Kaledonia Pictures, the production company making Wonka experience-inspired film The Unknown, appears to be rather new, with its website only appearing a matter of days ago.
The past day has brought a new twist to the ongoing saga of the Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow, which went viral in late February: a production company called Kaledonia Pictures is working on a film loosely based on it, called The Unknown. It’s said to be some sort of supernatural horror about a “renowned illustrator and his wife who are haunted by the tragic death of their son,” and encounter an “unknowable evil” in the Scottish Highlands.
Filmmakers hurriedly cashing in on events isn’t new – hence the assorted horror films based on the newly-out-of-copyright Steamboat Willie that are currently in the works.
What is somewhat odd about The Unknown, however, is that Kaledonia Pictures has almost no internet footprint whatsoever. There’s no mention of it on Companies House, which you’d expect from a UK firm – there’s a Caledonia Pictures Limited, but that was dissolved in February 2018.
In fact, a Readers’ Context note attached to a tweet about The Unknown put out by Discussing Film suggests that “the production company cited in the article, Kaledonia Pictures, did not exist 3 days ago. Their website, kaledonia-pictures.com, is email-only. The website for the project, whatistheunknown.com, was registered four hours later. Kaledonia Pictures is not a registered company.”
In the Bloody Disgusting story that broke word of the film project on the 4th March, a quote is provided by Kaledonia Pictures, but there’s no name attached to it.
“We are excited to begin production and look forward to sharing more with you as soon as possible,” someone from the company wrote. “We are actually only a few miles from the event, so it is quite surreal to see Glasgow all over social media, worldwide.”
This whole jamboree began, you may recall, when a company calling itself House Of Illuminati staged a (to our knowledge unlicenced) Willy Wonka-themed ‘Chocolate Experience’ in February. With tickets selling for around £35 each, it turned out to be a tawdry affair with a few candy-themed set-pieces dotted around a Glasgow warehouse and various low-paid actors pressed into the roles of off-brand Oompa Loompas. One actor, a 16 year-old woman named Felicia, was given the role of a villain called The Unknown – a masked and evil “chocolate maker who lives in the walls”.
In the wake of the event, which was hastily cancelled on the day it launched after angry parents called the police, numerous outlets have dug into who exactly is behind the odd-sounding House Of Illuminati. Rolling Stone, for example, discovered that it had but one employee – its founder Billy Coull.
Unlike Kaledonia Pictures, House Of Illuminati Ltd is registered on Companies House; its given address is in London, and its director is listed as Billy Coull. On his Instagram page, meanwhile, Mr Coull describes himself as an “enigmatic wordsmith from Glasgow, Scotland.”
Like many other outlets, including this one, it was quickly noted just how much House Of Illuminati’s website and the one advertising the Willy’s Chocolate Experience itself used AI, with both text and images relying on generative software.
The Scottish Sun even records a heated moment where angry parents confronted Coull himself about the use of AI to sell the event. There’s also the claim made by performers at the event that the script they were asked to learn was “15-page AI generated gibberish… which contained made-up characters such as The Unknown.”
Besides organising events, Billy Coull also appears to have self-published numerous books with Dan Brown-like titles including Eclipse Of Power and The Codebreaker’s Enigma. As Rolling Stone notes, these were all published last summer, and appear to have been written using generative AI.
Interestingly, even the brief synopsis for The Unknown film, published on its website, appears to be written by AI. Pasting the text into GPTZero, an AI detector, suggests there’s a 92 percent probability that it was generated by a chatbot.
A teaser image hosted on the same site – to date, the only piece of artwork associated with the production – dates back to 2021.
According to Kaledonia Pictures, The Unknown is going to be rushed through production for a release later in 2024. We’ve contacted the company and House Of Illuminati to find out more about the project.
