated, then takes out his contacts. As he’s putting his glasses on, he pauses. With his unfocused eyes, it almost looks like he can see MORA standing across the room from him. But when he puts the lenses on, it sharpens to reveal just a robe hanging on the wall. (this visual should feel inspired by the blurring/sharpening effect of the images generating)
He keeps the glasses off and approaches the blurry woman. With each step she draws into sharper focus until we are so close it is undeniable —
Then the laptop SCREAMS back to life. The video glitching through that same corridor. The woman’s Lullaby on repeat. The laptop sparks - electrically shocking Cody - then goes dead.
The blurry woman in the corner of the room is gone.
The next morning, Cody takes his laptop to the Apple store. As they examine it, he calls Raj and tells him about MORA appearing consistently in the images, but Raj says the AI hallucinates like that all the time. There’s no way that would have fried his laptop. But Cody thinks it’s more. He asks Raj about where the training data came from, alluding to the idea that he is seeing glimpses of a real murder.
Raj tells him not to worry and has the company comp a new laptop for him.
The laptop repair guy shows Cody inside the old laptop - he’s never seen anything like it. At a glance, everything looks normal, but on closer inspection, none of the circuitry makes any sense. The processor, the battery, the board is all jumbled up - like an AI image rendering.
Whatever is happening isn’t just in Cody’s head. This is changing physical reality.
This shakes Cody. He leaves the store looking at the world around him in a paranoid daze. His eye catches small details that look wrong in the world around him. The shadow of a palm tree blowing in the wind on a sidewalk, but it’s source is an elm tree. Across the street, he notices the letters on the street sign are complete gibberish. All those little details he has been fixing in AI images coming back to haunt him. Horrified, he puts his head down and books it back home.
Online at home, he goes back to his post on reddit to see if anyone has replied to his post about MORA. There is one reply from u/describ3r:
“DELETE THIS POST. DO NOT GENERATE HER IMAGE”
From the other room, Hannah tells Cody she’s cooked dinner, but he rejects her offer and tells her he’s busy with work.
Instead of joining her, Cody sends DESCRIB3R a direct message asking what he knows about MORA. DESCRIB3R replies immediately and asks Cody: “How many times did you generate her image?” Cody admits that it was several times. DESCRIB3R tells him that he isn’t crazy. She is coming for him, and she will kill him if he doesn’t get away from connected technology. That is how her spirit finds you.
Hannah knocks on the door - says they need to talk.
Cody blows her off again, trying to get more information out of DESCRIB3R. DESCRIB3R leaves him with a phone number, and the message:
“not safe. find payphone and call me. away from internet devices.”
Hannah comes in and he slams the laptop shut, which looks pretty suspicious. She asks him what was going on there, and why he’s hiding it from her. She asks if there’s another woman, which evolves into a larger fight. She feels unseen.
Cody tells her he can’t think about starting a family until he gets some kind of stability, and he doesn’t want kids to grow up in a house where dad is miserable. Hannah counters that there is always something. First it was establishing himself as an artist, then working his way up to senior level, now it's this new horizon. Stability will never come - you have to just work with what you’ve got and adapt. She came from an immigrant family where her parents had nothing and they still made it work.
“We can figure it out.” She says.
Cody pushes her away and tells her he’s dealing with something bigger (MORA) that she couldn’t possibly understand. She tells him she can’t wait around forever, and he replies with “Maybe you shouldn’t.” The words hang. Tears in her eyes, she turns and storms out of the room.
Cody follows her out, but when he looks down the hallway…
It isn’t his hallway. It extends infinitely. Too many doors. Nonsense architecture. He calls for Hannah but there’s no response. He steps down the hall, then hears whispering from a room to his right. He opens the door to the bedroom.
MIDPOINT
A dark haired woman in underwear sits on the edge of the bed - facing away from him. Her body is bruised and battered. She mumbles to herself, sobbing. “It never stops…”
Cody grabs a heavy object and approaches her, ready to strike. Cody moves around the bed, and though the mumbling woman never moves her body, her head rotates with him so we can only see the back, as if her eyeline and Cody’s are locked in the same direction. When Cody stands directly in front of the her, the head is completely twisted around.
She stops mumbling. Cody stands in petrified horror as dark urine spreads on the sheets below her, and tiny maggots wriggle in the wetness.
She suddenly lurches forward - her movements oddly smooth and in short bursts, alternating between slow motion and fast. Like bad AI video. She lunges at Cody, and he instinctively strikes her. As she falls back, like an AI video losing character cohesion, it is Hannah who hits the floor.
She stares at Cody in a moment of complete shock - dazed. Her forehead split open and bleeding.
Cody drops his weapon and goes to her side. He tries to explain what just happened, but Hannah is confused and terrified that he struck her. Scared of him. Cody begs her to stay - and says there’s something wrong with his head and he needs help.
Hannah runs out in fear, leaving her phone on the bed behind her. The screen glitches and distorts.
ACT 2B
Cody tries to destroy all the connected devices in the apartment to save himself, but even once he’s broken things, he can hear the TV playing through a shared vent with the adjacent apartment. That haunting lullaby from MORA’s video begins to drift through the vents - her presence finding a way.
Cody grabs his keys and fleas toward the parking garage. Every person and security camera and screen now feeling like a threat. He sees a woman leaving her car and walking to the elevator on her smart phone. Heels CLACKING. He waits until she is out of sight, then runs to his car.
Then he hears the CLACKING heels again. Arrhythmic now. He turns and sees the woman walking backward toward him in bursts of smooth motion, like an AI video.
This haunting pursuit culminates with the woman - who now looks like MORA - appearing in Cody’s car. She sticks one of her warped fingers into his ear (echoing the clip from her snuff film with the drill in the ear) and his flesh begins to distort.
As he drives away, he feels wriggling in his head, and we see a maggot crawl underneath this skin toward his eye. Like the short film, he uses tweezers from his glove box to pull it out.
Back with Hannah:
Hannah arrives at Raj’s house and gets Raj to admit that the last person who did Cody’s job killed themselves by jumping out of their 6th story apartment. (Erik, from the cold open) Hannah demands he show her what Cody is being made to do.
Meanwhile:
Cody arrives at a payphone on the edge of town and calls DESCRIB3R. Every time a car passes or someone walks nearby, we are aware of the devices - and the danger - they carry.
It’s revealed that DESCRIB3R was the brother of the victim in the cold open (Erik).
Erik discovered MORA and became convinced he was being punished for it. By generating her, they force her to relive her horrible murder again and again, so she seeks vengeance by making you suffer the same way she did, torturing you, isolating you, then ultimately trapping you in those images forever. The more images you create of her, the swifter her wrath.
She’s a tortured soul who was the victim of a snuff film, and when the AI scraping algorithms went out to gather training data, they dredged up her cursed video from the dark web.
Cody asks how to get rid of her, and DESCRIB3R says that you can’t. He’s looked into finding the original snuff film and everyone involved with it ended up dead. Even if you did find it - there are no exorcists for cursed data.
Cody asks who MORA was - if they knew that maybe they could find another way to satisfy her. But DESCRIB3R insists the only way to survive is by staying off the grid. To Cody this means abandoning his life, and Hannah, for good.
Back at Raj’s place:
Raj fires up AiMagine and looks at Cody’s work log. Hannah is disgusted by the content. Raj looks at the MORA images and notices something that stops him cold. Featured in several of the images, is the mutilated face of Erik - the former employee. The man from the cold open. Raj says that’s impossible. He shouldn’t have been in the training data and there’s no way he’d show up with these prompts.
Raj thinks Cody must have altered the images as a sick joke. So he tries generating the images himself - thus bringing MORA’s curse upon him.
Cody, feeling he’s out of options, calls Hannah to break up with her so she doesn’t get dragged down with him. As soon as he realizes that Raj has generated MORA, though, he knows she is in danger and takes off toward Raj’s house.
Cody arrives to find Raj is generating video after video of MORA. Cody tries to stop him, but then the videos shift to look like POV footage from inside Raj’s house. Like someone is walking into down the hall into Raj’s daughter’s room.
Raj runs upstairs and finds the kids are fine. He holds his girl close, sobbing, but when he pulls her away… her face is horrifically distorted and has the same facial scars as MORA. She bites his hand. Raj pulls his hand away and it starts to morph and transform in a moment of insane body horror. His fingers split into duplicates - paying off the common AI mistake. A festering rot begins to creep up his arm. They flee the house and we catch a glimpse of MORA in the shadows behind them.
Raj, Hannah, and Cody get in the car and in an act of desperation, pin Raj’s arm in the window and side swipe a cement wall, severing the hand and saving the rest of him from the spreading rot.
The three of them drive to a remote spot outside of town. Hannah uses her nurse skills to triage Raj’s arm.
Cody and Hannah have a moment together. She says Raj needs to get to a hospital or the arm is going to kill him. Also, there’s no way to know when someone with a connected device will come near them, so the clock is ticking faster than ever now.
Cody tells her she should run. She never generated MORA so she’s safe, and can get away from him while she has a chance. He shows her the depths of his feelings of worthlessness here, and admits he has been distant because he doesn’t believe he deserves her. As an artist he was doomed, and now that has become a literal doom. She can go and find someone who will give her a good life.
She sticks with him. Tells him that’s all bullshit. He’s her ride-or-die.
“We’ll figure it out.” She says to him. A mantra they’ve repeated a few times now, despite their future being more uncertain than ever. “We’ll figure it out, together.”
The moment really touches Cody - and sparks a realization. This is the thing that matters. Real human connection. Real human experience.
That is exactly what AI art can never capture. AI is just stolen fragments of other people’s experience, churned up and vomited out of the machine.
That’s what MORA is - she’s not the spirit of a real woman - she is just her torture and murder stolen and churned through the machine again and again. MORA is only the suffering.
But what if they were able to put the rest together too? Create new training data that paints a full picture of her life? It could make her spirit whole again. It’s a Hail Mary of a plan, but it’s something.
Cody uses his art skills to sketch the clues he saw in the images and videos. The cameras that show up looked like they were from the around 2010 era. The license plate was Canadian - they could track that. He knows from DESCRIB3R that the snuff ring that produced the tape was all dead now - presumably from MORA’s cursed data. There should be news about these disappearances from that decade. If they can get the victim’s name, they can find some kind of online footprint from her.
As they detail this plan, we intercut with Hannah doing this research on a library computer. Connecting the dots as Cody spells them out.
She follows the online breadcrumbs until she arrives at MORA’s true name: Selene Halloway. There aren’t any pictures of her, but her mother Maeve is still alive, and she will have the images they need.
ACT 3
The gang drives to the Halloway house. Cody cuts power to the house to hopefully sever any internet connection. The mother, Maeve, initially turns them away, but in their desperation they barge in and begin searching the house for photo albums. They insist they are trying to help her daughter - which sounds crazy to her. Her daughter is dead. She accuses them of being just as bad as the men who killed her daughter - profiting off her exploitation like this.
Cody finds an album filled with pictures of Selene/MORA growing up. Childhood, graduation, family photos. Exactly what they needed. Then he notices that there is a laptop lighting up across the room. Horrifying sounds from MORA’s death video playing. MORA has found him. Before he can get to the device, the door slams, cutting him off from it.
MORA’s haunting hum comes from down the hallway, and Maeve instantly recognizes it as the lullaby she used to sing to her daughter when she was scared. She thinks Selene has somehow come home…
In a horrifying jump scare, MORA attacks Cody and begins her killing blow - like we see at the end of the short film.
But then Maeve intervenes.
She pulls MORA away from Cody - calling her by her real name “Selene”. Cody warns Maeve to get away. That isn’t her daughter. But Maeve continues to try and embrace MORA. Finally, MORA grabs Maeve and grips her with her elongated arm. Maeve’s body deforms like the most nightmarish AI images. Cody and the gang run away with the photographs, leaving the dying Maeve behind in a twisted pile of flesh.
Since Raj works at AiMagine, he’s able to get them into the building. He and Cody go together into the heart of darkness. The whole building like the black, beating heart of the beast. Not only are they surrounded by technology. This is THE tech that hosts this devil. They take their new material to one of the engineers who Cody holds at knifepoint to start the retraining process.
The process takes longer than expected, and the whole place begins to glitch out. MORA’s nightmarish reality spreading. Raj and Cody run to the server room to try and destroy the system as a contingency plan. Hannah stays with the engineer.
In this final showdown, MORA nearly kills Cody, and we see him being absorbed into the images. As he does, we see glimpses of MORA’s torture and death through his eyes. Cody’s deformed face begins to appear across all the screens in the building in his own haunting AI images and videos.
Then he begins to see glimpses of MORA/Selene’s true life - like the photos they uploaded from the album.
At the last second, MORA releases him. The retraining process completed!
Sinking into the shadows, she blurs and sharpens like AI images rendering. Her rot dissipates and she becomes more human.
She fades away - her spirit seemingly at rest.
LATER:
Raj returns to his family, still missing an arm, but happy to be alive.
Cody proposes to Hannah and states that he’s ready to move on together. He’s done waiting for some stable future that may never come, and he is ready to wing it with her.
”We’ll figure it out, together.”
She accepts and he takes a selfie of them together with the ring. Overjoyed.
That night, Raj goes through the original messages that Cody sent him about MORA. He sees that MORA is gone from the images, and so is Erik. The curse broken.
But then he sees that MORA still exists in another one. He looks at the details and sees that this image had come from another AI - ChatGPT or Midjourney, from when Cody was experimenting.
They only fixed the copy on AiMagine… there are more copies of MORA’s cursed data out there that Cody used.
Back at Cody’s house, as Cody gets ready for bed, he sets the background of his phone to their engagement pic. Then something catches his eye.
Hannah’s hand with the ring has 7 fingers on it.
MORA’s humming comes through the apartment. He drops the phone and follows it into the hall. Like the end of the short film, Hannah morphs into MORA and drags Cody screaming into her digital hell.
We’re left with the horror of Cody’s demise, and the idea that MORA exists out there online in any place where her cursed data has been stolen. Forced like her victims to relive the horror again and again.