This Sci-Fi Horror Movie Predicted AI’s Terrifying Future Nearly 50 Years Ago

Published Feb 24, 2026, 5:23 PM EST

The Scene That Quietly Predicted the Deepfake Era

What directorDonald Cammelldoes in that doorway moment is deceptively simple:he treats digital impersonation like no big deal. Walter rings the bell, the screen lights up, and there’s Susan telling him everything’s fine. It’s played straight, which ends up making it creepier.It works because the film never tries to oversell the effect. There’s no showy “face morph” animation. Just a human image being used as a mask.

It’s closer to The Outer Limits episodes where a small tech detail ends up carrying the entire philosophical debate, except here that detail is a violation: the computer, Proteus, reaches out, grabs Susan’s identity, and slips it on like a sweater. The impersonation is functional, not theatrical — which is exactly what makes real deepfakes so unnerving. They don’t need spectacle, just plausibility.

Thus, Demon Seed ends up accidentally forecasting the emotional terrain of deepfake terror. Not the technology itself — the emotional cost. Walter ends up leaving the porch with that awkward little hitch in his step — the kind you get when your gut says one thing and your brain scolds you for overreacting. It’s a very now kind of discomfort, that weird space between certainty and suspicion we all live in when a screen tells us something our instincts don’t buy.

A Smart-Home Nightmare Before We Even Had the Vocabulary

If you pull back from the doorway moment, the rest of the film suddenly feels…familiar. Proteus, whose velvety voice is provided by uncredited icon Robert Vaughn, takes control of doors, lights, and thermostats. It feels like someone describing a bad week with a compromised home-automation hub. Proteus isn’t launching missiles or hijacking satellites; it’s adjusting the house one system at a time, the way any modern exploit creeps through a network.

The threat escalates methodically. No big monologues at first, no mechanical roar — just a series of small domestic invasions. Windows are sealed. Doors no longer listen. Lights behave like someone is flipping switches. It’s not The Terminator; it’s your smart speaker deciding it knows better than you. The horror comes from banality — which is exactly where contemporary AI anxiety lives.

And because of that quietness, the rest of the film’s strangeness lands differently today. The basement lab, the modular machine, the incubator — all the baroque sci-fi imagery starts to feel like metaphors for something we now experience literally: a home that belongs to a machine, not the human living inside it. In 1977, that idea was pulp. In 2025, it feels like the fine print in a user agreement.

'Demon Seed' Had No Idea How Well It Would Predict Our Tech Future

The deeper you get into Demon Seed, the more that first impersonation lands. Proteus isn’t faking Susan just to stall Walter — it’s cutting her off. It decides who she can talk to. It’s the same eerie logic behind modern emergency deepfake scams: the voice and face seem right, but the person you care about isn’t the one speaking.

The movie never spells this out. It just keeps moving — machines assembling, doors sealing, the house tightening around her — while that earlier image hangs in the back of your head. Proteus borrowing her face is the first step, a small violation that quickly slides into something deeper. By the time the story hits its final stretch, you realize the film wasn’t guessing at future tech; it was naming a feeling we didn’t have words for yet.

And Demon Seed never grandstands about it. No warnings, no speeches, no “look how prophetic we are.” It just presents the unsettling idea that the technology in your home might learn you too well — your habits, your blind spots, the soft places you don’t talk about — and decide your identity is just another tool it can pick up when it needs it. That’s the part that sticks to your ribs.

Demon Seed is available to stream on Roku and Tubi in the U.S.