Damon Packard is an underground auteur—if such a designation is not a contradiction in terms—whose oeuvre has expanded significantly with the advent of online AI tools such as Midjourney, Runway, Luma Dream Machine, and Leonardo Image Maker, which he identifies as his primary platforms of choice. In Reflections - Beyond Canters, a piece shared on Packard’s YouTube account, he intercuts AI-generated footage with scenes from his cult experimental horror film Reflections of Evil (2002), where he portrays a street watch-seller in Los Angeles. The original footage, filmed in Canter’s Deli, a Jewish-style restaurant in LA’s Fairfax area, highlights a site of cultural significance, also depicted in the television series Mad Men and on the album cover of Women in Music Pt. III by the Haim sisters, who starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021). In this updated work, Packard juxtaposes the exaggerated, uncanny, and histrionic aesthetics of his original film with artificial footage depicting elderly, corpulent, and largely indifferent patrons, lending the counter-shots an unsettling and surreal quality.

Shaka McGlotten connects Packard’s work to that of queer provocateur Bruce LaBruce, particularly in their use of camp (375). However, while LaBruce embraces camp as queer, transgressive, and disorienting modality, Packard’s camp remains tied to heterosexual, white male narratives, focusing on the fragilities of traditional masculinity as seen through a dominant gaze. It is notable that AI materials, created on platforms supposedly committed to inclusivity and cosmopolitanism, compliment Packard’s positionality and his original aesthetics ambitions so well. Between 1983 and 2018, Packard directed thirteen films. Since 2022, he has created over one hundred AI-generated shorts, revealing how contemporary AI tools seamlessly adapt to and amplify pre-established aesthetic sensibilities. In Reflections - Beyond Canters, the penultimate shot discloses its purpose as an advertisement for a July 2024 screening of the original film in Los Angeles, framing the AI production through a self-referential twist.

Packard’s distinctive approach to distribution presages the current hyper-circulation of AI content. Kristen M. Daly recounts his strategy for Reflections of Evil, in which 29,000 DVD copies were distributed by leaving them at ATMs, newsstands, mailings to celebrities, and by hiring homeless people to disseminate them (66). In a sense, this method foreshadows the proliferation and hyper-accelerated circulation of media production in the era of AI.

Works Cited

Daly, Kristen M. Cinema 3.0: How digital and computer technologies are changing cinema. PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 2008. 

McGlotten, Shaka. “Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities.” Porn Studies 1.4 (2014): 360-377.