Hackers at 30: The full story behind the cult cyber fairytale

In the mid-90s, the long-awaited arrival of the information superhighway promised to transform the lives of people all over the world. 

Though the average desktop hard drive stored just 500MB of data, and search engines like Google and AskJeeves were still only concepts, the total number of websites online would skyrocket from 2,278 at the end of 1994 to over 23,500 by June 1995, cementing the internet’s unshakeable foothold in the cultural zeitgeist.

Screens were flooded with features that put cyber-culture front and centre that year – from Keanu Reeves sci-fi romp Johnny Mnemonic and Sandra Bullock snooze-fest The Net, to classic Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell. “It seemed to be quite a niche, geeky area,” says Iain Softley, director of one of the most enduring ‘hacksploitation’ films of the era, over coffee and madeleines at London’s Ciné Lumière. “But I felt this could be the next moment in pop culture to break through into the mainstream – just as rock ’n’ roll and pop music had been in the early 60s.”

Hackers celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with a deluxe’ new 88 Films home media release and a pair of screenings at London’s Prince Charles Cinema on September 18. The institution refers to it as “possibly the first movie where the nerds were the cool kids”. But it’s not the only reason why this ultra-stylish cult classic – about teen computer hackers in Manhattan caught up in a nefarious tech whizz’s corporate conspiracy – has built such a loyal following in the years since its release.

Informed by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine and figures like Mark Abene – a 22-year-old New Yorker also known as Phiber Optik, who spent most of 1994 in prison on counts of computer trespass and conspiracy – writer Rafael Moreau would supply the cerebral screenplay that Softley would use to assemble a cast of soon-to-be-famous stars. Among them: pixie-haired Angelina Jolie (fresh off the set of Cyborg 2), her soon-to-be-husband Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting), and a pre-Scream Matthew Lillard. Future TV icons Lorraine Bracco (The Sopranos), Wendell Pierce (The Wire) and Fisher Stevens (Succession), who plays the scheming, skateboarding villain, would be their adversaries, with celebrity magician Penn Jillette also providing a fittingly nerdy cameo.

With the cast assembled, the performers were flushed with dystopian literature. “Angelina asked, ‘what would my character read?’,” Softley recalls. “By the next day on set, she’d almost finished William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.” (Renoly Santiago was handed William Gibson’s notoriously dense sci-fi staple Neuromancer.) Their characters’ personalities, meanwhile, would be expressed via legendary clothing collector Roger Burton, known for styling Quadrophenia and for his collaborations with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Cue combat vests, Quiksilver tops, piercings and unexpected jodhpurs as Hackers became populated by true-to-the-word cyberpunks.

Real hackers “were so boring”, Burton – who sadly passed in July 2025 – told Dazed back in 2020. “They were kind of like Goths,” Softley concurs. Inspiration was instead derived from post-punk and even wig conventions on New York’s Lower East Side, with some items foraged from thrift stores and street vendors. The Hackers kids “were creating the world they saw inside their heads, saying ‘this is our world now’,” says Softley, who dyed his hair an “unattractive yellow” on the first day of shooting in solidarity with his flamboyantly-dressed stars.

The colour palette was psychedelic, because people were using technology almost as a trip

The wider visual landscape of Hackers – a Manhattan metropolis built on customised PCs and pastel-coloured floppy discs – was captured by in-vogue cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, fresh off success on Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Postcard destinations such as Washington Square Park, the Empire State Building and Grand Central Station would root the movie in a vivid mid-90s reality. This tangible setting was then mirrored by a digital world achieved largely via practical effects, rather than CGI, as chunky laptop screens provided portals into technicolour computer switchboard cities housing pixellated video messages and impenetrable code supernovas. “The colour palette was psychedelic,” says Softley, “because people were using technology almost as a trip.”

Perhaps the most vivid on-screen spaces, though, are Hackers’ clubs; cultural melting pots adorned with Berlin-esque graffiti, where characters dance and engage in tense WipeOut battles on giant screens. If they feel like familiar settings, it’s probably because they were filmed in London: ‘Cyberdelia’ was constructed at Brentford Public Baths, while Ministry of Sound was utilised as the “Razor-and-Blade club” in New York.

Softley knew how to make these places feel intoxicating. The director had spent formative years in Manchester during the heydays of New Order and Happy Mondays (he recalls being turfed out of The Hacienda to the sound of T. Rex’s “Telegram Sam”). And he was still going to “warehouse parties in the suburbs” with cast members while filming early-Beatles drama Backbeat in 1993. Club culture was the focus of numerous research trips during Hackers, from London institution Heaven to all manner of spaces in New York: “We just wanted to recreate that excitement, and the multi-cultural, multi-tribal scene going on,” Softley says.

Unsurprisingly, this focus would help inform another of Hackers’ most widely-discussed facets: a sensational, early 90s dance music soundtrack that Softley felt was the sound of the future. And so Hackers would be electrified by ethereal classics like Orbital’s “Halcyon” and “On and On”, The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People”, Underworld’s “Cowgirl”, and the likes of Leftfield, Massive Attack, and Stereo MCs. “It had this kind of symphonic, ambient quality that was so appropriate to the film,” he says. “The way that music and film combine is one of the most thrilling things about cinema to me.”

Though he jokes that Brat summer came a year late for him, Softley has historically been ahead of the curve with music. “I saw the first ‘Ziggy Stardust’ show at Royal Festival Hall when I was 14,” he says. “And I was already aware of the Chicago house scene before people in the UK started talking about acid house after the Ibiza summer.” When New Order’s “World in Motion” was confirmed as the England World Cup song in 1990, he thought electronic music had been cemented in the mainstream. United Artists, the studio behind Hackers, didn’t share that vision and declined to issue an official soundtrack release which, given its contemporary reputation, seems bizarre. “They wanted another grunge soundtrack,” Softley recalls, “because [apparently] no one was listening to techno and house music at the time.”

Hackers’ box office return was another disappointment. Despite capturing a critical pop culture moment (indeed, Stuyvesant High School, a key Hackers shooting location, was dubbed ‘Hacker High’ by the New York Daily News after its students were investigated by the FBI for hacking in 1995), it failed to recoup even half of its $20m budget upon release. Criticism pointed to the favouring of style over substance and a litany of “unbelievable events”, with the Los Angeles Times quipping “can Windows ’95 do all of this?”. Softley recalls one review in the Orange County Register citing the idea of pictures being broadcast on computer screens as “preposterous”. Either way, Hackers was never intended to be high art, says the director, but “a cyber fairytale that was irreverent, bold, and energetic.”

It’s impossible to predict where we’re going now, and you don’t want to make a film that’s going to be completely irrelevant in a year’s time

The film has since built a loyal following as pop culture continues to metamorphose with new cyber-culture trends and news cycles, from the rise and fall of Napster and BitTorrent to major hacker events like WikiLeaks and ‘The Fappening’. In fact, within 12 hours of re-watching Hackers, my own phone began bombarding me with targeted articles about the movie; a reminder that even my own living room isn’t safe from the eyes and ears of the algorithm. Is this fertile ground for a timely sequel? I put the question to Softley – but he claims it’s not quite that simple.

“Everyone involved in Hackers has been approached [about a sequel],” Softley says. “But it was only about five years ago that I seriously considered it.” He describes discussing it on stage at Electromagnetic Field festival with an Anonymous-affiliated hacker once dubbed one of the “most-wanted cyber-criminals on the planet”. Jake Davis, aka Topiary, was just 20 years old when he was convicted of conspiracy to attack the websites of the CIA and Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency in 2013. “Five years ago, it was financial cybercrime and global security, and how ‘big data’ was used to influence Brexit and the American election,” Softley continues. “But it’s already moved on. With Hackers, it was really just one concept in terms of technological advance – a cyber world becoming a part of everyone’s lives. It’s impossible to predict where we’re going now, and you don’t want to make a film that’s going to be completely irrelevant in a year’s time.” 

Not all hope is lost, because, as Softley reminds me, Hackers was never really a ‘tech’ film in the first place. It’s a film about popular culture, about kids hanging out in New York. With the right concepts about human relationships, there could one day be a new tale to tell in Softley’s “cyber-delic” world of trippy metropolises, flamboyant fashions, and pumping choons – “all of those other elements, be it AI or cyber-snooping, will just be a tool to tell the story.”

Find out more about Hackers’ deluxe new 88 Films home media release here, and get tickets to the screenings at London’s Prince Charles Cinema on September 18 here