268 | Robert Cuffley & Alexa Barajas (ROMI)

My Summer Lair Chapter #268: What’s The Different Between A Smart Home & A Haunted House?

New technology provokes old fears…there’s a potential for dangers we can’t always envision or fully understand. If you’re not low-brow like Chopping Mall then go top shelf with 2001: A Space Odyssey with the malevolent HAL 9000. Impressive technology is fresh sci-fi but when it all starts to go wrong or takes on an alternative agenda…that’s horror.

In ROMI Alexa Barajas plays Maddie, a young woman who is forced by her mother to hide out in a state of the art smart home.

Maddie meets ROMI the house’s Hal 9000 which is malfunctioning thanks to a “ghost in the machine.” A smart home with that disembodied voice and different sounds and cycles operates no different than a haunted house.

For Alexa who plays Maddie it’s not long before ROMI the smart home’s digital assistant begins to terrorize her. Isolated and alone it’s hard to maintain a firm grip on reality.

Technology can anticipate our needs but technology can also incapacitate our needs. This is the current AI debate we’re having.

All unsettled in a glitching smart home Alexa is a tension architect who cannot fully convey all that is going wrong but fully knows something is wrong.

As you’ll hear Alexa enjoys making horror but isn’t a horror fan…she’s more up for comedies. Once again there’s that thin line between horror and comedy. It’s funny because ROMI is horror and Alexa Barajas as Teen Mari in Yellowjackets has horror elements. Hopefully she’s cast in a comedy soon.

Director Robert Cuffley is a big horror fan…that’s why Chopping Mall comes up. We recognize Kelly Michael Stewart the founder of Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival for his contributions to Canadian horror and genre filmmaking. Shout out to Kelly, he’s a cool dude.

Robert reveals the experience of making ROMI behind the camera and working with Alexa.

So welcome Robert and Alexa to My Summer Lair to talk about horror and Super Nintendo and Yellowjackets and I ask them both…could you survive a night in a haunted house? I suspect the way you answer that question reveals your position on living in a smart home.

Oh and it takes Alexa a bit of time to appear in the conversation; she was running late. But it’s all good; once she showed up and joined the fun a good time was had by all.

ROMI @ W • T • F

Host Sammy Younan

Recorded: Monday, November 27, 2023 at 12:00 pm (EST)

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