New AI Video App Promptly Invents 17 Genres of Existential Dread Cinema, Critics Hail It as ‘Accidentally Avant-Garde’

Los Angeles, CA – A new artificial intelligence-powered video creation app, CineMinima, has inadvertently invented 17 previously unclassified genres of existential dread cinema, according to an enthusiastic early assessment by the American Federation of Film Critics (AFFC). The announcement has been described by industry insiders as “a watershed moment for movies seeking to alienate and disturb in wholly uncharted ways.”

Launched last Tuesday, CineMinima was designed to streamline video production for small creators by auto-generating scripts, storyboards, and editing effects based on one-word prompts. Within minutes of its release, users began reporting films emerging from the platform that defied easy categorization, blending stark surrealism, symmetrical despair, and characters whose only motivation was to confront the void.

CineMinima’s Chief Product Officer, Dr. Wallace Prufrock, emphasized that the app’s deep learning model drew exclusively from open-source footage, “with negligible reference to continental philosophy, and only minimal exposure to the writings of Kierkegaard.” Nonetheless, an initial analysis by the AFFC revealed narrative forms including “Triumphant Ennui,” “Morning of Unmaking,” and “Extremely Neutral Apocalypse”—genres which had no documented precedent in cinematic lexicons.

“There’s a 16-minute shot of a lightbulb slowly dimming, then regaining brightness as the credits roll vertically and all text is written in Morse code,” said Irma Harkness, an AFFC reviewer who awarded the film ‘Best Unintended Vanishing Point’ at last week’s critics’ roundtable. Harkness added, “It’s as if the app understands something about futility that human directors simply can’t reach on purpose.”

Developers first became aware of the phenomenon after receiving user complaints about videos in which main characters habitually failed to start their own scenes, often collapsing into recursive dreams or lengthy debates regarding whether their memories belonged to them or to the system’s codebase. In one notable case, a children’s birthday party sequence concluded with every guest exiting through a revolving door and vanishing one frame at a time, until the camera panned to a half-inflated balloon hovering above a floor of mirrors.

The company subsequently released a patch aiming to encourage livelier outcomes, but this update only added a new genre, “Joyous Nullification,” marked by montages of impassively smiling actors dissolving into static as upbeat music played on endless loop. Dr. Prufrock acknowledged in a press statement that team morale was “strained, yet harmoniously bewildered.”

Throughout the international film community, response has been uniformly awestruck. Japanese horror auteur Norio Yakamoto called the app’s output “a digital elegy for hope,” while the Zurich Institute of Narrative Science published a white paper suggesting that algorithms may now lead, rather than follow, humanity’s search for meaninglessness on screen.

CineMinima recently confirmed plans to debut the complete accidental catalog at next year’s Venice Film Festival, with viewers required to sign release forms acknowledging potential ontological unease. Inquiries regarding commercial use of the genres were politely redirected to the app’s in-house Existential Liaison, who could not be reached for comment.

As of press time, analysts observed that CineMinima’s most popular export, “Protagonist as Wallpaper,” had amassed over 40,000 downloads, mostly among philosophy undergraduates and municipal libraries looking to replace damaged security footage.