An immense sound, metallic and insect-like, fills the chamber. Suddenly AM’s computer banks begin humming and lighting up. It is unknown why these five were chosen or what AM’s motivation is for holding them captive and torturing them. The supercomputer killed off the human race but kept five people-Ted, Ellen, Benny, Gorrister, and Nimdok-alive in its chambers. But as the conflict developed into World War Three, the computers linked themselves into a single entity and became AM in its current all-encompassing form. Later, as the group huddles around a fire, Gorrister tells Benny the origin story of AM: during the Cold War of the 20th century, the US, Russia, and China all had an AM supercomputer. AM has gradually mutilated Benny’s body and mind to resemble those of a monkey, and Ted reflects that Benny went insane years ago. AM possesses total power over them, and Ted thinks of the computer as something of a god: sometimes a “ him,” sometimes and “ it.” AM holds the entire Earth inside of it and now aims to perfect itself by killing off its obsolete parts.Īs the group of five begin to make their way to the ice caverns, Benny makes a futile attempt to escape from AM, and AM painfully blinds him as punishment. “What the hell,” Ted thinks to himself-nothing matters anymore. The group, including Nimdok, is skeptical of this, but they haven’t been fed in three days and so decide to venture the 100-mile distance to the caverns on foot. It is the group’s 109th year trapped inside AM, an enormous supercomputer, and Ted, the narrator, feels that Gorrister is speaking for all of them when he admits that he doesn’t know how much more he can take of AM’s torture.Īfter this incident, Nimdok has a hallucination of canned food in the ice caverns that lie within AM’s depths. When Gorrister joins them on the ground, looking up at his own body, the group realizes that Gorrister isn’t really dead-this is just another one of AM’s sadistic tricks. As such, Ellison’s classic sci-fi horror story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream remains unfilmable even with all of the advances made in visual filmmaking technology and the loosening of censorship rules.Tim, Ellen, Benny, and Nimdok are in a computer chamber, staring up at the corpse of Gorrister that’s hanging from the ceiling. Many of the scariest elements of the short story are deeply felt and, while it is disturbing to envision an endless, hopeless search for imaginary food in a pitiless labyrinth, this could translate to watching characters wander around pointlessly in a movie adaptation. However, the ending would be tricky to bring to life onscreen, as would the general plot of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Like the prospect of a supercomputer torturing humans for fun or the idea of a global apocalypse, this image is unsettling in the original short story. While horror anthology shows like Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities have attempted to bring Lovecraft's monsters to life on-screen, Ellison's ending for I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream only seems like a gruesome predicament because the reader can't see it realized. The sentient supercomputer that kept him and four over humans alive is frustrated when the other humans kill themselves and each other out of frustration, so the machine spends years softening the main character until he can’t hurt himself, hurt anyone else, move, or do anything else. Ellison’s story works best in book form because the main character’s eventual fate could look unintentionally comical if realized on screen.
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