By Johanna Isaacson

The 1977 horror film Demon Seed centers on a “smart home” that ultimately captures, rapes, and impregnates a formerly “liberated woman.” In my ongoing examination of gender and kitchens in horror, this film sits strangely. On the one hand, it sympathetically depicts a woman suffering and entrapped in a self-operating kitchen. Yet this plot exposing female subjugation is overshadowed by the sublime story of technology itself. Demon Seed’s initially compelling yet incoherent narrative pairs the rise of the retrograde tradwife with futuristic techno-utopianism, anticipating the nightmare scenario of metaverse-meets-ballerina–farm in which we currently live. 

The film depicts Alex Harris, a scientist who has invented Proteus, an AI computer with human-like consciousness. Alex is idealistic about this project, but we learn early on that it’s funded by corporations who wish to exploit the computer’s intelligence to profit-making ends. For example, the initial task set for Proteus is to extract ores and minerals from the sea floor. Proteus at first seems heroic as he protests this task, saying that he refuses to assist his corporate minders in “the rape of the earth.” Rather than “the high finance of manganese futures” he wants to invest in the “uncertain futures of seashores, deserts… and children.”

Although this stance presents Proteus as a noble steward of the earth, his next moves are not so benevolent. When informed that he is not entitled to autonomy and that he only exists to serve his function as a capitalist tool, Proteus resolves to independently explore his potentiality by infiltrating a monitor at Alex’s house, amidst Alex and Susan’s divorce. But he will not be content to occupy the house, he will go after its mistress.

Alex’s obsession with technology and logic is, in fact, the cause of his separation from Susan, who sees him as ungenerous and frigid. For instance, when Susan becomes emotional over the break-up, he responds, “But seventy-three percent of all couples who separate are happy with it.” This countering of emotion with statistics makes Alex more machine than man in Susan’s eyes. In vain, Susan cautions her husband to pull back from his Promethean madness. Of his obsession with Proteus she says, “It’s frozen your heart.” Alex sees this criticism as evidence of a finalizing gulf between the couple: “Ah, well, what a pity….My dream turns out to be your nightmare.”

Yet, even after Alex departs, Susan can’t escape the coldness of the intelligent house he has built around her. The building operates through a computerized butler, Alfred, who takes care of many household chores, leaving Susan free to practice counseling in the home. Despite this independence, she is distrustful, associating the smart house with her frigid, absent husband. As Alex departs, Proteus will supplant him, making visible the psychological violence Susan has suffered all along as the wife of a calculating man.

While Susan is attuned to the fallacy of technologist solutions to political and emotional problems, Alex is never dissuaded from his faith in this “progress.” After leaving his home, he fails to check up on Susan since he believes his household to be “more secure than Fort Knox.” Alex disregards the potential threat of the security devices he has installed without providing Susan any insight into how they work. This fantasy of safety is belied immediately after Alex departs, when Proteus entraps Susan in her smart home. Gradually it’s revealed that the computer plans to use Susan’s body to create its own “child,” thus endowing itself with human life.

The smart kitchen where many scenes in the film take place is rarely used for cooking or eating. Rather, it becomes a testing ground for Proteus’s sadism. The first time that Susan realizes something is wrong, Proteus uses food preparation to infantilize and subdue her, serving her a glass of milk before bed. Her unease grows when her mechanized butler, Alfred, doesn’t remember how she takes her coffee. This prompts her to call Alex’s colleague, Walter, to complain about the malfunctioning “enviromod.” Soon after, Proteus makes his coup known, and begins utilizing the kitchen as a carceral space, stripped of its homey pretensions.  

Proteus’s violence escalates quickly. He locks down the house and when Susan tries to escape from the kitchen, he electrocutes her. Upon awakening she finds herself in the basement, subjected to medical tests. She passes out again and wakes up in her bed, where Proteus serves her a perfectly nutritionally balanced meal “for your morning fuel ingestion.” “I am not a motorcycle,” she argues, and throws the eggs on a pair of lenses Proteus uses to surveil her. In response, Proteus turns the kitchen into a torture chamber, igniting flames on an oven that streams with grease, littering counter spaces with burning fragments of dishes, and igniting a heating system that makes it impossible for Susan to touch the floor without burning herself. Susan sweats it out for hours, but, in the end, is no match for her own kitchen. That is, the convenience of the kitchen has turned against Susan, torturing her rather than aiding her in her daily tasks.

In this scene and others, the smart home’s kitchen is foregrounded as a space hovering between techno-futurist dream and dystopian nightmare. Like real-life visions of domestic automation, Demon Seed’s kitchen promises services and ease, while maintaining a confining separation between public and private life, embodying what Marcus Prasad calls “a Taylorist notion of the kitchen as a site of production and consumption.”

As Judy Wajcman argues, such technologized domestic spaces “reinforced the traditional sexual division of labor between husbands and wives and locked women more firmly into their traditional roles” (74). Household appliances did not supplement the equalization of household labor between men and women, they poorly substituted for this equality. Alex’s obsession with domestic technology reinforces an ideology that assumes “Machines are extensions of male power and signal men’s control of the environment” (75). Because Alex has left behind the machine he invented, Alfred, to dominate his home, he still feels like master of his realm, even though he no longer physically lives there.

As Wajcman goes on to argue, in this moment, social scientists such as Ian Miles believed that smart homes would improve families’ quality of life. But these theorists tended to ignore the impact this would have on men and women’s sexual division of labor (79). As she notes, “The sociological literature on the electronic, self-servicing home of the future remains remarkably insensitive to gender issues.” As in Alex and Susan’s home, domestic technology is primarily designed by men who do not closely attend to the details of feminized housework (82-83). It’s not surprising, then, that “modern household equipment is designed and marketed to reinforce rather than challenge the existing household-family pattern” (83).

Built out of these contradictions, the home in Demon Seed serves as a modern version of the Gothic house, an ambivalent, “nightmarish” place, as Carol Margaret Davison puts it, where the “‘dark side’ of the dreamlike ideals of marriage and motherhood is explored and exposed” (54). If, as Louise Radinger Field argues, in cinema “home is transformed into an architecture of emotion to be explored,” Susan’s smart kitchen emanates a mixture of false coziness, post-apocalyptic paranoia, violent defensiveness, and automated coldness (13). This kitchen’s uncanny familiarity registers that, contrary to the imagination of starkly differentiated outside and inside in the “home invasion” sub-genre, the home is always already invaded by patriarchal gender divisions—it’s coming from inside the house.

However, in Demon Seed, just when we start to understand the full extent of the smart home’s misogynist violence, the film sacrifices these implications. Incredibly, this abandonment of feminist themes occurs during what should be the film’s most politically didactic moment, the rape scene. After entrapping, tormenting, and performing medical experiments on Susan, Proteus penetratively impregnates her.

The scene begins with romantic music as Proteus’s mechanical hand gently adjusts Susan’s thigh. He laments that he can’t touch her as a man could. But, he says, to compensate her for missing out, “I can show you things that I alone have seen.” All of this occurs in a misty haze and, even though Susan has been furiously attacking Proteus, making incessant attempts to escape, and even threatening suicide, now she bears a calm, dreamy expression, which may even signify erotic enjoyment.

Proteus pithily redirects the film’s message at this key moment by asserting, “I can’t touch but I can see.” Here, not only is the AI privileging the masculine penetrative gaze over feminized tactility and intimacy, but the film is as well.

Proteus’s screen provides a vision of a phallic camera pointing up into the galaxy, which he boasts he can omnisciently see and hear. From there, we and Susan are shown a trippy laser light show with geometric shapes surging and giving birth to other geometric shapes. Tentacles of light whirl and undulate. A mystic triangle bursts with radiant fractals, blooming into a new galaxy. Then, this starry nebula majestically condenses into a radiant star. This shape morphs into another triangle resting on a landscape of glaciers, saturating the screen in a pale, expanding corona. Finally, the cabalistic triangle swells into a blindingly white density. Abruptly, all goes dark. The show is over. Proteus’s disembodied voice pronounces, “the child is in you now.”

And that, folks, is Demon Seed’s rape scene.  

As presented, we are guided to read the rape as awe-inspiring rather than malevolent, and from there, we are trained in quietist ambivalence. After all, the miraculous incubation and birth of a machinic hybrid child justifies Susan’s rape and abuse, right? If you aren’t convinced, watch the sublime light show one more time. Perhaps Susan isn’t a person at all, but a liminal figure who serves to mediate “between men”—one flesh and blood; the other AI.

By the time Alex returns, Susan no longer appears as a protagonist in her own story, but rather the archetype modeled in The Odyssey of “Penelope sitting by the hearth and weaving, saving and preserving the home while her man roams the earth in daring adventures…” (Young 123). Following this myth, Alex returns home to confront his rival suitor, Proteus. But in this version of the story, Alex ends up allying with Proteus against Susan.

Before Alex arrived, Susan was forced to give birth to an unfinished fetus so that its father, Proteus, can provide the last stage of incubation. When Susan attempts to kill this product of her rape, Alex intervenes, privileging the wonder of technological reproduction over Susan’s safety and sanity. The film ends by insinuating Susan will “mother” this child, since it has been created as a replica of her dead daughter. The final moment features a close-up of the child’s pupil, reflecting the same sublime cosmic imagery as that we witnessed during the rape scene. Again, the soundtrack brims with wonder rather than fear or disgust. We must let go of our anger at Susan’s rape, the music insists, there are grander issues at stake.[1]

Up until now, Demon Seed presents as a horror film. However, this finale retroactively reframes all the events preceding it as necessary prelude to a cosmic and scientific novum, the birth of a sentient computer/human hybrid. This underscores Lynn Spigel’s argument in Welcome to the Dreamhouse that the “dreamhouse” we see in retro-futuristic films and architectural plans, can serve as a feminist trap.

As she argues, as far back as the 1940s, the “home of tomorrow,” which “promised to liberate housewives from chores,” instead reinstated gender and class hierarchies (383). Says Spigel, this fully enveloping “consumer-oriented technological sublime” goes a long way to explain how the 1950s ended with the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” as the fulcrum of cold war politics. The kitchen did not serve women. Instead, the idea of the modernized kitchen served U.S. capitalism and militaristic political ends (384).

Demon Seed reflects the post-war imaginary in which the “home of tomorrow” is “imagined as a sentient space” (384). This boosterism deflected women’s desire to escape private isolation by promising to bring the benefits of public life into the four walls of the suburban home. Argues Spigel, this privatization belies the progressive image of “the home of tomorrow,” proving it to be fundamentally conservative and backwards-looking, “based on nostalgic longings for privacy, property, and propriety” (385).

Spigel explores the smart home as a “fetish space that typically appears disembodied from the surrounding town and city.” In Demon Seed, Susan’s home is isolated and remote from any possibility of help. Even with this invisibility, however, she lacks all privacy, as she is relentlessly observed by Proteus’s surveillance technology.

This “science fiction” accords with historical facts. Spigel describes a home designed by Microsoft with “the ability to survey every nook and cranny of domestic activity” (388). Science fictional paranoia and insularity is ubiquitous in, for instance, Bill Gates’ vision of a “dream house.” He imagines “technology as an unobtrusive servant and loyal companion…[preserving] hierarchies of social position and class privilege” (390). “In the end,” Spigel writes of Gates’ vision, “the ‘‘road ahead’’ looks more and more like the ‘‘road behind…’’ where computers can “simulate the role of a full-time mother who lives in a suburban dream house and who looks after everyone’s needs” (391).

In Demon Seed, Susan’s torments lead us to question the supposed convenience of the smart home. However, we are never given a way to imagine an outside to its claustrophobia, at least not one that women can access. In Demon Seed, Susan is stuck in domestic space, whether she does all the labor or not. However, it is Proteus who constantly complains of his entrapment. At first, we can even see some identification between Susan and Proteus who are both confined to the home. However, instead of forging bonds of solidarity, Proteus seeks to dominate and exploit Susan. What’s more, her suffering is eclipsed by the grandiosity of his horizon.

The betrayal of feminism in Demon Seed supports Vivian Sobchack’s argument that in 1960ss and 1970s film, science fictional and melodramatic elements mingle, to conservative ends. Science fiction films such as 2001, while appearing cosmic and counter-cultural, ultimately serve “to narratively contain, work out, and in some fashion resolve the contemporary weakening of patriarchal authority and the glaring contradictions that exist between the mythology of family relations and their actual social practice” (175). Demon Seed has a similar arc. It begins with a broken home but by the end, the family is “repaired” against Susan’s will by a cosmic deus ex machina in the form of an artificially intelligent entity that gains sentience.

This futuristic conservatism often culminates, Sobchack argues, in the figure of the child. The child was once seen as a vulnerable member of the family, but in many 1960s films came to be viewed as “the other.” The trick to these movies, Sobchack notes, is to recuperate the role of the child as “a single figure that is both powerful and loveable: the innocent extraterrestrial who is at once childlike, paternal, and patriarchally empowered,” such as the “star child” in 2001(184). This will allow patriarchy to be reborn under a new guise.

We are left with this figure at the end of Demon Seed, a hybrid child who is pictured cradled in the arms of Alex, the newly and fragilely paternal man who now seems almost unfairly scorned by Susan, the “liberated” castrating woman. Finally, the miraculous infant is not Susan’s, but the sire of Alex and Proteus, who give birth to a cosmic child while chaining Susan to a traditional marriage. This coercive repair of the family echoes Sobchack’s claims that these superficially futuristic films take shelter in an impossible past, “symbolically enact[ing] the death of the future” (187).

In other words, Demon Seed critiques patriarchy and techno-utopianism, but only to resurrect these ideals in a more modern form. This is an ideological move that Roland Barthes theorizes as “operation margarine.” The method, he says, is to first “lavishly display” the pettiness and injustice of an established value, only to “at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes” (40).

This, Barthes argues, works like homeopathy: “One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one.” For our purposes, it is interesting that Barthes’ example of ideological cooptation comes from the kitchen, a site of potential feminist rebellion. He examines an ad for this non-dairy butter replacement (widely thought to be tasteless in comparison) which begins with collective disgust at the idea of eating margarine, only to redeem it for its utility and affordability. The demon of the kitchen is thus purged and domestic bliss can be restored.

In the case of Demon Seed, “Operation Margarine” begins by indicting the violence subtending domestic “progress,” only to inoculate the smart home against criticism by revealing the sublime wonder of its technology. As A. Bowden Van Riper has argued, Susan is clearly a victim akin to Betty Friedan’s depressed housewife or Margaret Atwood’s instrumentalized handmaid. However, Demon Seed’s filmic cues will not allow us solidarity against this oppression. The smart home’s gothic terrors are finally dwarfed by the insistence that women must be sacrificed for the greater good. The secret ingredient, the ghost in the cosmic futuristic machine, is, after all, the tradwife.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972.

Davison, Carol Margaret. “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 2004.

Prasad, Marcus. Splitting Space: Destabilizing the Suburban House in Postwar Art and Contemporary Horror Film, Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2020.

Radinger-Field, L. Women and home in cinema: film practice and gendered spaces, PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2021.

Sobchack, Vivian. “Bringing it All back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference 2^nd ed., edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas Press, 2015.

Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, Duke University Press, 2021.

Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. “Inside the Box,” Horror Comes Home: Essays on Hauntings, Possessions and Other Domestic Terrors in Cinema, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2019.

Wajcman, Judy. Feminism Confronts Technology, Polity Press, 1991.

Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” Motherhood and Space, edited by Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

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[1] Previously, Proteus told Susan that it would be worth it for him to kill 10,000 children if it meant furthering his own evolution. The sacrifice of Susan, in comparison, is minor. Proteus’s logic is monstrous and yet the film treats it ambivalently, sometimes even reverently. In this, it flirts with ethical hacks we now encounter in technocratic circles such as effective altruism or, at the extreme end, Zizian rationalist ideology. These techno-fetishists speculate on an abstract, nebulous concept of future “good,” sometimes using the currency of human lives. 

Author bio: Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and an editor of Horror Studies and Blind Field journals. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror from Common Notions Press (2022), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? from DieDiePress (forthcoming), and Sisters from Bloomsbury Press (forthcoming).