Horror shows can be based on movies or books, or they can be completely original works. They can be good, bad, or middling. However, few of them are as truly strange as “Greetings from Atomville,” a bite-size, multi-platform horror series about an unnerving place that you won’t find on TV. Instead, it reveals its terrors across its accounts on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. 

“Greetings from Atomville” doesn’t really bother to explain itself, but its events seem to take place in and around the titular Atomville. Many of the various AI-generated video clips are eerie, 1950s-style public announcements where masked figures inform the residents about various dangers lurking in the area and the draconian rules that people — such as they are — must obey to survive. Demonic Redboys, child-hunting Gluttons, violent tithe-collecting angels, and other entities plague the town. Occasionally, there’s also a commercial for appropriately creepy places such as a meat purveyor that sources its meats locally and promises strange and unique cuts, or a company that reanimates your loved ones into malformed body part puzzles that would make doctors Victor Frankenstein and Herbert West step back in disgust. 

Every Atomville resident is required to wear an unsettling mask that conceals or distorts their features from the age of 1 on pain of death. Concepts like “Creation Day” and greetings like “May Providence be with you all” turn up with little to no explanation. There’s a strong implication that a mysterious Designer built the area and possibly its denizens, which is fitting considering the project’s AI origins. The status report nature of the videos and their assumption that the viewer is perfectly aware of the outlandish concepts they discuss is a fascinating way to peek into the utterly unexplained. 

Indie filmmakers have been known to use the Uncanny Valley vibe for projects like 2022’s “Grimcutty,” but the rise of AI tools has enabled internet creators to step up their creepypasta video game to an increasingly impressive effect. While the memorable visuals and implied larger mythology make “Greetings from Atomville” one of the more notable AI horror works out there, it’s not alone. 

The Latent Places TikTok account is a similar chronicle of uncanny events that started out as a comparatively plotless, often gruesome AI art account, but soon transitioned into a series of public announcements from an organization known as the Ministry of Latent Places. These inventive infodumps feature everything from water monsters who haunt a popular swimming hole to Slender Man-style Flesh Collector entities. Interestingly, several entries have a distinct horror-comedy tone, such as the Little Guys entities that feed on confusion and sneak into your house to rearrange stuff, or the group of demons who attacked the Earth realm in the 1950s but discovered they’d rather play golf and hang around with people. 

Elsewhere, ScariestThingsEver makes one or two-minute horror films about various subjects, and TikTok is teeming with individual horror-themed AI clips. Though it relies more on old-school computer animation and general weirdness than AI and creeping atmospheric horror, even the origins of the “Skibidi Toilet” YouTube series can be traced back to creator Alexey Gerasimov’s nightmares. All in all, it seems that the trend train has chosen its track when it comes to horror narratives you won’t find on TV — and it wouldn’t be all that surprising if more works like “Greetings from Atomville” and “Latent Places” started popping up and gaining prominence.