How American Haiku Used AI to Bring a 16-Year-Old Film Featuring John Hurt to Life

A short film over a decade in the making is finally seeing the light of day, powered by technologies that didn’t exist when it began. Awful Dreams, a short film from full-service creative ad agency American Haiku, combines a long-abandoned script by the shop’s founder and CCO, Thom Glover, with a previously unheard voice performance from Sir John Hurt, recorded in 2010 and left dormant for nearly sixteen years.

“Awful Dreams is a project we tried to get off the ground in multiple different ways for many years” said Thom Glover, founder and CCO of American Haiku and writer behind Awful Dreams, “but it found its true expression in the nightmareish qualities of early AI models”.

Originally conceived as a practical-effects horror in the vein of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Alien, the project stalled after repeated funding setbacks. The script, written as a gothic poem in blank verse, tells the story of a butcher plagued by a nightmare in which the animals he has slaughtered return as a single, grotesque entity, hellbent on his demise.

Despite early momentum and John’s involvement, the film was never produced. The materials were eventually shelved, including the actor’s recorded narration. That changed in 2024, when Thom connected with director and AI artist Michael Hess. 

Rather than revisiting the project as originally intended, the pair chose to rebuild it using generative AI tools, embracing early versions of the medium’s unpredictability as a creative asset to generate disturbing imagery. Where many AI-driven films aim for realism, Awful Dreams leans into the technology’s tendency toward distortion and hallucinations. Bodies shift unnaturally. Forms blur and collapse. The imagery resists coherence, creating a sense of unease that aligns closely with the film’s premise.

“Most AI films are trying to show how close the technology can get to reality. We were much more interested in where it breaks,” said Michael Hess, director of Awful Dreams. “There’s something deeply unsettling about imagery that almost makes sense but doesn’t quite resolve. That tension became the visual language of the film.”

John’s voice anchors the piece, adding weight to a production that bridges multiple timelines. The actor, who died in 2017, never saw the finished work. His performance, recorded for a version of the film that was never made, now exists within a project shaped by new tools and techniques. That tension sits at the centre of Awful Dreams. It is both archival and experimental, human and machine-made.

At a time when AI in filmmaking is often framed around efficiency or replacement, American Haiku’s approach suggests a different path. Instead of smoothing over flaws, the film uses them to heighten its central idea, drawing on the discomfort that comes from images that feel neither fully alive nor entirely artificial.

“This project sits at the intersection of old and new in a way you rarely see. A script from 2010, a performance from Sir John Hurt, and a production process that only became possible recently,” said Mateo Suarez, Executive Producer of Awful Dreams. “For us, it’s less about what AI replaces and more about what it enables. This is exactly the kind of idea that benefits from that shift.”

The project, which has had significant success on the festival circuit, where it attracted attention not only for its use of AI, but for the unusual circumstances of its creation.