Space Necronomicon (Director's Comments + Review) 2023 Film by Cosmotropia de Xam

This review of Space Necronomicon, a 2023 film by Cosmotropia de Xam, includes the director’s comments on the movie and making of it.

While conserving the surrealistic and supernatural style traditional to the director’s other works, the film presents new facets — the cosmic sci-fi theme and the innovative use of AI-powered digital art software.

Now, let’s get down to business.

Synopsis

Extraterrestrial magicians (Cosmotropia de Xam, Juju Christian, and Sat Siljana) turn a doll into a living vampyric creature (Madame Sans Nom). They send her to Earth where she meets a girl (Mira Kohli).

The extraterrestrial unveils for the girl the secrets of magic and the metaphysical structure of the Universe. She turns the girl into a vampyric being, like herself. Together they leave Earth, which is doomed to perish in a global technogenic disaster.

Summary

Visual Beauty

The first thing I noticed was the visual beauty. The film is very nicely coloured. There is an abundance of purple, violet, blue, and turquoise — looks very harmonic.

The only thing I’d prefer to be excluded is the stroboscopic effect used during some of the scenes. I find it uncomfortable and irritating, although it’s one of Cosmotropia de Xam’s trademark tricks.

Music

The music has mostly a spacey 70's sci-fi vibe, similar to the score from The House That Eats the Rabbit, a 2021 film by Cosmotropia de Xam.

Plot

Traditionally for Cosmotropia de Xam’s films, the plot is basic and secondary in relation to the audiovisual experience. Usually, it’s very difficult for me to see a coherent story in Cosmotropia de Xam’s films. Fortunately, this time, while viewing, I was excited to think “I actually understand what they are doing!”... not without an effort though. And I likely still missed some details.

As usual, it’s a supernatural story. But this time, magic and mysticism are combined with cosmic science fiction.

Artificial Intelligence

I looked forward to watching Space Necronomicon especially because it was announced as an innovative film made with the use of an artificial intelligence software tool.

I had seen those uncanny AI-animated classical art portraits on social media. I had also seen entire short videos created by AI, where objects and people moved like in a normal video (although the picture as a whole seemed deformed).

In Space Necronomicon, however, the AI art is presented as pictures being either smoothly transformed one into another or changing as a sequence of frames. There was also a moment similar to the aforementioned animated portraits. Although those AI sequences didn’t look like what we imagine when we hear the word “video”, it still looked beautiful and very unusual. I wasn’t disappointed.

However, I’d love to have more time to look at the images more carefully — many of them are very detailed. It’s often difficult to grasp what is shown in the pictures because they change each other too quickly, and many of the sequences have the uncomfortable stroboscopic effect applied to them. Although, I looked at them more closely after watching the movie by scrolling through it and taking screenshots.

The AI art takes about 10%-20% of the screen time. Most of the film shows elegantly-dressed young girls doing magical rituals. Although it’s pretty, we’ve already seen this countless times in Cosmotropia de Xam’s other films (especially that skull). The AI art sequences act as a counterweight balancing this with cosmic sci-fi horror.

Director’s Comments

To provide you with first-hand information, I asked Cosmotropia de Xam himself a number of questions about his film:

The style of some of the AI art used in the film reminds me of the 70’s European sci-fi cartoons. What were you inspired by when creating it?

The style of the AI art is a technical and visual tribute to 70's sci-fi cartoons / artfilms such as Planète sauvage (1973), graphic novel magazines, and books like Metal Hurlant, Moebius, Saga de Xam [A French psychedelic sci-fi graphic novel series written by Jean Rollin and illustrated by Nicholas Devil.]

You said the AI art you created wasn’t the regular AI art one can see everywhere today. And that you needed to train the tool to have it produce art in a specific style you want. Could you, please, provide some detail on your AI training process?

For an extended training process, you needed to feed the machine with images, prompts, descriptions and re-imaging — quite complex and experimental, like discovering new sounds out of old ones.

Did you use AI only to generate and animate pictures or also to edit the footage filmed with a camera?

AI was mainly used to generate a stock of thousands of images and variants, not to animate. Animation was made by hand. You often see these days a morphing effect within AI video art — this will soon look very cheap and primitive when AI animation looks better in 1 or 2 years. So I decided to use mainly frame-by-frame animation like they did in the 70's, also for authenticity.

There is footage of neon movie theater signage and erotic film inserts at the beginning. How is this relevant to the plot?

* Spoiler *

The movie is about a drug E769 Dracula medication experiment and two crazy girls, religion, a hippie cult, and how god is an astronaut — for an extended multilayer view on it, watch Metamorfosia (2014) 

[I also reviewed the film Metamorfosia by Cosmotropia de Xam, with his comments included].

What film-related bonuses do you offer to your fans?

3 different AI artbooks with soundtrack, remixes etc, AI generated Tarot cards on Cosmotropia de Xam chosen artworks and designed to cards by Mira Kohli.

[You can order these at Cosmotropia de Xam’s Big Cartel store.]

Could you, please, tell me about the filming locations?

The film locations were a sacred cave in a holy mountain in the very south of Germany near the border with Austria and not too far away from a place near Munich where once the first spiritual moog experiments by Eberhard Schoener and Popol Vuh happened. Kosmische Area.

A big cemetery not too far away from where Conny Plank had his famous studio where all the cosmic sounds productions were made in the 70's.

The city of art nouveau / Jugendstil in mid Germany, I found it by „coincidence“ when I made a stop during my travel back from filming Acid Babylon 2 back in 2021.

 

References

One of the girls says: “Is God an astronaut?”. This is a quote from Clive Barker‘s Nightbreed.

The skull held before Mira’s face seems to be a reference to Françoise Pascal doing the same in the famous scene from The Iron Rose, a 1973 film by Jean Rollin. Cosmotropia de Xam has used this gesture in several of his films.

The character of Madame Sans Nom playing with the sunlight reflected by the mirror seems to be a reference to Howard Vernon’s character doing the same in Jess Franco’s The Perverse Countess. Whether or not this was intentional, it’s more subtle than it’s done in Phantasmagoria 2, The Labyrinth of Blood, a 2018 film by Cosmotropia de Xam.

One of the girls is reading a book with Hans Giger’s art on the cover. It‘s a book of Timothy Leary‘s psychedelic prayers with a collage artwork by H.R. Giger and Kosmische Tarot artist Walter Wegmüller.

The very title of the film references:

1. Succubus, a film by Jess Franco the German title of which is Necronomicon — Geträumte Sünden
2. other films by Cosmotropia de Xam: Tokyo Necronomicon (2019) and Hollywood Necronomicon (2013)

 

Where to Watch Space Necronomicon

• Stream online at Phantasma TV
• Purchase a physical copy at Phantasma Disques online store

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