Many, not all, examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world of literature and cinema have been cautionary tales, including Mary Shelley’s pioneering 1818 horror novel Frankenstein, where the man-made creature is emotional, self-educated, sapient, but ultimately destructive. One hundred years later, factory-assembled biological men and women called “robots” murderously turn the tables on their human masters in Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR), written by Karel Capek in 1920. He derived the term robot from the Czech word for forced labor (“robota”). Note that east of the Bohemian playwright, the Ancien Regime in Tsarist Russia was violently overthrown with the emphatic execution of the Romanov Family in 1917 (and subsequent Bolshevik victory in their ensuing civil war).
After RUR, robots or artificial intelligence would became a staple in Sci-Fi canon: e.g. Fritz Lang’s epic Metropolis (1927), Isaac Asimov’s classic compendia I, Robot (1950), The Day the World Stood Still (1951), or Forbidden Planet (1956). DC Comics debuts superhero Robotman as a member of The Doom Patrol in My Greatest Adventure #80 (June 1963). And no one should forget the homicidal super-computer HAL 9000 and his all-seeing crimson cycloptic eye in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). These are just a few examples out of hundreds.
In 1962, “androids” (human-imitating automatons with synthetic skin) make their first cinematic appearance in the Hollywood film Creation of the Humanoids. Departing from previous cautionary tales about AI, director Wesley Barry makes the most of a shoe-string budget to create a seminal movie. This Cold War-era post-apocalypse film is rich with social and political allegories and is now a cult classic. You will enjoy the clever use of stock Confederate Army props and uniforms, as well as unique camera angles and lighting techniques. The distinctive ocular special effects worn by some of the actors and the electronically-generated music score ("Electronic Harmonics by I.F.M.") enrich the production. The result is quite an extraordinary little gem of a film. No wonder the late avant-garde Andy Warhol regarded Creation of the Humanoids his favorite movie.
Courtesy of YouTube, the ground-breaking Creation of the humanoids (1962) Sci-fi full movie (youtube.com)