When Chris Marrs Piliero first encountered deepfakes in 2018, his immediate reaction was fascination, followed by dread centered on all the terrifying ways the technology could be used in the wrong hands. Years later, that idea became the central premise for his debut feature film, Appofeniacs, a tech-horror thrill ride built around AI, paranoia, and “apophenia,” the human tendency to see patterns where none exist.

"Apophenia is our constant need to inject meaning into the meaningless," Piliero tells Polygon.

At 47, after spending over a decade directing fast-paced music videos, Piliero stepped up to make something entirely new and all his own. His feature film debut, Appofeniacs, chronicles the bloody and interconnected fallout of deepfake media tearing through a group of Los Angeles residents over a 24-hour period. The escalating nightmare is set in motion by Duke (Aaron Holiday), an instigator who creates cruel AI-generated images purely out of boredom, weaponizing digital paranoia like a contagious party trick. As his fabricated footage spreads like a virus and shatters the realities of Texas Tim (Will Brandt), Lazzy (Paige Searcy), Poppy (Simran Jehani), and many more, the deceit sparks a wave of real-world slaughter that drags in a roster of eccentric locals, including a premium cosplay weapon craftsman named Clinto Binto (Sean Gunn).

In a conversation with Polygon over Zoom, the director explains everything that went into Appofeniacs , detailing how he shot the film on a Sony FX3, leaned heavily on practical effects, rewrote scenes so he could film them in his own house, and even rented out his home on platforms like Peerspace and Gigster to fund the $300,000 project.

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