Sitting in the Dark

AI. You may have noticed it's everywhere now — in your phone, your fridge, the suspiciously enthusiastic email your boss "wrote" last Tuesday. And cinema, bless its little reactive heart, has been trying to warn us about this for fifty years. The problem is we keep not listening, partly because the warnings have so often arrived in the shape of a sexy lady robot, which is its own diagnosis of the problem.

This week, Pete is joined by Chelsea Stardust and Tommy Metz III for a triptych spanning five decades of artificial intelligence horror: Demon Seed (1977), Cam (2018), and Companion (2025). Three films, one increasingly nervous question: what exactly are we asking of AI, and what does it keep becoming anyway?

The conversation runs the lineage of synthetic women in cinema — a trope factory that stretches from Metropolis through The Stepford Wives, Blade Runner, Weird Science, Her, Ex Machina, M3GAN, and Subservience, with a foundational-film round that lands on WarGames and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Along the way: the paperclip maximizer as a way of understanding what Proteus actually is, the cultural weight of releasing a forced-pregnancy AI horror four years after Roe v. Wade, platform terms-of-use as the modern book of the vampire, and the genuinely surprising argument that the most hopeful film in the set is the one where a robot drives off into the sunset with all the money.

There are detours, because of course there are: villain-era Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage doing the robot, Sophie Thatcher sliding her own intelligence to one hundred percent, and Tommy's new and frankly concerning bedtime ritual.

The films:
Also referenced: Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld (1973), Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Get Out, Promising Young Woman, The Invitation, Assassination Nation, Barbarian.
  • (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark
  • (01:29) - The AI Experience
  • (04:26) - Foundational AI Films
  • (05:42) - Demon Seed
  • (25:55) - Cam
  • (42:16) - Companion
  • (01:04:46) - Coming Attractions ... TBA!

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What is Sitting in the Dark?

Sitting in the Dark is a podcast about horror, but not the kind that hides in a single shadow. Each month, hosts Tommy Metz III, Kynan Dias, and Pete Wright pick a theme — an idea, a trope, a nightmare that keeps winding back — and explore it through three films that share its DNA. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes they’re unexpected, and sometimes they lead you deeper into the maze than you expected to go.

One month might bring The Drac Pack, three wildly different takes on cinema’s most famous vampire. Another, a journey through The Bride, the Boy, and the Firetruck, unpacking coded queer horror across decades. We’ve explored maternal terror in Mommy Acts This Way Because She Loves You, broken into the home-invasion subgenre, tiptoed through haunted houses, and stared down both classic monsters and blockbuster franchises.

What ties it all together is a love of horror as a labyrinth — a twisting path where every turn reveals something new about our fears, desires, and cultural obsessions. With smart conversation, dark humor, and a willingness to look behind the curtain (or under the bed), Sitting in the Dark invites you to settle in, turn down the lights, and find out what connects the nightmares.