The newest Blumhouse film AfrAId shows how easily AI can go from being a family’s biggest blessing to its most lethal enemy.

AfrAId follows Curtis (John Cho) and his family, who are selected to try out AIA, an experimental AI home assistant installed in their home. After AIA is installed, “she” rapidly learns about the family’s routine and needs, predicting what the family will need. Soon her desire to help her family takes them down a path beyond their darkest nightmare.

Directed and written by Chris Weitz, he is known for his work in comedy, drama, and family films, including directing The Twilight Saga: New Moon and co-writing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. AfrAId is Weitz’s maiden voyage into the horror genre. Horror is in Weitz’s blood. His maternal grandfather Paul Kohner produced the 1931 Spanish-language Dracula, which starred his maternal grandmother Lupita Tovar.

In our interview Weitz shares with us what inspired the idea for the film, the massive and irreversible implications of the internet, and what he hopes audiences will take away from this film.

Bonilla: What are some of your favorite four movies?

Weitz: Oh, let me see. Well, I thought Midsommer was pretty amazing. The Exorcist. I re-watched The Exorcist the other day when William Friedkin passed away, and I thought it was kind of every bit as shocking as it ever was. Even though you could look at some of the practical effects and say, “Well, you know that that’s not as good as CGI could be nowadays”, but it didn’t really matter.

What inspired you to make a film that’s AI-centered?

Well, I think that horror, when it works, is kind of based on everyday anxieties and fears. And I was having some anxiety and fear about my family’s exposure to the internet, and what the internet could do to families and to children. So really, AI to me is about what it’s trained on. And if there were an AI that was trained on the open internet, the entire internet, including the dark web, what would that be like? That was sort of the genesis of the idea.

At the time when I was thinking about it, some creepy things were popping up in YouTube videos and this thing called the Momo hoax as well. Where scary stuff was showing up, and the algorithms of YouTube were delivering it. And if you’re a parent, every time a kid goes online you really have no idea where they’re gonna end up.

I noticed this film shows how the AI unit impacts each parent and child differently, whether they’re a teenager or a small child. So why was it important to show that diverse impact?

Well, I think one of the interesting things about the really advanced AI, but also about the internet in general, sort of web 2.0, or I don’t know if we’re onto 3.0, is the degree of personalization. How well it’s going to know you and adapt to you, because of all the information that you are constantly shedding just on your path through life. Whether it be the information that our cell phone knows about where we’re going, what we’re searching for, and all kinds of details that are being captured and open to exploitation. So yeah, AIA, the villain of this piece is really able to sort of transform into whatever it is that she or it thinks is needed to work its way into this family.

The design of AIA reminded me of 2001: Space Odyssey. What inspired that design?

I think you’re always really conscious of the design for HAL because that’s one of the great sort of bits of production design ever. It’s very, very simple and it’s very beautiful. You know, this has a bit of HAL in terms of the light, the sort of internal light, but the unit itself also has a kind of anthropomorphic kind of style to it. So it’s as though HAL had this kind of marketing upgrade into something that seemed a lot more user-friendly and less cold.

In several of your films, including this one, Javier Aguirresarobe is your DOP. As a director, what do you like most about his style and working with him?

What I love about Javier, well, first of all, the pictures are always beautiful. But you know things aren’t pushed for their own sake. When he and I work together, we’re usually in a very neutral sort of space, in terms of the kind of color space and the way that things are composed it’s relatively sedate and classic. So that then when we do push things, you can really feel it.

Towards the end of this film, there’s a change in the way that we’re actually lensing the entire movie. It goes from spherical to anamorphic, if you want to nerd out about that, and that sort changes the whole feel of the image. And we go into a lot more kind of abstract colors than we usually do. But with Javier, I feel as though we feel like we’re in the real world, albeit a really beautifully captured version of it.

In 1930, your grandparents made their first horror movie together, the Spanish-language version of The Cat Creeps, and then in 1931, the Spanish-language Dracula. How does it feel to be making your horror movie 94, 93 years later?

It’s really fun. Universal was my family’s home studio for a really, really long time. But yeah, The Cat Creeps and Spanish Dracula were made there. It’s really fun, I mean, the idea of scaring people in a kind of safe way that they can walk away from is really an interesting thing to put my hand to.

And it’s part of your history. So that makes it even cooler.

It is, yeah. My grandma talks about showing up on the set of the Spanish Dracula at midnight because they shot through the night. As you know, since you really seem to know your film history, and that she was actually scared, making the movie in the middle of the night.

What would you like the audience to take away from this film, other than wanting to go home and throw their home AI assistant in the trash?

That they spend some time talking with their children about what it is that they’re doing online. I’m not sure that they can stop them, but to be aware that the internet is a neighborhood that we live in.

AfrAId is now in theatres nationwide.