film notes | late 70's techno-gothic

 I've read that we remember very little about our lives before age 4.  This is especially true for me, who feels like most of my memories began when my sister was born, 4 1/2 years in, and after we'd moved into the house in Loves Park.  Before that marker--things are just flashes.  The green shag carpet in the trailer we first lived in. My mother making popcorn in the tiny kitchen. Lying on the floor under the coffee table with a sheet draped over it as a fort. 

With my early intro to horror, its not surprising some of these flashes come from movies I probably was in the room for, but scarcely followed well.  One memory I held was some sort of alien baby movie, where a pregnant woman gave birth to a monster. Like everything, it was only flashes--the monster, dwarfish and covered in blood, with long hair in front of a backdrop of stars. A wall of early computers malfunctioning. It was so incomplete I wondered it it was something I invented entirely.  Years later, gifted with the internet at my fingertips, I tried to find it using all sorts of search terms--"alien baby" "demon baby" "70's evil baby".  Most results tended to bring up things like It's Alive and Rosemary's Baby. A Cronenberg film I don't quite remember the name of.  

I thought I was close with Demon Seed.  Basically a super computer sexually assaults the wife of its creator by trapping her in the computer operated house. It stars a lovely Julie Christie and like many similar movies, speculates on the dangers of developing technology. It ends with a strange, human-looking child that resembles their lost daughter, but inhabited with the computer's "soul". While a rather gripping,  trippy ride, this was not the right movie alas..

A couple years later, I was flipping randomly through a book in the library on 70's horror and saw a photo from The Manitou and got so excited. This was it! My search terms had been off--it was not alien or demon-but a Native American witch doctor--and the description was even weirder--a woman gets a strange growth on the back of her neck that turns out to be a witch doctor trying to be reborn to avenge the genocide of his people. At the end, it is, and the vanquishing of the creature that emerges involves harnessing the energies of the hospitals super computer, which sort of works the opposite of the other movie. There is also the weirdness of Tony Curtis as the lead, who almost delves into comedy, which makes things even weirder and more surreal. 

Even after I figured it out, I only recently was able to find it on Amazon and actually watch it--most of it, I don't remember at all in terms of plotline.  Only the end and its visuals--especially the computers and the star filled room and the witch doctor. I rewatched the other movie and was struck at the similarities in theme when it came to technology--the giant computer parts, the ominous monitors, how they could take over, or be taken over, by malevolent forces. A; especially funny considering we now carry a much more impressive computer in the palms of hands that controls our lives.  How are homes are inhabited by security systems and Alexa machines. Though our current technophobia films have a little less bite, I suppose, than it did when everything was new and threatening and suddenly in our homes. 

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