Donald Cammell
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
And the AI gone bad angle not only has been done before (for home automation, that might have started with "Demon Seed" back in 1977) but also isn't used in any particular creative or imaginative way by Smith or director Lars Klevberg.
That silliness aside, the idea of Chucky having control over it all is barely even followed through on, and while no one’s asking for some Demon Seed -like shenanigans there’s a lot of room to play that’s never even attempted.
The perils of artificial insemination are also used to examine the anxiety surrounding women’s bodies as grounds for experimentation in Demon Seed (1977), Inseminoid (1981) and The Unborn (1991).
Think “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Demon Seed,” “The Brood,” and “Mother!” among others.
As a terrorized heroine, she doesn't evoke the immediate sympathy of actresses like Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight," Dorothy McGuire in "The Spiral Staircase," Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" or Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby."
As a terrorized heroine, she doesn't evoke the immediate sympathy of actresses like Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight," Dorothy McGuire in "The Spiral Staircase," Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" or Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby."
Unlike most first-rate science fiction, this story is utterly divorced from any sort of political or religious context (it’s ironically being released on Good Friday), not to mention even the faintest emotional resonance (when the film takes a baby step into “Demon Seed” territory by having Depp take control of Clifton Collins Jr. as a romantic surrogate, it instantly pulls back).
Instead of going loop-di-loop in its most ding-dong moments, “Transcendence” falls back on its own virtual memory of movies greater and lesser, like, well, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “THX-1138,” “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” “Freejack,” “Demon Seed,” “Altered States,” “Gattaca,” “A Beautiful Mind” as well as the work of sculptor Cornelia Parker.
But in “Transcendence,” which might have been titled “Him,” it’s very much back to square one: the culture of technophobia that gave us the predatory mainframes and cyborgs of “2001,” “Demon Seed” and “Alien,” and that early ’90s wave of cyber-paranoia thrillers (“The Net,” “The Lawnmower Man,” “Virtuosity”) that now seem as quaint as dial-up Internet.
From this moment on, the film recklessly melds scenarios from sci-fi milestones like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and every computer-run-wild movie from “Colossus: The Forbin Project” to “Demon Seed.”
There have been quite a number of movies dealing with the negative fallout from cyborgs including 2001 , Demon Seed , The Net , and Virtuosity.
At heart, Transcendence is a throwback to the fear-mongering science fiction of the past: not those atomic-age adventures like The Incredible Shrinking Man , but rather the lab-bound likes of The Andromeda Strain and Demon Seed , circa the paranoid '70s.
"Demon Seed," now at area theaters, pioneers and esoteric sex crime, computer rape, and blends it with the hit atrocity from "Rosemary's Baby" - infernal conception.
As a terrorized heroine, she doesn't evoke the immediate sympathy of actresses like Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight," Dorothy McGuire in "The Spiral Staircase," Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark" or Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby."
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
influenced by Demon Seed (1977)
Visuals
The design of the eye itself resembles an icier, more modern combination of the Eye of Sauron, the Matrix, and Demon Seed’s Proteus…
And with others it's a singular computer that makes quite the impression on viewers, be that Proteus IV in the barely seen "Demon Seed" (which was way ahead of its time warning about home automation) or the game playing WOPR in "Warm Games."
This may sound satirical, but the mashup of Demon Seed and Saw is pretty humorless, even more so when it begins to add heavy-handed elements from The Stepford Wives and The Handmaid’s Tale .
The faceless threat of the computer screen has long proved a fertile source of fear for film-makers, with slashers such as Eric Weston’s 1981 Evilspeak (a mainstay of the “video nasties” panic) making merry with the spectre of the post-Demon Seed download long before the dawn of the internet.
Basically it’s a modernized version of the Frankenstein story, with a mad scientist creating a living entity he can’t ultimately control, accompanied by questions regarding robotics and artificial intelligence that have been raised repeatedly in movies from “Metropolis” to “Demon Seed” to “Blade Runner” to “A.I.” to “I, Robot” to “Her” to “Lucy.”
MORE MOVIES LIKE Moontrap : For more robots behaving badly, maybe try Virus (1999), Screamers (1995), Nemesis (1992), Hardware (1990), Class of 1999 (1990), Deadly Friend (1986), Chopping Mall (1986) and Demon Seed (1977).