Julie Christie is trapped in a suburban nightmare in Donald Cammell’s DEMON SEED
DEMON SEED (Donald Cammell, 1977)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Sunday, November 6, 3:00, and Tuesday, November 8, 9:00
Series runs through November 13
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan declared, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” Screen Slate and Anthology Film Archives have teamed up on a series that shows that concept at work in a very specific way. Continuing through November 13, “Screen Slate Presents: The Medium Is the Massacre” consists of a dozen horror films and specially chosen shorts that ratchet up the fear factor using cutting-edge technology and new media. Based on the novel by Dean R. Koontz, Donald Cammell’s creepy, claustrophobic 1977 futuristic thriller Demon Seed offers a very different look at motherhood. The film stars a surprisingly game Julie Christie as Susan Harris, a frustrated housewife whose husband, Alex (Fritz Weaver), is the leader of a team that has built a master computer known as Proteus (voiced by Robert Vaughn). When Alex goes off for several months to further Proteus’s already impressive attributes, the supercomputer starts developing a mind of its own, locking Susan in the house and deciding she must give birth to its child.
Cammell, who codirected Performance with Nicolas Roeg, fills Demon Seed with trippy, psychedelic visuals (the fab animated sequence is by Jordan Belson and Bo Gehring with Ron Hays) and cool technological flourishes, along with an electronic score by Ian Underwood and Lee Ritenour supplementing Jerry Fielding’s central musical themes. The film delves into suburban paranoia with Toffler-esque flare and an Orwellian fear of artificial intelligence. The film harkens back to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project while influencing such future films as John Badham’s WarGames, which also names its supercomputer “Joshua” and casts Weaver look-alike John Wood as computer creator Dr. Stephen Falken. Demon Seed is screening with Ericka Beckman’s 1999 experimental short Hiatus and Soda_Jerk’s one-minute Undaddy Mainframe on November 6 and 8 at Anthology. “Demon Seed with video effects by Ron Hays was perhaps the first film to integrate video with other special effect film processes,” Denise Gallant wrote in a 1982 issue of American Cinematographer. Programmed by Jon Dieringer of Screen Slate, “The Medium Is the Massacre” continues through November 13 with such other tech-savvy frightfests as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (Cronenberg was directly influenced by McLuhan, who lectured at the university he attended), John Flynn’s Brainscan, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, each accompanied by at least one related short film. “Whenever the dragon’s teeth of technological change are sown, we reap a whirlwind of violence,” McLuhan also said, in a March 1969 Playboy interview.