#technopunk

Dreaming In Digital Green

There is a certain peace in knowing that reality is just a setting you can toggle. I'm officially trading the sun for these neon highlights and a permanent connection to the grid.

Tano Bonfanti

Senior Concept artist / illustrator

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TechoRat Citizen

Any chance you’d be willing to dish out a quick (or long) list of your favorite techno horror/techno punk movies? Don’t know if those are the right terms.

If not thank you anyway for reading and I hope you are having a good night.

Full disclosure, I wasn't familiar with these terms, beyond what I could figure out intuitively, which turned out to be correct, as far as I can tell! Which is not very far so you know, bear with me. Nervously looking over my shoulders for a bear. OK.

After a crash course, I think it's safe to call Tetsuo The Iron Man and Tetsuo The Bullet Man the quintessential technohorror technopunk type movies. They are lean and mean structured around shocking violence and jaw dropping effects on a budget. In the same vein, but which you might not have heard of, is Tokyo Gore Police. It's, y'know, not for everyone, look it up and you'll have a pretty clear idea what you're in for. If you're on the bubble, let me just say "sexy crocodile vagina legs," and leave it there.

It looks like David Cronenberg is big in the subgenre and what can I say except good call. Kind of a horror pioneer across quite a few subgenres including splatterpunk and body horror, his fascination with permutations of the flesh and technology makes him a no-brainer. Obviously you should know about Crimes of the Future and The Fly, and potentially the lesser know but exception Videodrome and Existenz. However, also consider checking out his adaptation of Crash (an essential movie for anyone intrigued by trans humanism) and his adaptation of Naked Lunch. For all purposes, virtually everything in his oeuvre prior to Naked Lunch in some way invokes body horror and some degree of technohorror, so you may as well sit down and take your time with his filmography. Then follow up with with everything Brandon Cronenberg, his son, has released because that specific apple is not far from the tree.

Also mentioned is Terminator, which I guess is sort of horror and punk(ish) and techno, which sort of throws Alien and Aliens in but honestly those feel more like science fiction horror personally, whatever you know them already. And you're not here for stuff you can pull in any online search so lets get down to the weird shit.

I've mentioned it before, but Death Machine (1994) is an absolute joy to watch. Magnificent use of practical effects, tongue in cheek but never boring, if you want to see an absolutely gorgeous murder robot, this is a must-watch. Kind of the western answer to Tetsuo Iron Man with a less manic pace and heavy handed satire. Think RoboCop on a worse budget using the plot of Aliens but inside an office building. This one and a similarly impressive work of practical effects called Hardware (1990) are both difficult to unearth. If you see them anywhere, grab a copy, drop everything and watch.

There's this whole collection of AI movies that range between hard scifi and gloppy horror, but I'd like to direct attention to somewhat over looked Automata (2014). For me it has just the right blend of real world trash and futuristic dystopia, with a plot that's part mystery and part big ideas. It rides this lovely line that drew me in by featuring robots that do not feel human at all, disappointingly blocky and clunky, and led me into feeling the necessary empathy for the story to succeed. It is by turns abstract and violent, and feels almost as if it could be a precursor to Blade Runner in its visuals and story design.

Now let's rewind back to 1977's Demon Seed. It's been quite a while since I saw the original, and it's by no means the best movie out of the 70s but it is a buckwild, extremely fucked up AI gone haywire film. Content warning for an extremely disturbing sexual assault by a robotic shape shifting dodecahedron. It belongs on a technohorror list because it's the kind of movie where you'll say "wow, it sure went there." I can't tell you if it's good, only that you'll probably wish you could forget some scenes. And if you want to keep the ball rolling with slow paced science fiction movies about killer robots obsessed with sexual assault, you can check out Saturn 3 (1980).

But enough about robots, let's talk about zombies with Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead (2014) and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse (2021). Both of these have punk vibes, very in line with most Ozsploitation movies, and the gimmick is that, as a zombie apocalypse begins, a group of survivors discover the zombies belch up methane - and they can rig up their engines to run on the stuff. The pair of movies escalate continuously in their excess and weirdness. If the first leaves you wanting more, the second will leave you absolutely demanding it. Frankly anything low budget and vaguely weird from Australia tends to be over the top of over the top. See also SheBorg (2016) about an evil alien cyborg who comes to Earth to eat puppies (very unrealistic stuffed animals) and turn people into more evil cyborgs. The only hope is punk loser teenage girls. Is it badly made? Yes. Offensive? Pretty much. But it's evil alien puppy eating cyborg versus punk rock teenagers so like you gotta see it.

Not gonna sugar coat this - quite a lot of the "best technohorror" recommendations lists I'm turning up in searches to job my memory aren't great. Seems like mostly it's more "hey here are some movies that use an technology" versus anything that gives me a real sensation of the movie being either intrinsically about the interaction of the human, the horrific, and the technological, or where the tech aspect is a kind of break-out rogue element, getting away with something daring or weird or simply grotesque through having the sort of budget and distribution (or lack thereof) that keeps sticky fingered producers from leaving notes all over the script. Anyway this is kind of a prelude to suggesting Frankenstein might be the original technohorror, and to check out Depraved (2019), a take on Frankenstein with a fascinating direction, where the titular scientist is an ex-army field medic with PTSD and his monster is made from soldier parts which, themselves, are not entirely free from the memories of their own traumatic pasts. It may only loosely follow the original story but it's a hell of a gut punch and I think exactly the sort of filmmaking that you want from any genre appended with "punk."

Lastly of course we all know the recently released M3gan, but I'm going to suggest a second Frankenstein movie, which I have not seen as yet so this is a blind recommendation, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, directed by Bomani J. Story. If the title alone doesn't give you a frisson of anticipation about what might be in the movie, the trailer should have you hooked. I'm dying to watch it, personally, but saving it to watch with one of my partners.