Neural Horror Picture Show
(Images generated by BigGAN)
Neural networks are a kind of machine learning algorithm that learn to imitate the examples I give them. They’re pretty good at picking up on the feel of craft beer names vs guinea pig names, or metal bands vs my little ponies. So they should be pretty good at thinking of new names for horror movies, right? Right?
Ummm
The Baby Bunny
Pretty Day 3
Little Clock Train
The Sea Bothers
No Curse
Great Apartment
The Funny Bear
Missing Bun
Noice
Fish Christmas
The above titles were generated by a neural network (textgenrnn) trained on over 78,000 horror movie titles extracted from IMDB by Twitter user @enkiv2. It turns out that not every horror title is Slashy This or Murdled That. Titles in the original dataset include “PigDog”, “Princess Baby”, “King Dinosaur,” and “Sasquatch! A Love Story”. The neural net learned a bunch of interesting vocabulary from them.
And the neural net DID manage to pick up on the vocabulary of horror film titles. It just also managed to make them sound somehow more like the Halloween special of a kid’s cartoon show.
Halloween Bear
Case of the Big Monster
Dracula’s Holiday
The Creepy Clock
The Interbother
The Haunting Song
The Scream Fish Tapes
Monster Interviews
Monster of Mystery
The Devil’s Cool
World of the Band Zombies
The Lucky Dracula
The Christmas Man Werewolf
Other times, it was just plain weird. I know horror is supposed to make the mundane scary, but I somewhat question its methods.
Haunted Boss
Final Hair
The Cord Thing
Day in the Room
Attack of the Cleaning Day
The Stall Satan
The Return of Bob
The Date of Horror
The Snape Unknown
Carp Halloween Special
Planet Boot Cook
The Tooth Things
Stanning the Damned
Halloween: Realm Wars Part 1
American Star Horror Stories: The Creature of the Santa
With other titles, the neural net avoided sounding cute, but also avoided sounding convincingly human.
A Not Meat of the Wild
Fright & Trap of the Woods
The Man in My Dangers
I Call Zombies
The Night Night
Fright Footage
The Bad Side of the Dead
The Boobley of the Dead
Please Alive
Lost Blood Horror Story
The Haunting of Flesh Show
The Will the American Horror Stories - What the Green Horrors
I really like these titles with made-up words.
The Blunge
The Crooping Tomb
The Moonmanic Sands
My Boblop Trap
Clownfull Missing
The Contains of Halloween Trailer’s Comman Reaper Trailer
2000 Scarecrowning Strangler Secret + the Basament in the Children
It also generated a few that were a bit more along the lines of, um, erotic horror. To go with those, I also decided to see what would happen if I mixed the horror titles with ice cream flavors. Here’s a taste (ahem):
Honey & Darkness
Passion Owl
Caramel Horror Spice
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