Project X: Sci-fi that preceded Johnny Mnemonic

Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Zemeckis, and John Waters — these are just a few of the admirers of William Castle, the creator of the film Project X.

The year is 2118. The United States of America has become something akin to a military dictatorship. Organic farming no longer exists, crime has been eliminated, and due to overpopulation, reproduction is strictly controlled by the government. The only global superpower besides the U.S. is Sino-Asia (a new name for China). During his return from a secret mission, American spy Hagen Arnold sends a cryptic message to his superiors about a looming threat to the West from the East, and then narrowly survives a plane crash. Earlier, the spy had been administered an anti-torture drug that, when triggered by pain, completely wipes out his memory to prevent him from revealing anything under duress. To extract valuable information from Arnold, scientists use a holographic memory-reading machine. When that fails, they create a simulated environment based on the 1960s — a historical period Arnold is passionate about — and place him in it with a new identity. The idea is that playing out a role in this controlled setting will unlock knowledge buried deep in Arnold’s subconscious.

William Castle (1914–1977) was something of a Roger Corman type — a hyper-prolific director, screenwriter, and producer (occasionally also an actor) who specialized in low-budget, mass-produced B-movies. His credentials weren’t bad: he started out under Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures, then assisted Orson Welles on The Lady from Shanghai (1947), but mostly worked independently, producing countless westerns, crime thrillers, and horror films (he directed 25 films in the 1950s alone!), including House on Haunted Hill (1959) and 13 Ghosts (1960). He also became famous for his gimmicky promotional tactics: vibrating theater seats during screenings, glow-in-the-dark inflatable skeletons floating above audiences, special glasses to reveal hidden elements on screen, and even — long before Black Mirror tried it — letting viewers choose one of two possible endings, plus offering $1,000 in compensation to the family of anyone who might die of fright during the film.

In the second half of the 1960s, Castle wanted to direct a horror film based on Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby. He even persuaded Paramount Pictures to acquire the rights. But he didn’t end up directing it himself — his reputation as a B-movie maker stood in the way, and the studio wanted an A-list hit. So Roman Polanski took over as director, while Castle remained on board as the film’s producer and made a cameo appearance (he’s the man standing outside the phone booth). Around the same time, Castle decided to adapt two novels by British author L.P. Davies — The Artificial Man and Psychogeist — into a single film, with a screenplay by Edmund Morris. Thus Project X was born. Due to a limited budget that didn’t allow for expensive special effects, Castle partnered with Hanna-Barbera (the studio behind The Flintstones and Yogi Bear), which created several animated sequences, including a submarine journey and a flight in a futuristic jet. The film also employed other visual effects: wavy imagery, double exposure, monochromatic colors, negative shots, and so on.

It must be said that these techniques now appear outdated — as do the film’s massive computers with glowing vacuum tubes, transparent plastic helmets, and the tight uniforms worn by military personnel. Everything in Project X looks rather cheap and naive, but this shouldn’t distract from the film’s surprisingly weighty socio-political content, which may even be quite relevant today. Project X is not only a commentary on the turbulent 1960s, but also a kind of warning for the future. In one scene, scientists watch newsreels and press clippings from 1965–68: demonstrations, riots, police brutality, murders, bank robberies, epidemics, traffic accidents. In contrast, the U.S. of 2118 has eliminated all of these — but also has no single-family homes, no private property, and no naturally produced food. Instead, there’s overpopulation, strict population control, grueling work in massive factories, advanced and ethically questionable genetic engineering, and a new cold war between the U.S. and China. The government is run by brain-dead military leaders, while passive scientists carry out their orders.

But the most powerful theme in Castle’s film — though tied to the others — is the loss of control over one’s own life and its takeover by the state. In 22nd-century America, the individual is entirely subordinated to the government, which enforces mandatory sterilization, decides who can have children and how many, freezes people (in a way reminiscent of the “half-life” from Philip K. Dick’s Ubik), manipulates their memories for its own ends, and, if necessary, implants them with a new identity — referred to here as a “Matrix.” The associations with the Wachowskis’ Matrix tetralogy (1999–2021) are hard to miss. But Project X also feels like a precursor to other films: its vision of a “perfect” society reappears in Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man (1993); the idea of extracting hidden knowledge from the subconscious surfaces in Johnny Mnemonic (1995) by Robert Longo and Inception (2010) by Christopher Nolan; and the trope of creating an artificial reality for an unaware subject returns in Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998).