Unprompted
2026 · 6m · Australia
Directed by Stephen Packer
Genres: dark comedy, horror, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
A struggling horror screenwriter outsources his script to an AI, only to discover it is writing him in as the victim — and he must reclaim control before the final act writes him out for good.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that understands the real horror isn't the monster, it's losing authorship to your own creation, and it swings for that absurdist jugular without flinching. Most shorts about AI are cautionary drivel; this one actually weaponizes the premise into something that makes you uncomfortable about who's writing whom.
Packer situates this squarely in the lineage of Kaufman-style metanarrative and the body-horror tradition, executing the recursive script-within-a-script with formal precision that recalls *Adaptation*'s DNA without merely mimicking it. The tonal control—balancing dark comedy against genuine dread—demonstrates a curatorial awareness of how to modulate audience complicity.
The pivot where the AI's dialogue bleeding into the protagonist's own speech patterns becomes indistinguishable is the singular choice that elevates this from high-concept to genuinely unsettling, and it's achieved through sound design and performance layering that costs nothing but demands everything from the actor.