In Theodore Roszak's 1991 novel Flicker - a wonderfully mind-bending paranoid thriller about cinema history - the future, and the end, of film is discovered in the shape of a teenage auteur called Simon Dunkle. He is the nihilistic genius behind avant-garde horror works such as Insect Anxiety and the apocalyptic Sub Sub, a film said to initiate a new genre, "genocidal farce". Dunkle outdoes even these with The Lonesome Lovesong of the Sad Sewer Babies, a work so disturbing that the novel's narrator deems it not so much a movie as "a kind of optical acid that burns through from the eye straight down into the vital organs". Flicker proposed the horrifying, yet strangely thrilling, possibility that cinema would soon belong to lawless infant-savants like Simon Dunkle. We haven't really seen one yet - even Harmony Korine seems too benignly cinephilic to qualify. However, I can think of one film-maker who has consistently been disturbing enough to come close to the Dunkle aesthetic, and that is Chris Cunningham, the British music video director whose work features in the Royal Academy's Apocalypse show.
The exhibition's subtitle is Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, and Cunningham is familiar with both. He has done futuristic beauty in the video for Bjork's All Is Full of Love, with the star playing two auto-erotic porcelain robots. And he has done horror in his videos for Aphex Twin, in which swarms of delinquent brats and siliconed hip-hop molls all wear the distorted features of Aphex mastermind Richard James. These grotesquely comic vignettes are not only the antithesis of MTV-friendly, they are unfriendly, period. And they make you want to see - and shudder at the thought of seeing - a feature film made by this man.
Instead, Cunningham has taken a detour into the art world, and now exhibits at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. But his 15-minute film, Flex, showing there and in Apocalypse, is surprisingly low-key. A naked man and woman, lit in bilious green, confront each other in darkness, exchange brutal volleys of blows, screw just as convulsively, and finally, coupling in mid-air, are struck by a ray of light that vaporises them. Who would have imagined Cunningham producing romantic abstraction of such a transcendentalist strain?
Flex is less disturbing than it seems on paper - a coupling of brutality and beauty. What makes it transcend the apparent banality of its topic is the execution, the meticulous sound design and machine-gun editing. It's a work to be heard and felt as much as seen.
Cunningham began as a teenage special-effects expert, working on Alien 3 and Stanley Kubrick's abortive AI project. He is not alone: sculptor Ron Mueck was a movie animatronics specialist (he also worked on Alien 3), and he too is currently at Anthony d'Offay with his waxily lifelike human figures.
Mueck and Cunningham have moved from what you could patronise as the merely "lifelike" to work that strives to address the human condition. But you shouldn't dismiss the visceral impetus of effects work. The purest example I ever saw was a stall at a Spanish horror film festival. It was laden with hundreds of latex horror models - all gouged eyes, severed limbs, ripped bellies disgorging rubbery entrails. You fairly retched to look at them, but you could hardly take your eyes away.
We usually expect art proper to demand a more complex reaction than that, but in fact one work in the Apocalypse exhibition made me react quite similarly to the Spanish atrocity exhibition - Hell, Jake and Dinos Chapman's Holocaust installation. However repelled I felt, I couldn't stop peering at it; yet that fascination stood in the way of any coherent critical reaction to it.
At Apocalypse, Chris Cunningham and Jake and Dinos have somehow reversed career paths. The former sci-fi robotics nerd has moved away from pure effect into a more contemplative, impressionistic realm. Meanwhile, the Chapmans have reverted to teenage special-effects artists with their meticulously constructed Airfix landscape of horror. Hell, their very own "genocidal farce", makes them the true Simon Dunkles.
Chris Cunningham and Ron Mueck are at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, W1 (020-7499 4100) till October 17. Apocalypse is at the Royal Academy, W1 (020-7300 8000) till December 15.
