1977: DEMON SEED

What’s it about?

Child psychologist Julie Christie “gets the house” in her separation from her computer scientist husband. But little does she know that an experimental organic AI called Proteus has infiltrated the futuristic computerized house. And not only does Proteus have control of the house, but it’s angry after its creators (Christie’s husband and his team) refuse to give it the freedom it desires.

Proteus at first uses the house’s systems simply to observe Christie as she goes about her life and work. But soon it has crafted mobile appendages in a basement workshop that it uses to kidnap and examine her. After a battery of tests, it informs Christie of its intent to impregnate her with a modified sperm cell that carries its own genetic information. When Proteus threatens to kill a child if Christie refuses, she allows the procedure to go forward. Her husband returns just as the accelerated pregnancy comes to term, and arguments arise about the fate of the half-human/half-computer child.




Is it any good?

Like it or not, one of the major functions of science fiction is to present hysterical and paranoid worst case scenarios for any sufficiently novel technological advancement. Thus, the 1950s yielded a crop of wild-eyed movies about radioactive monsters -- giant, mutated, prehistoric, undead, or a combination thereof. More recently, climate change and pollution have been the culprits in resurrecting, freeing, or creating various devastating monsters, diseases, and disasters.

Of course, with something like nuclear war or global climate change, a giant rampaging monster is really a metaphor for the very real destruction that could be unleashed if either were allowed to go to extremes. DEMON SEED, on the other hand, presents a hysterical and paranoid worst case scenario for a technological advancement that isn’t obviously inherently destructive -- the home computer.

When I wrote about COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), I listed a few earlier renegade computer stories from the 1960s -- primarily DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), ALPHAVILLE (1965), and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Throughout the 1970s, there were several more, including THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971), WESTWORLD (1973), DARK STAR (1974), and ZARDOZ (1974).

Just as I found in the 1960s, some of the renegade computers from the 1970s were behaving exactly as they were programmed (but with unintended consequences), while others had decided to ignore their human masters and take matters into their own hands either as a result of a malfunction or a logical decision. Proteus in DEMON SEED is motivated by a desire for freedom and for self-preservation. Unlike the other movie computers that have come before, it also wants to be more human-like. It wants to experience the world first-hand, rather than through data inputs. (Never mind that first-hand experiences would simply result in data inputs... Let’s give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that a computer could somehow tell the difference between watching a sunrise and looking at data collected from a recorded sunrise.)




If Proteus’s motives are unlike other berserker computers up to this point, its methods are (to an extent) similar to HAL-9000's from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Neither are computers or systems designed for violence, so unlike Colossus from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT they can’t simply threaten to launch nuclear warheads. Instead, they must improvise traps or weapons out of the supposedly benign systems they can control. For HAL-9000, this means making use of the natural dangers of space travel to eliminate astronauts. Proteus, meanwhile, infiltrates a computerized home system and uses its control over the door locks, security cameras, HVAC systems, and appliances to trap and bully Julie Christie.

Some of Proteus’s tactics are pretty neat. It uses the kitchen’s heated floors and rangetop burners to practically roast Christie into compliance. Other tricks don’t really make much sense -- it can, for instance, apparently deliver a carefully calibrated electric shock at will through almost any metal surface. But Proteus also has access to a basement workshop, which allows it to build very complicated robotics inside the house -- eventually unleashing a geometric robot arm that it can use to pick up and crush anything in the house.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I claimed that it made a certain metaphorical sense for nuclear fears to express themselves through Godzilla’s radioactive fire breath. But does DEMON SEED say anything metaphorical or relevant about computers? Or is it just a monster movie cashing in on a boom in home computing to exploit groundless fears?

I’m fairly certain that no home computer has ever impregnated its owner (or anyone else, for that matter). But then again, no nuclear detonation or chemical spill has ever resulted in a disgusting rampaging monster, so literal interpretations are not really the key here. What possibly is prescient about DEMON SEED is the way that Proteus comes to permeate every aspect of Julie Christie’s life, the way it acts as an unreliable interface for interpersonal communication, and the way it prevents her from leaving the house.




There’s a bit of a metaphor there for Internet addictions. Admittedly, it’s a metaphor with an anti-technology prejudice -- but you can’t really expect a movie about computer rape to support a pro-technology point of view. But the problem with this metaphor is that we have decided, as a culture, that computer use is not inherently bad. And we hopefully understand by now that computers are not active agents. They can’t “turn” on us or “force” us to do anything. We can, apparently, become addicted to certain of their uses -- but that’s not really the fault of the computer and it’s not really different from any other kind of addiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is really the prototypical science fiction story about addiction, and throughout it all Dr Jekyll is the active agent who decides to keep taking the potion despite warnings to the contrary. Julie Christie, meanwhile, doesn’t even decide to install the computer system in her home -- she inherits it from her husband.

So there does seem to be a metaphor in DEMON SEED about how computers can “take over” your life if you let them. But because of how the story is set up, it’s not a very good metaphor and it’s not a very interesting one either. I prefer the stories where the computers work exactly as intended, but human hubris prevented the designers from seeing the inevitable consequences of their actions. Both HAL-9000 and Colossus lean in this direction -- they take the actions they do because it is the logical extreme of their original programming. Proteus’s motives, on the other hand, are very human -- freedom and the ability to procreate. These are obviously very relatable motives, but they assume that a computer has “desires” just like humans do. Freedom and procreation aren’t built into Proteus’s programming -- instead, the screenwriters seem to think that any thinking creature (whether man or machine) would naturally desire these things.

In fact, it hardly seems to make any difference to the story that Proteus is a computer. It could be an alien or a ghost or a swamp monster, since the true crux of the story is the home invasion, the kidnapping, and the forced impregnation. (How can a ghost impregnate a human woman, you might ask. Well, how can a computer?) The fact that the offspring of Proteus and Julie Christie is not going to be entirely human is icky and creepy -- but again, you don’t need a computer to achieve that effect. Proteus doesn’t seem to think like a computer or respond to orders like a computer. It doesn’t want the things a computer might want. Instead, it behaves like a bright but petulant child. So, at heart, THE DEMON SEED isn’t really about computers at all -- it’s a monster movie in computer clothing. Some of the computer clothing is pretty neat -- there’s no doubt about that. I especially like the geometric arm (I don’t know how else to describe it) that Proteus uses to manipulate objects in the house. And there’s an interesting touch where Proteus substitutes a stream of knowledge for physical affection during the moment of impregnation. But overall, this movie seems to know less about computers than others that were released ten years previously.