The Horrors of Innovation: What the Film 'Oddity' Teaches Founders About Building in AI and Web3

If you’re taking a break from shipping code this weekend, Damian McCarthy’s indie horror masterpiece Oddity (and his recent box-office hit, Hokum) is well worth the stream. Set in the sprawling, isolated Irish countryside, the film relies on cursed objects, the occult, and sketchy outsiders to craft masterful, suffocating tension.

But as a founder, builder, or engineer, you might find watching Oddity hits a little closer to home than expected.

Why? Because pushing the boundaries of deep tech—specifically in AI and blockchain—is its own kind of psychological thriller. The tropes of isolation, the dread of the unknown, and the danger of "cursed objects" perfectly mirror the grueling, terrifying, and ultimately rewarding path of modern innovation.

Here is what navigating the cinematic horrors of Oddity can teach us about building the future.

The "Cursed Objects" in Your Codebase

In McCarthy’s cinematic universe, a cursed object is a seemingly harmless artifact that harbors destructive potential. Touch it, interact with it, and you invite chaos into your world.

For engineers and Web3 builders, cursed objects are very real. They are the unaudited smart contracts, the deprecated open-source dependencies, and the poorly documented legacy APIs that you inherit. In the blockchain space, a vulnerable smart contract is the ultimate cursed object. Interacting with it doesn't summon a golem—it summons an exploit that can drain millions of dollars in liquidity in seconds. Innovation requires us to study these "cursed" systems, learn from their catastrophic failures, and build more secure, resilient architectures (like formal verification and decentralized security protocols) to contain them.

The Isolation of the Frontier

Oddity thrives on the isolation of its environment. When things go wrong, there is no one around to help.

Ask any founder building a generative AI startup or a decentralized protocol, and they will tell you that true innovation is a deeply isolating experience. When you are operating at the bleeding edge, there is no Stack Overflow thread to save you. There are no established playbooks or "norms of society" to fall back on. You are out in the wilderness, piecing together unproven consensus mechanisms or battling the latency of novel LLM architectures. Embracing this isolation—and learning to trust your own technical compass when the environment turns hostile—is what separates visionary builders from the rest.

Peering Into the Dark Corners of AI

McCarthy is a master of the "dark corner"—forcing the audience to stare into the shadows, anticipating what might emerge.

Artificial intelligence is the greatest "dark corner" in modern tech. The sheer opacity of deep neural networks and large language models serves as a black box where data goes in and emergent behavior comes out. We are constantly peering into these shadows, trying to understand how the machine arrived at its output. The hallucinations, the latent biases, and the unpredictable edge cases are the monsters lurking in the dark. As AI engineers, our job is not to run from the dark, but to build the flashlights—better interpretability tools, robust alignment frameworks, and transparent guardrails—that illuminate it.

Master the Tension of Building

Oddity is brilliant not because of jump scares, but because it masters the tension of anticipation. Building disruptive technology is much the same. It is a constant, high-wire act of managing burn rates, navigating regulatory ambiguity, and shipping code into production when the stakes are agonizingly high.

So, go watch Oddity. Appreciate the horror on screen, and then return to the editor. Because as tech founders and engineers, the only thing scarier than confronting the unknown is failing to build a better future out of it.