Spooktacular Halloween Adventures in AI-Generated Artwork

Well, it seems to be that time of year again: when the leaves on the trees turn orange and red, the full Moon lights the clouds with an eerie pale glow, headless Hessians menace sleepy New England towns… and Let’s Get Off This Rock Already! publishes its annual Halloween special. Previous entries covered Event Horizon in 2019 and the Soviet Union’s Lost Cosmonauts in 2023. This year, though, we’re focusing less on any particular subject matter, and more on mood. We’ve seen already what generative AI can do for Arcadian idyls, fictional characters, and overgrown ruins—but how well does it handle the eerie and the macabre?

From the prompt: “**Haunted graveyard, eerie, spooky, mist covering the ground, full moon in the sky, in the style of a 1990s cartoon**.” The bat in the upper right was a nice addition.

The genre of “horror” encompasses some wildly different goals, in terms of evoking an emotional response in the viewer or reader. Some horror films are designed to be as bleak, shocking, and misanthropic as possible, leaving you utterly drained by the time the credits roll, haunting you for weeks afterwards. See the French-Canadian film Martyrs for an example¹. Others, like most slasher movies, aim to deliver fast, gruesome thrills, wowing audiences with sheer carnage. Still others—by far my favorites of the bunch—work with atmosphere, aiming to be spooky more than merely graphic. Into this (very loose) category I would put Event Horizon, Nosferatu, and Slingshot², to name three that have been featured on this blog. They’re all about slow builds and eerie environments. They’re almost cozy, in a way. That’s the same feeling that I’m trying to capture here.

Let’s begin with a staple of sci-fi horror: an abandoned starship, adrift in space, all alone amidst the icy blackness. An unknown force massacred its crew; nameless terrors still lurk aboard, ever waiting. The perfect place for a salvage team to come aboard, or maybe a crew of space truckers diverted from their original course, investigating what happened—whereupon they’ll start getting picked off one by one. Here’s a playlist to get you in the mood.

One take on the prompt “**Creepy abandoned spaceship drifting through space, lights and engines off, blue nebula in background, dark sci-fi art**.” I like how the front has that 1940s bomber look to it.

A ship of ghosts, drifting silently through the night.

A more photorealistic take on the above—though it suffers from Midjourney’s “people randomly standing around” disease.

This, on the other hand… this is what I like to see!

Let’s take this sci-fi horror vein in a few different directions, shall we? Plenty of things that go bump in the cosmic night. Say we wanted a creepy-looking astronaut:

Prompt: “**Futuristic sci-fi astronaut wearing a spacesuit, but with a black void instead of a face, creepy abandoned machinery in the background, dark drawing style**.”

Well, we’ve got ourselves a creepy-looking astronaut! Wouldn’t want to turn a corner and bump into that guy standing there all ominously. Perhaps there’s no face behind that black visor. Perhaps he is possessed by some alien force, unknown and unknowable, utterly without remorse.

Next we might try something involving the spookiest of planets. Let’s plug in a simple prompt—“Lost in space near Neptune”—and see what it spits out.

Well, two of those look promising, which is better than my usual success rate. I’ll apply my bag of tricks to the top left and top right. Some results:

Scientific or logical accuracy? No. Vibes? Yes.

Hell yeah! Nailed the marooned astronaut, and the monochrome palette is a splendid touch.

I’ll note that getting Midjourney to cooperate with these can be a fraught process. Sometimes a short prompt gets results, as above, but more often, the AI really struggles to achieve the desired atmosphere, and words like “creepy” don’t work by themselves to nudge it in the right direction; you have to specify how you want it to make the picture creepy, otherwise the result falls flat. These are just a few of my many, many rejects:

From the prompt “**Creepy abandoned spaceship**.” Got to say, a *Star Wars* droid head wasn’t exactly what I was going for.

What I wanted: “**Creepy spaceship adrift in space, blue nebula in background**.” What I got: The cover of a forgettable self-published sci-fi novel. At least the nebula looks pretty cool.

This one would have worked just fine, if not for one of the astronauts facing the wrong way. I can’t help but imagine he’s pissed at the guy behind him. “God dammit Frank, you’d better stop whistling over the commlink *right fucking now*, or I’ll make what killed the original crew the *second* most gruesome thing that’s happened aboard this ship.”

Back to the spookiness. We’ve had some creepy atmosphere so far, but why don’t we dial up the fear factor? What this post needs is an injection of creepy creatures, à la Alien. After all, there has to be something to chase our astronauts around.

You see, it’s smiling, so it must be friendly. Right?

Grim times for any arachnophobes onboard.

We’ve got the creepy-crawlies squared away, I think. Now let’s try some body horror:

Are you or a loved one mutating into a giant insect? Help is available.

From the prompt “**Alien parasite latched onto a human host**.” Though in this case, “latched onto” seems to be an understatement…

Something has gone terribly wrong inside the ISS cupola module.

I think that’s it for today, folks. Just some fun (and seasonal) goofing off. I hope you all have a delightfully spooky Halloween, and I’ll catch you in November!