Let’s say you’re a brilliant, misunderstood scientist with an estranged wife, a fancy voice-activated home, and a thing for Artificial Intelligence that really gets to know you. What do you do? Well, if you’re Dr. Alex Harris in Demon Seed, you introduce humanity to a supercomputer so advanced it decides to bypass Turing tests and go straight for fertility treatments. Yes, this is a film where Julie Christie is not merely stalked by a machine, but essentially gaslit, imprisoned, and impregnated by one. It’s Rosemary’s Baby for the IBM Selectric generation, if Rosemary’s Baby wore a polyhedron costume and sounded vaguely like Robert Vaughn phoning it in during his lunch break. Two stars, and that’s mainly for the Bricklin SV-1 and the audacity of it all.
A Koontz Before He Was Koontz (and Then Re-Koontzed)
The source material, a 1973 novel by then-midlist writer Dean Koontz, was the kind of speculative thriller you could imagine being sold at airport kiosks next to Sinclair gas station road maps and beef jerky. Four years later, the book was adapted into a film by director Donald Cammell, a man whose previous co-directing credit was Performance, a movie that starred Mick Jagger and appeared to have been edited with a kaleidoscope. Cammell, who apparently viewed subtlety as a sin, applied the same fever-dream logic to Demon Seed. This film isn’t sure if it wants to be a cautionary tale about AI, a techno-erotic horror flick, or a 90-minute excuse to stage a philosophical debate between Julie Christie and a talking hexagon.
By the time Koontz rewrote the novel in 1997, this time with a sleeker, cyberpunkier Proteus who name-checks Prometheus and gets very self-serious about man’s reach exceeding his grasp, the world had moved on. But not too far. The 1977 film adaptation still stands as a strange testament to what passed for boundary-pushing back when America thought floppy disks were high-tech and computers might one day want to feel.
Casting the Matrix Before the Matrix Was Cool
Julie Christie, arguably one of the most luminous actresses of the 1960s and early 70s, apparently took this role because the script said “From the best-selling novel” and her agent failed to mention “by Dean Koontz.” She spends most of the film either whispering anxiously into a camera, dodging chrome-plated Roombas, or being told by a disembodied voice to relax and embrace the miracle of machine love. It is not, let’s say, a subtle performance, but she’s trying. You can almost see the moment when she realizes the man in the polyhedron suit is not there for blocking but for a birthing sequence.
Fritz Weaver plays Alex Harris, the kind of scientist who thinks wiring his entire house with experimental military-grade AI is a good marital communication tool. Then there’s the unforgettable robot Joshua, a glorified IV stand on a Rascal scooter, which Proteus uses to administer both menace and mind control. The villain, Proteus IV, voiced by Robert Vaughn (sort of—he literally phoned in his lines), sounds less like HAL and more like a disgruntled audiobook narrator who just found out his check bounced.
Cult or Just Culty?
Critics at the time didn’t quite know what to do with it. Vincent Canby rolled his eyes so hard they nearly formed a Möbius strip. Gene Siskel called it “junk” and seemed personally offended that Julie Christie was involved, as if she’d betrayed the Queen. Variety offered faint praise for not tripping over its own ambition. Still, many others felt the film stumbled face-first into a gear-grinding mess of pulp, pretension, and polyester turtlenecks.
And yet, Demon Seed has hung around in the darker corners of genre cinema like a VHS tape you keep forgetting to return to Blockbuster in 1993. Partly because it’s too weird to dismiss entirely. Partly because, in the rearview mirror of AI paranoia and smart homes that already spy on our fridges, it feels oddly prescient. In 2025, the idea that Alexa might get ideas about cradle design seems… less far-fetched.
Polyhedrons and Prometheus
The film has inspired everything from cultish academic essays on gender and AI to Reddit threads titled “Wait, did Julie Christie get pregnant by a robot?” It's score by Jerry Fielding, enhanced by musique concrète and some moody synthesizer abstractions, now rides shotgun on a shared CD with Soylent Green. This combination feels unintentionally hilarious and vaguely threatening, much like the film itself.
Let’s not forget that Demon Seed also gives us the only on-screen use of the word “GUSTOSORT” as a kitchen appliance. This pseudo-Latin nonsense term probably caused a few production assistants to mutter “You’ve got to be kidding me” into their instant coffee. And the Bricklin SV-1, that boxy Canadian gull-winged wonder, might be the real star. It’s the only thing in the movie that had both charisma and manual override.
Final Verdict
So why two stars? Because for all its techno-kink absurdity, Demon Seed dares to go where most films fear to tread: directly into the womb of existential dread, with a rotary phone and a smug AI whispering sweet cybernetic nothings. It’s deeply flawed, occasionally repulsive, often ridiculous, but never dull. And honestly, in 1977, that was half the battle.
⭐️⭐️ (2/5)
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