controversy

If you’re worried about AI taking over the entertainment industry, close your eyes for a moment and imagine your worst case scenario.

What kind of villains do you picture? Soulless corporate executives gleefully watching their bottom lines go up while they slash thousands of human jobs? Insufferable tech bros hi-fiving each other at the notion that their lack of creative talent no longer prevents them from flooding the internet with anti-woke “Star Wars” rip-offs generated by typing a few lazy prompts into an app? Unshowered right-wing nationalists producing dangerous deepfakes while sulking in their basements?

Whatever pro-AI bogeymen haunt your particular nightmares, they probably don’t look like Todd Rohal. A seasoned veteran of the American indie film scene, his offbeat comedies have been popping up in places like Sundance, SXSW, and Adult Swim for the better part of three decades. He cut his teeth shooting 35mm films before digital editing was invented. He self distributed his early movies by cold-calling theaters under fake names and convincing them to screen his single 35mm print until he had to drive it to another venue. When he was tired of screening his first feature “The Guatemalan Handshake,” he buried his personal print in the desert and ceremonially burned all of his remaining DVD copies.

He’s had the kind of idiosyncratic career that the independent film ecosystem theoretically exists to elevate and promote. So why is he getting death threats over a comic book adaptation about an old lady forcing Tipper Newton to fuck her son at gunpoint?

If you’ve attended a genre film festival this fall, Rohal’s new film “Fuck My Son!” has probably popped up on your radar. Adapted from legendary underground comic artist Johnny Ryan’s graphic novel of the same name, the film is a throwback to the kind of old-school midnight movie that prioritizes shock value above all else. Robert Longstreet dons a dress and a thick layer of prosthetics to play an old lady whose sex positive ethos takes a dark turn when she kidnaps a woman (played by Tipper Newton) and forces her to — you guessed it — fuck her horrifically deformed son.

The film is a feast of practical effects and unapologetic bad taste, designed to be enjoyed with rowdy crowds in packed theaters in the wee hours of the morning. The shock value should be recognizable to anyone who can remember reading Ryan’s comics in the back pages of VICE magazine. During a recent conversation with IndieWire at a Silver Lake sidewalk cafe hours before the film screened at Beyond Fest, Rohal explained that he was drawn to those comics because they reflected the kind of progressive, anti-censorship worldview that he hoped to promote with his own work.

“I saw his stuff as offensive, but in a way I understood that was exciting and funny and made me react,” Rohal said of Ryan’s work. “Not knowing his politics I was basically like ‘We are very aligned politically, I’m guessing, because I’m a very liberal-thinking person, rights for everyone, very against censorship. And that’s everything Johnny is about.”

Rohal’s adaptation begins with a fake pre-show that might exist at a nightmarish MAGA version of AMC Theaters. In the world of the film, a fictional religious movie studio is distributing “Fuck My Son!,” but wants its audience to be able to enjoy the film without offending their Christian sensibilities. It offers the film in a format called Perv-O-Vision, which allows prudish viewers to put on a pair of glasses that makes any nude scene appear as if the actors are fully clothed.

The pre-show includes a demonstration of Perv-O-Vision that’s complete with full frontal male nudity and an audience of theatergoers that are very clearly generated with AI. It’s not a sophisticated attempt at replacing human actors — it’s slop in every sense of the word, intended as a satire of the kinds of right-wing corporations who would sincerely use bad AI to cut video production costs.

“I liked the idea that ‘Fuck My Son’ would be presented as a corporate product,” Rohal said with a laugh. “The beginning of the movie is supposed to feel like you’re in a corporate environment. So I thought ‘What would corporations use when portraying this?,’ which led me to say ‘I want to use AI.’ Thinking that would be very clear in its messaging! I’m learning that it’s not clear, that for any AI usage, the context and intent has no bearing for a lot of people.”

In addition to the pre-show, a character in the film is visited by the Meatie Mates, a fake Christian cartoon about singing meat that is presented as a much more hateful version of “Veggie Tales.” The characters were designed by human animator Cable Hardin in a 2D sequence, but Rohal used a mix of AI tools to make them look worse and worse as they reappear throughout the film. The effect feels like watching the deterioration of a media company in real time, as it’s easy to imagine a Christian TV producer commissioning the original human-drawn characters before switching to cheap AI a decade later.

“Fuck My Son!” premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival, where the section’s famously rowdy crowds embraced the film wholeheartedly. Rohal thought the AI jokes all landed, so he was shocked to wake up the next day and find that the film was being bombarded with negative Letterboxd reviews. (A large plurality of the film’s reviews are either half a star or one star, and the three most “liked” reviews are devoted to criticizing its use of AI.) Rohal was blindsided by the controversy in part because the online reaction was completely different than the enthusiasm he saw in the theater.

“The Toronto screening was crazy. Through the roof! And then the next day, I didn’t look online but [my publicist] told me ‘It’s pretty rough,’” Rohal said. “The online response is pretty strong. I read it and I was looking through some things, and I had to stop. There were hundreds of comments and I was like ‘This just doesn’t make any sense.’ The difference between what I experienced last night and this… There was no way that much hatred was in the room. Because they would have vocalized that! It would have lessened the cheering and laughter.”

The phenomenon only became more curious when the film experienced similar reactions at Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest — joy during the actual screenings and hatred online. The disparate reactions suggest that not everyone criticizing the film has seen it. Rohal pointed to his openness about the film’s use of AI in its writeup on the TIFF website, in which Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky wrote (with Rohal’s permission) that the pre-show “satirizes the corporatization of theatrical moviegoing, complete with freakish deployments of AI slop” as a possible spark that lit the fire. The online hatred snowballed, with people accusing Rohal and his team of using AI in other parts of the film that were shot entirely practically. The prevailing narrative online became that “Fuck My Son!” is an AI-generated movie, rather than a movie that satirically uses AI in a few carefully chosen shots.

“People saw [the writeup], there must have been some kind of Slack channel and people must have been like ‘We’re gonna blast this with horrible reviews because we’re these patriots of anti-AI.’ Because a lot of things people were saying were inaccurate. People said ‘Fifty percent of this movie is AI.’ That’s not true! The technology isn’t even there to do what I was accused of doing, which is fascinating.”

Rohal continues to tour the film to ravenous festival audiences (next up he’s heading to France for the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival and Spain for the Sitges Film Festival), and he’s self-distributing the movie, with a series of 35mm screenings in theaters across America booked through early 2026. But he can’t help but laugh at the surreal experience of having to defend his film online every day to angry cinephiles spreading blatant misinformation about it. Case in point: he recently posted the film’s poster on Instagram, where he was slammed with complaints about the “AI poster” that was actually made by a human artist without any generative AI.

Rohal is doing his best to keep a sense of humor about the ordeal, noting the parallels between the kinds of hate mail and death threats that Ryan received for his original comics with the ones that he’s now getting for adapting them.

“I responded to some people online, and they just won’t engage in conversation about it,” Rohal said. “People threatened to kill me on Letterboxd. Someone said there should be drone strikes against me until not an atom of my body exists. And Johnny’s gotten death threats his whole life for doing his comics… It’s extreme.”

As an outside observer, it’s hard not to chuckle at the notion that this particular film has become the lightning rod for such impassioned debate about what we want the future of the film industry to look like. We’re talking about a movie in which Tipper Newton is forced to remove a monster’s dirty diaper and look for his genitalia, only to grab what she thinks is his penis but is actually a loose hotdog that he misplaced. In a saner world, this film probably wouldn’t be discussed as anything other than the shocking diversion from everyday life that it offers. But it also makes sense that the midnight movie audience, a group that thrives on its willingness to treat lowbrow films as serious works of art, would react so strongly to AI making its way into their world.

On one hand, it’s easy to empathize with the position that a section of pop culture known for embracing outsiders who lack the resources of corporate filmmakers would object to seeing indie artists use the very tools that corporations use to cut costs and make soul-crushingly bad content. But Rohal makes the opposite argument — if AI is here to stay, why should we cede all the power to the very corporations we’re already mad at?

“It’s like beating up a hobo for stealing your jobs, and he’s just collecting cans, goddamnit! He’s just doing whatever he can, and you’re gonna beat him up? You’ve got to understand that the jobs you’re trying to save are a corporation that’s holding onto something and they’ve got control over our entire culture. And I’m like, that’s really what we should be pushing back against. And I don’t see that,” Rohal said. “The way things are going terrifies me, because we’re essentially handing this technology over to evil people to do evil things, when we should be learning it ourselves.”

Rohal is a bit more optimistic about AI being used in indie films than I am, but it should go without saying that any serious discussion of a piece of art should at least consider the artist’s intentions. How is telling an independent filmmaker that he can’t use a bit of AI to satirize the people who use AI maliciously any different from telling artists that they can’t depict any words or actions that they wouldn’t condone in their own personal lives?

“It’s crazy to me that there is a large majority of people that can’t separate that, that can’t see the context of things or question why it’s being used,” Rohal said. “It’s just blind hatred and a desire to ban something completely. I think there’s an innate human desire to hate and destroy other humans. It just happens, whatever side of the political spectrum you’re on. I remember being a kid and seeing ads for ‘The Last Temptation of Christ.’ I was growing up in Ohio and churches were protesting it. And now we think ‘Oh that’s so cool, you were protested by the Catholic Church!’ But at the time, that was probably not cool to Martin Scorsese when he was like ‘I want people to see this movie! I care about it!’ And that’s how I feel now. It’s so weird that it’s about technology now, but maybe that is just the time we live in. Technology is this weird religion where we have sects.”

“You can use Photoshop, you can use After Effects and green screens and CGI and you can farm things out to India, but you cannot use this software on your computer at home,” he continued. “Even if you’ve learned the whole process. The effects in the movie took me months to do, and people tell me it’s lazy and I’m like, ‘I was up every freaking night until four in the morning working on this by myself. It was not lazy. I absolutely could have asked someone else to do this for me, but I wanted to do it myself because I wanted to learn it myself. I know how film works, from how negative emulsion works to this. And I think that’s what a filmmaker should do. I’m fascinated by film, I’m fascinated by all of this stuff, and the fact that people are mad about it is really confusing to me.”

Rohal never expected a movie called “Fuck My Son!” would give him so many P.R. headaches, but he also never expected the experience to be so life affirming. The film was born out of his commitment to free artistic expression, a tribute to a comic artist who spent his career battling mobs of people trying to tell him what he could and couldn’t say. It feels like destiny that Rohal ended up fending off a mob of his own, but he still doesn’t have any regrets about making his little movie about a twisted mom who just wants someone to fuck her hideous son.

“Making ‘Fuck My Son!,’ as crazy as that sounds, has been the biggest thing in my life that helped me figure out what’s important to me,” he said. “And I know that’s crazy, and you won’t see that in the movie, but following certain instincts and staying away from other things that would have prevented the movie from being what it is, and just allowing it to be itself, has really been life changing for me. And I credit that to the creative freedom that I had, and there’s an aspect of AI that fits into that that’s on the positive side of it. So if people want to assassinate me or drone bomb me for that, so be it.”

Announced theatrical engagements for “Fuck My Son!” can be found below, with starred dates indicating 35mm screenings.

10/16-23 – New York, NY – IFC Center

10/23-30 – Los Angeles, CA – Alamo Drafthouse Los Angeles

10/31 – 11/04 – Austin, TX – Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

10/31 – 11/01 – Brooklyn, NY – Nitehawk Cinema – Williamsburg*

11/05-08 – San Francisco, CA – Alamo Drafthouse New Mission* 

11/14-15 – Chicago, IL – Music Box Theatre*

11/28-29 – Dallas, TX – Texas Theatre* 

12/05-06 – Seattle, WA – Grand Illusion Cinema at SIFF Film Center* 

12/19 – Toronto, ON – Revue Cinema

12/26-27 – Philadelphia, PA – PhilaMOCA

01/02-03/26 – Omaha, NE – Film Streams’ Dundee Theater*