Kaledonia Pictures says it’s making The Unknown, loosely based on the doomed Willy’s Chocolate Experience; organiser says it was unaware about the film.
Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow, a calamitous live family event held in late February that went viral, continues to make headlines. And among all the memes and accounts of what went wrong – taken from jobbing actors involved in the event – there emerged the story that a film was being made, loosely based on a character connected to it all.
That film is said to be a horror film called The Unknown, and according to its production company, Kaledonia Pictures, it’s set for release later this year.
According to the event organiser behind the experience, however – a company called House Of Illuminati, founded by Glaswegian Billy Coull – it had no previous knowledge of the film. Nor, it says, does it have any connection to Kaledonia Pictures, and adds that The Unknown is copyrighted and will “protect [its] interests.”
Film Stories got in touch with House Of Illuminati via email yesterday, and this is the short statement we received in response:
“We are unaware of this matter and in no way associated with the company. The unknown and likeness is copywrite house of illuminati and we will protect our interests.”
As we briefly outlined yesterday, the story behind both companies is rather unusual. House Of Illuminati, which was founded in late 2023, advertised the Willy’s Chocolate Experience event using AI-generated text and images rather than photos that might have given visitors an accurate idea of what they were getting. Actors connected to the event also claimed that the 15-page script they were given was written by AI and made almost no sense – it appears to be this script that gave rise to a curious villain named The Unknown – a masked “evil chocolatier” who lives in walls.
The resulting event proved to be so shambolic that angry parents called the police – and before long, it was making headlines around the world.
Kaledonia Pictures, meanwhile, didn’t appear to exist until a matter of days ago; it isn’t currently registered on Companies House and its internet footprint is only about a week old.
Nor do we know who runs the company, or who will direct, produce or star in the film. All we have to go on is a short synopsis about bereaved parents encountering a spectre in the Scottish Highlands – which may have been written using AI – and a piece of artwork, which appears to be a stock image created years ago.
On the 4th March, an unnamed person attached to Kaledonia Pictures told Bloody Disgusting, “We are excited to begin production and look forward to sharing more with you as soon as possible. We are actually only a few miles from the event, so it is quite surreal to see Glasgow all over social media, worldwide.”
If House Of Illuminati does indeed try to protect its interests, then Kaledonia Pictures may have to rapidly back-pedal on its film’s connection to February’s sorry event. Interestingly, UK copyright law appears to diverge from the US, meaning AI-generated work is protected under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, so theoretically, House Of Illuminati may have a case here.
Not that the matter will necessarily go to court. At this stage, the whole situation looks rather murky, and it’s difficult to say whether The Unknown film will ever even happen, or whether it’s anything more than a single image and a handful of words.
We’ll bring you more as we get it.
