THE VALLEY WHERE LOAB LIVES emerged from a simple question that quickly turned into an obsession: what happens when we begin to dream with algorithms – and they do not produce anything comforting, but instead shape nightmares from our collective unconscious?
Like many filmmakers of my generation, I experience the rise of generative AI tools with a mixture of fascination and unease. Systems such as Midjourney, Kling, or ElevenLabs possess the unsettling ability to recombine fragments of our collective memory – and to generate images and sounds that feel both familiar and alien at the same time. It was precisely this tension between recognition and otherness that I wanted to explore through the figure of LOAB.
LOAB is not a freely invented character – she is, in a sense, an accident: an apparition that emerged from a negative prompt intended to negate an image of Marlon Brando. What appeared was a female figure, a kind of unconscious horror entity, which has since spread across the internet as an urban legend. For me, she crystallizes those prejudices, fears, and repressed images that we inscribe into machines – often unintentionally; a figure that comes into being where that which must not be is given algorithmic form.
No genre engages with such questions as radically as horror. Horror makes collective fears visible – in the body, in technology, in the blurred boundary between life and simulation. By structuring the film into chapters inspired by NOSFERATU, PSYCHO, THE SHINING, THE SIXTH SENSE and GET OUT, a dialogue emerges between the iconic images of horror cinema and the spectral logic of algorithmic image production.
The film also draws on one of the first original horror myths of the AI era: Roko’s basilisk – a thought experiment in which a future super-intelligence punishes those who did not actively support its creation. LOAB, too, resembles a digital basilisk. Her power lies not in violence, but in the ability to dominate our imagination – and with it, the future of storytelling. Whoever knows her is already part of her code.
THE VALLEY WHERE LOAB LIVES is not a traditionally produced film. It is the result of a dialogical process of composition involving hundreds of iterations and curated prompts. I understand it as a ‘Promptus’ – a work that emerges from the conscious interplay between artistic intention and algorithmic production.
The Promptus transforms the history of cinema and opens a space for a language that has yet to be written. As ‘Prompteurs’, we are no longer merely translators of tradition, but co-architects of a new grammar.
I believe: only if we take responsibility for our collaboration with algorithms – as Prompteurs, not as mere operators – can a new cinematic language emerge. Otherwise – like in the myth of the basilisk – the machine will punish us for our inaction.
Georg Tiller
