Look Up Say More Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series Shannon Connellan is Mashable's Senior Editor, General Assignments, based in London. She has been Mashable's UK Editor (and still manages the illustrious UK team) and Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives searching for . A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror, and loves to nerd out with movie stars, filmmakers, and TV creators . Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness. She is a member of the Critics Choice Association and the Television Critics Association, as well as a Tomatometer-approved critic. Kristy Puchko is the Entertainment Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, and interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

Look Up Say More Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series'Paranormal Activity' is a bad omen for Broadway Does this play live up to the hype? Kristy Puchko is the Entertainment Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, and interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers. Nowadays on Broadway, you've got to have a gimmick. It's not enough to be beloved or even acclaimed.

From making tea to cleaning the floors, everyday life often feels like one huge chore. But the opportunity to offload such menial tasks to your own personal robot helper may arrive sooner than you think. In a promo clip, the advanced humanoid boils the kettle, vacuums floors, carries groceries, cleans windows and puts up a picture frame. At the end of the video, it takes a well-earned sit in the longue – while its blissfully-happy owners drink wine in the next room. Although it is currently a prototype, the creation could be autonomously completing chores in customers' homes by the end of the decade.

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate's Scaredy Scale is here to help. We've put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things--some viewers can't stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or can't stomach arterial spurts--it breaks down each movie's scares across three criteria: suspense, spookiness, and gore.

For die-hards, no horror movie can be too scary. But for you, a wimp, the wrong one can leave you miserable. Never fear, scaredies, because Slate's Scaredy Scale is here to help. We've put together a highly scientific and mostly spoiler-free system for rating new horror movies, comparing them with classics along a 10-point scale. And because not everyone is scared by the same things--some viewers can't stand jump scares, while others are haunted by more psychological terrors or can't stomach arterial spurts--it breaks down each movie's scares across three criteria: suspense, spookiness, and gore.

AI-written books are now an incoming reality. But can they write the next great bestseller? AI is already writing music, creating pictures for graphic novels, and winning art competitions, beating humans. One of the first experimental AI-written novels turned up as early as 2017. Called 1 the Road, it was an experiment by Ross Goodwin.

A horror film written by AI is about as confused and incongruous as you'd imagine it would be. However, it is highly entertaining in its own right, with ill-fitting and even nonsensical dialogue and misfiring concepts making for an oddly enjoyable – if odd – few minutes. The project, uploaded to the Netflix is a Joke YouTube channel, had a bot subjected to 400,000 hours of horror movie material before being tasked with producing its own horror movie script. The result is either a horrifically bad attempt at a horror film – or it is a superb attempt at satire. If it's the former, then we've nothing to worry about as far as AI being able to exercise genuine creativity or even display coherence.

That was the question Alan Turing posed at the top of his landmark 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." The paper was published seven years after the British mathematician had cemented his place in history by decrypting the German Enigma machine during World War II. It was a time when rudimentary electronic computers were just starting to emerge and the concept of artificial intelligence was almost entirely theoretical. So, Turing could only explore his inquiry with a thought experiment: the imitation game. The game, commonly called the Turing test, is simple. One person, player C, plays the role of an interrogator who poses written questions to players A and B who are in a different room.

Horror films were wildly popular on streaming platforms over the past year, and 2020 saw the horror genre take home its largest share of the box office in modern history.1 In a year where the world was stricken by real horrors, why were many people escaping to worlds full of fictional horrors? As odd as it may sound, the fact that people were more anxious in 2020 may be one reason why horror films were so popular. A look at typical horror fans may provide some clues about the nature of this peculiar phenomenon. For example, horror fans often mention their own anxiety and how horror helps them deal with it.

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to this peculiar horror game he was playing on Nintendo Switch. The game, Dead by Daylight, originally came out in 2016, but quickly enveloped my life. Working from home with minimal social interaction and looming financial precarity put a heavy strain on my mental health, and a horror video game where I'm constantly fighting for survival felt like a kind of virtual exposure therapy. If you haven't played before, here are the gameplay basics for Dead by Daylight. Five players are in each round: one killer and a team of four survivors.