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Movie of the Week

Slaughterbots

February 21, 2026

“They used to say, ‘Guns don’t kill people; people do.’ Well, people don’t. They get emotional, disobey orders, aim high. Let’s watch the weapons make the decisions.”

~ Tech CEO in Slaughterbots

Movie of the Week

Slaughterbots

The Solari Report does not generally promote the horror film genre, but the 2017 “horror short” Slaughterbots is worth eight minutes of your time.

The nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which works “to steer transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from large-scale risks,” released the film, and documentary, commercial, and feature film director Stewart Sugg directed it. Wikipedia describes Slaughterbots as an “arms-control advocacy video” dramatizing a “near-future scenario.”

In general, the horror genre “seeks to elicit physical or psychological fear in its viewers,” and Slaughterbots’ “fictional” depiction of drone warfare achieves both. Most of the mini-film depicts a pseudo-TED Talk presentation, in which a tech CEO brags about—and demonstrates—his company’s unstoppable AI-operated drones, which can be “trained as a team” and combine cameras, sensors, facial recognition, and anti-sniper features with explosives.

On Solari’s Money & Markets, Catherine and John Titus have observed for quite some time now that “Gaza is a method”—a method coming to a neighborhood near each of us if we do not push back. And the method is advancing. In the Feb. 5 episode (“Gun Bans and Detention Camps in a Drone Panopticon – What Could Go Wrong?”), Catherine and John drew attention to the U.S. military’s new “SkyFoundry” program for the mass production of one million small drones annually. Meanwhile, Flock Safety—the company that has been rolling out surveillance cameras in every nook and cranny of rural and urban America—is using “public safety” as its cover story to link camera and drone capabilities. Hollywood is doing its part by churning out feature-length movies that program the public to accept drone surveillance and warfare on arbitrarily designated “enemies” as facts of life.

Slaughterbots apparently hit a nerve when it was released, attracting over 200 million online views and worldwide notice. The comment of someone who viewed Slaughterbots in 2025 says it all: “Palantir was definitely taking notes when this film came out.”

Slaughterbots can be viewed HERE.

Links

Slaughterbots (Wikipedia)

The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

AI Drones Used in Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities

SkyFoundry and the Future of American Drone Production at Scale

Flock Expands into Drones

List of films featuring drones (Wikipedia)

Related at Solari

Pushback against Local—and Locally Funded—Surveillance


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