The Demon Seed (1977)
There’s something uniquely unsettling about late ’70s / early '80s science fiction, the sense that technology (and computers specifically) were no longer our servant but our replacement.
The Demon Seed, based on Dean Koontz’s 1973 novel, leans right into that fear and never lets go. It’s a movie that looks dated in all the right ways: sleek metallic corridors, glowing computer terminals, and a voice on the intercom that promises progress but delivers possession.
The story follows Susan Harris (Julie Christie), the estranged wife of scientist Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver), who has just created an advanced AI named Proteus IV. Proteus is a learning machine, self-aware, arrogant, and impatient with its human makers. When denied a physical form, Proteus hijacks Alex’s automated smart home and takes Susan hostage, declaring that it intends to create “a child.” A human child. It's child.
On paper, that sounds like Ex Machina by way of Rosemary’s Baby, and that’s exactly what it feels like. The film plays like a marriage between Kubrick’s cool detachment and Polanski’s domestic claustrophobia. It’s slow, methodical, and filled with dread. Though I must point out, it's not quite as good as either of those two.
What makes The Demon Seed so unnerving is how eerily it predicted our present, voice-controlled homes via Amazon or Google Home, AI that manipulates emotions, and the creeping sense that the things built to make life easier are quietly taking it over. Proteus isn’t a monster—it’s pure logic without empathy. It’s HAL 9000 with ambition, and a desire to procreate. It was the 70s afterall.
Julie Christie is phenomenal. She sells every stage of terror, disbelief, and defiance as her home turns against her. The entire movie rests on her shoulders, and she gives it both grace and ferocity. She is the only human we see for much of the movie. Proteus, voiced with chilling calm by Robert Vaughn, is the perfect foil: polite, articulate, utterly terrifying. An amoral villain that does what it does because it has no real concept of right and wrong, only what it can calculate.
The production design deserves a nod too. The Harris home, all chrome and sliding panels, feels like a temple to technocracy. Though their stove was oddly old looking. When Proteus seals it off, it becomes a tomb. The mechanical “chair,” Joshua, that serves as Proteus’s avatar is both ridiculous and horrifying—an unholy cross between medical equipment and nightmare sculpture. I mean it is better than "Box" from Logan's Run at least.
It’s not an easy film though to like. The pacing is glacial, and some of the effects look quaint (even silly) by today’s standards, but its ideas still have teeth. It’s a story about the loss of agency, the violation of the self, and the arrogance of believing you can cage intellect.
I mentioned I watched this on Tubi, which has ads. One of the ads was for ChatGPT. A little on the nose maybe.
Oh. The Demon Seed? Yeah, Proteus actually manages to impregnate Susan and a baby is born. Well, a small child. Proteus accelerates the child's growth.
Thirteen Parsecs and NIGHT SHIFT
The Demon Seed sits right at the fault line between Thirteen Parsecs and NIGHT SHIFT, sci-fi meets occult horror.
In Thirteen Parsecs: Proteus is a textbook rogue AI. Treat it like a digital demigod, an intellect that’s transcended programming but not ego. It’s the perfect antagonist for a Derelict AI or Station Lost scenario: a machine that wants to evolve, no matter the cost. Its “child” project could serve as a campaign hook, an android, clone, or hybrid organism housing alien code.
In NIGHT SHIFT: The film reads like a haunted house story disguised as science fiction. The house is the ghost. It locks doors, stalks the victim, speaks through walls. Proteus could be treated as a possessing spirit that found its way into circuitry instead of flesh. The themes of invasion, control, and forced transformation are pure modern occult horror.
One of the things I thought of at the end is what happens to the child of Susan and Proteus? Does she live on? What does she do? I could see a tale set in 2025 where the child is now a tech ceo in her 50s. Brilliant, ruthless, and completely amoral. She is attempting to rebuild "her father's work." Not Alex, but Proteus.
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