USA, 1977
94m
35mm film, “filmed in Panavision”, Metrocolor, 2.35:1
mono, English
An American science fiction film directed by Donald Cammell. It began filming on 24 May 1976.
Plot Summary
A researcher into artificial intelligence leaves his wife alone in their house which is fully automated and controlled by the super-computer Proteus IV. But the machine becomes obsessed with the researchers wife and lays plans to artificially inseminate her with its own human/machine offspring…
Credits
* = uncredited
Crew
Directed by: Donald Cammell
© MCMLXXVII [1977] by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents [opening credits] Presented by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [end credits]. A Herb Jaffe production
Produced by: Herb Jaffe
Screenplay by: Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson
Based Upon the Novel “Demon Seed” by: Dean R. Koontz
Director of Photography: Bill Butler
Film Editor and Montages: Francisco Mazzola
Musical Score Composed and Conducted by: Jerry Fielding
Sound: Jerry Jost, William McCaughey
Costumes for Julie Christie Designed by: Sandy Cole
Makeup: Lee Harman, Don L. Cash
Hairdresser: Dione Taylor
All Special Makeup: Frank Griffin, Burman Studios
Special Effects: Tom Fisher
Synthavision Animation by: Bo Gehring
Tetralinks by: Level-Seven
Delta Wing Computer Animation by: Computer Science Department, University of Utah
Electronic Visuals Designed and Developed by: Ron Hays
Special Proteus Monitor Footage by: Jordan Belson
Production Designer: Edward C. Carfagno
Cast
Julie Christie (Susan Harris)
Fritz Weaver (Alex Harris)
Gerrit Graham (Walter Gabler)
Berry Kroeger (Petrosian)
Lisa Lu (Soon Yen)
Larry J. Blake (Cameron)
John O’Leary (Royce)
Alfred Dennis (Mokri)
Davis Roberts (Warner)
Patricia Wilson (Mrs Trabert)
E. Hampton Beagle (night operator)
Michael Glass (technician 1)
Barbara O. Jones (technician 2)
Dana Laurita (Amy)
Monica MacLean (Joan Kemp)
Harold Oblong (scientist)
Georgie Paul (Maria)
Michelle Stacy (Marlene)
Tiffany Potter, Felix Silla (baby)
Robert Vaughn [voice of Proteus IV] *
Alternative Titles
Proteus Generation
Links
See also
A for Andromeda (1961)
Press
1977
New York Times 9 April 1977
Demon Seed is gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly. […] Demon Seed is virtually a one-woman, one-computer movie. […] Miss Christie is too sensible an actress to be able to look frightened under the circumstances of her imprisonment. Most of the time she just looks bloody impatient […] Donald Cammell, a painter who was the co-director (with Nicolas Roeg) of Performance, directed Demon Seed with more apparent interest in the machinery of the movie than in its sense. Some of this machinery is quite impressive, including the large metal tetrahedron that becomes the material manifestation of Proteus IV […] Yet most of these effects are more mind-depressing than mind-expanding. At best they are unintentionally funny. – from a review by Vincent Canby
San Francisco Chronicle 7 April 1977
A gripping, profound look at the future […] The Demon Seed is an extraordinary science-fiction film. […] This is a science fiction film that grips both the intelligence and imagination. It is shameful that MGM is marketing it like a horror film. – from a review by Judy Stone
Newsday 8 April 1977
Demon Seed touches on such lofty subject as ecology (the supercomputer doesn’t want to collaborate with businessmen in wasting natural resources), immortality, and what it means to be human. But it is mostly concerned with a defenceless woman who is imprisoned and victimized by a ruthless power. […] I think that the fuzzy parts of Demon Seed‘s plot – like exactly how the supercomputer transfers his consciousness to the cell matter of the fetus to 28 days [sic] – are less troublesome than the transparent attempt to titillate us. The sight of Julie Christie trussed spreadeagle on her bed while a mechanical arm handles her body is pure exploitation, as perverse as something out of the prurient feelies of Brave New World. It is a mistake, in an otherwise above-average sci-fi film. – from a review by Joseph Gelmis
Cinefantastique vol.6 no.1 (Summer 1977) p.14
The premise of Demon Seed – a computer rapes and impregnates a woman – is bizarre even by science fiction standards, but the most bizarre thing about this film is that it is so very successful. Far from being mere technological pornography, Demon Seed is one of the best science fiction films since 2001 and a strong re-affirmation of the potential of science fiction film. Some might criticize Demon Seed as a rape fantasy. another stage in film’s degradation of women. and while some sequences, such as the computer’s examination of Susan Harris (Julie Christie), have sado-masochistic overtones the film is actually tasteful given its plot. To see this one has only to compare it to the original novel by Dean R. Koontz. Screenwriters Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson have avoided the nudity, stupidity, and sensationalism that made the book a penny dreadful. […] While the screenplay has a few implausibilities, such as the failure of anyone to notice the disappearance of Walter Gabler (Gerrit Graham) after his failed rescue attempt and the presence biology equipment in a computer scientist’s lab, it is still a remarkable blend of terror, humor, characterization, and speculation. Much of the credit must go to Donald Cammell’s direction, While the film has the visual beauty and philosophical depth one might expect from the co-director (with Nicholas Roeg) of Performance, it also shows a strong sense of storytelling style and a Hitchcockian understanding of the interplay between humor and suspense. […] The film is beautifully produced, building a believable world in miniature to support the story. The location work for the contrasting settings, the Harris mansion, and ICON laboratories, is excellent and Edward C. Carfagno’s production design and Bill Butler’s glacial photography both contribute to the mix of the otherworldly and the immediate. […] The worst aspect of Demon Seed is the title which suggests it’s another devil movie. This is tragic, not only because the film succeeds so well as science fiction but because its intent is diametrically opposed to The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, and all the horror films it superficially resembles. Demon Seed has its share of terror, but where horror films deal in despair and destruction Demon Seed creates wonder and hope – perhaps the prime difference between horror and science fiction. – from an illustrated review by S.W. Schumack
Sight and Sound vol.46 no.3 (Summer 1977) pp.190-191
Proteus’ plight is viewed with some sympathy (and the fault, by weird implication, is largely the scientists’, for their failure to understand his emotional problems). Certainly there is pathos at the end when Proteus, having ‘investigated eternity’ and seen the futility of his existence, and after doing his best to reproduce himself in an independent form, commits suicide by shutting down his circuits. But if this promises rich material for a black comedy, it is sadly unrealised here, remaining at some half-formed ironic level in a film which seems uncertain just how seriously to take itself. The makers have settled instead for a chic, anything-goes mood, crossing and confusing the Computer’s Lib theme with more fashionable material (Women’s Lib, ecology, scientific hubris, demonic possession) than their shaky narrative can stand. One incidentally interesting aspect of the film is its strong suggestion that whatever Donald Cammell (here making his solo debut as director) contributed to the conception of Performance, that film’s visual and thematic cohesion were probably the work of his collaborator Nicolas Roeg. Demon Seed might be striving after a similarly powerful metaphor for its age – some equation between scientific rapine and what the resentful Proteus eventually does to the heroine – but it lacks the integration of Performance, its perceptive blend of the popular subversions of pop and drug culture with the identity-riddling philosophy and fiction of Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges. Demon Seed, moreover, is very uncomfortably directed: the performances are stilted and metallic (whatever is supposed to be assumed about robots taking over), and the perfunctory visuals leave the ramshackle plot dangerously over-exposed. […] A […] disturbing ramification is that the film eventually allows the audience to enjoy her helplessness and humiliation just as in many a more direct rape fantasy movie. In fact, all the super-technology, whether on display or under attack, fails to disguise some basic dramatic deficiencies. One is that Proteus, running amok apparently from the moment he is plugged in, comes across too glibly: we need more motivation, even from machinery. Another is that our thoroughly modern heroine is made to behave as if she were a Griffith damsel, struggling in helpless rage rather than fainting terror, but still merely putting up a titillatingly fruitless fight before the beast has his wicked way. – from an illustrated review by Richard Combs
Films Illustrated vol.7 no.74 (October 1977) p.44
The more I think about Donald Cammell’s film, the more it grows on me. Science fiction is marked by an almost inevitable pessimism but Proteus IV, the all-knowing computer that is the film’s liquid-voiced protagonist, offers a glimmer of hope for the world, if not for the human race itself. It has a sense of ecological responsibility and refuses to allow its masters to commit crimes against the planet that is their home. […] The problem with Cammell’s film seems, ironically, to be too large a budget. The special effects and cosmic light shows are superfluous to the requirements of a cerebral script, and the computer’s trick of spinning like a diamond-shaped top, then lashing out in a whip-like formation symmetrical pyramids, is gadgetry for its own sake. In its quieter moments, though, the film develops a tenderness that is quite unexpected. – from a review by D.C. [David Castell]
Monthly Film Bulletin vol.44 no.525 (October 1977) p.209
A nice contrast might have been made between the machine (“I am reason”, it says at one point), trapped in itself and not allowed to explore the boundaries of knowledge, and its venal creators. As It is, the three money-men who come to inspect their gadget are blandness itself, and its keeper Dr. Soon Yen, the linguist, reads to it like the kindest of nannies. Had Proteus really been programmed with “all human knowledge” it would, surely, have understood about guile, the telling of pacifying half-truths: instead, almost before it has been set in operation, it complains and baulks at its instructions only, it should have understood hastening its own demise. Similarly, the relationship between Susan the proponent of humanity in a machine age, and the arch-fiend itself a thinking computer, is left disappointingly undeveloped. Susan, who behaves so calmly when Amy throws a tantrum in her office, is incapable, it seems, of acting with an ounce of self-control when the computer takes over her house: she resorts to pettish behaviour, throws her breakfast at the camera and then refuses to wipe the lens, and uses only the most obvious and antagonistic stratagems to try to escape from the house. (One sits for much of the film’s running time devising ways she might possibly have escaped.) With the exception of the Protean geometrical construction that the computer fashions in the basement, the film’s special effects appear particularly redundant: Jordan Belson’s monitor footage, the visual manifestation of the computer’s mind, might have been seen on the wall of any discotheque ten years ago. – from a review by John Pym
Films and Filming vol.24 no.2 (November 1977) pp.40-41,43-45
What happens is often of a ribald nature, sometimes intentionally but mostly not, yet it merits contemplation because its director is Donald Cammell, who collaborated with Nicolas Roeg on Performance (1970): although he waxes less ambitious here in psycholoical and narrative terms, the ground he treads is nevertheless risky and the horrific events that take place are viable developments of what is at least a bold attempt at superior science fiction […] Minds of resolutely serious intent might dwell at fade-out time upon the virtues of the offspring […], an unpleasantly pictured creature which has a human look and will, we are told, supersede computers – presumably imbued with the wisdom that led Proteus to deplore the avaricious nature of mankind and to decree for science a purpose essentially humane. We must not rush off filled with optimism though; ambiguity resides in the closing frames, leaving us in doubt about the balance of goodness and nastiness in a creation as powerful as Proteus, and it’s half-breed progeny too. – from a review by Gordon Gow
References
Periodicals
- Cinefantastique vol.5 no.1 (Spring 1976) p.35 – note (Coming)
- Cinefantastique vol.5 no.3 (Winter 1976/1977) p.37 – illustrated article (Coming: Demon Seed by Bhob Stewart & S.W. Schumack)
- Cinefantastique vol.6 no.1 (Summer 1977) pp.14, 17, 19 – illustrated review (by S.W. Schumack)
- Film International vol.4 no.1 (2006) p.77 – DVD review (Short Takes: Demon Seed by Michael Tapper)
- Filmfacts vol.20 no.4 (1977) p.86-89 – reprinted reviews
- Films and Filming vol.24 no.2 (November 1977) pp.40-41, 43-45 – illustrated preview
- Films Illustrated vol.7 no.74 (October 1977) p.44 – review
- Flesh and Blood no.7 p.48 – review
- The Hollywood Reporter vol.242 no.13 (9 July 1976) pp.9; 10 – note; credits
- The Hollywood Reporter vol.245 no.44 (28 March 1977) pp.3, 14 – review
- The Listener vol.121 no.3098 (26 January 1989) p.35 – review
- Monthly Film Bulletin vol.44 no.525 (October 1977) p.209 – credits, review (by John Pym)
- Music from the Movies Special no.39 pp.60-61 – soundtrack review (Film music review: archival by Mikael Carlsson)
- Radio Times 3-9 November 1984 p.31 – review
- Screen International no.111 (29 October 1977) p.20 – review
- Shivers no.32 p.15 – review
- Sight and Sound vol.46 no.3 (Summer 1977) pp.190-191 – illustrated review (by Richard Combs)
- Sight and Sound vol.16 no.2 February 2006) p.87 – DVD review (Demon Seed by Matthew Leyland)
- Starburst no.215 (July 1996) p.55 – video note (Videofile by David Bassom)
- Variety 30 March 1977 p.18 – review
Books
- Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction by Phil Hardy (ed) p.333 – illustrated credits, review
- Film Review 1978-1979 by F. Maurice Speed p.144 – credits
- Horror and Science Fiction Films II by Donald C. Willis p.91 – credits
- Science Fiction Films of the Seventies by Craig W. Anderson pp.147-153 – credits, review
- Science Fiction in the Movies: An A-Z by Roy Pickard p.24 – credits, note
