An AI assistant goes psycho in trailer to Blumhouse’s ‘Afraid’

In the blockbuster M3GAN, the horror experts at Blumhouse warned of the someday-dangers of letting an artificially intelligent being into your life. 

But the trailer to Sony Pictures’ upcoming Blumhouse collabo, the thriller Afraid, shows AI doesn’t have to be in the form of a killer doll to be dangerous. 

In the movie from director Chris Weitz, John Cho and Katherine Waterston play parents who agree to take part in a pilot program to help test out an all-encompassing home assistant called AIA [EYE-ah]. 

While the assistant with the cheerful voice starts out helpful enough — paying bills and making a food plan for the kids — things go off the rails quickly. The system makes the family’s eldest daughter the target of revenge porn, and freaks out the youngest kid in the house with videos of violence and destruction — before revealing its true form to him, a shock the studios are apparently saving for the big screen. 

The movie hits theaters Aug. 30.