As near as I can find out, there's only one horror movie that actually involves Alzheimer's directly: in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea (1999), scientists are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. So (as one naturally would) they genetically engineer SUPER SHARKS with amazing brains. What can possibly go wrong? Oh, yes. The shark thing, is what can go wrong.

Here's a good chunk of that movie, which conveniently starts out with the foolhardy scientists explaining their scheme to Samuel L. Jackson, and ends with indications that things are going wrong. (I do not think Jackson, at any point, utters the words, "Get these motherfucking super-sharks out of this motherfucking seabase." More's the pity.)

But that movie just uses Alzheimer's as a plot device. If you're looking for stories that actually play on our fears of Alzheimer's and what it means to our tenuous grasp of personhood, you have to look a bit further afield. And as Sir Michael Caine says, Alzheimer's is scarier than any shark, no matter how big.

But here are the ways in which i think we're starting to see the rise of horror that takes about Alzheimer's, obliquely rather than dead on.

Forgetting:

There's been a rise in stories about people's memories getting siphoned off. I have a vague but vivid memory of reading a comic book (or maybe seeing a TV show) with baddie who exults in erasing people's memories, and says things like, "I just took your memories of your mother," with a smirk. But I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this — almost as if my memory had been erased, fiendishly. And googling has turned up nothing. (Any suggestions?)

(Update: Thanks to everyone who commented. I think Ian Cyr is right, and it's a recent issue of Green Lantern Corps. by Dave Gibbons et al., featuring a baddie with mental powers. Although, someone reminded me The Surgeon General does something quite similar in Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and, yes, Gibbons again. But it's fascinating how many other examples people came up with.)

In any case, there are lots of other examples of recent stories about mind-erasure. Dollhouse is an obvious example, which asks explicitly what's left of us after our memories have been stolen away. (And comes up with a moderately hopeful answer, over time: There's still something that remains even after our minds are gone, although it's hard to define.)

Heroes has the walking plot device, the Haitian, who mostly just shows up and zaps some of your memories whenever HRG or someone else needs a little memory lapse — then wanders off to do his own thing, until he's needed to henchman up again. But there is that one super-creepy bit where HRG is interrogating his former mentor in Russia, and he gets the Haitian to zap bits of the mentor's memory, piece by piece, gloating the whole time. You get the full scariness of being unable to remember your mother, or your wife, or other bits of your past.

Torchwood season two had Adam, the guy who insinuates himself into your memories. Smallville had Lex getting some super-advanced electro-shock therapy, which erased seven months of his memory, and being shattered as a result. DC Comics grappled with the ethics of the magician Zatanna erasing people's memories in "Identity Crisis." Acheron Hades in the Thursday Next series has shown a propensity for zapping people's memories as well. Various X-Men have gone around zapping memories of late, including Rogue, Professor X and Jean Gray. (And in
one recent X-Men comic, Emma Frost sadistically erases an assassin's only happy memory, vowing to do worse if the assassin comes back. In Mark Millar's Authority issues, the Evil Doctor also gets off on nuking people's memories.

The 2001 movie Time Lapse features someone who's been dosed with a memory-erasing drug, rushing to stop an evil nuclear scheme before his memory goes away completely. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind featured people paying to have memories selectively erased, only to discover how terrifying that is in practice. And Dark City was all about people's memories being rearranged every night.

I feel like this is just scratching the surface — there's a lot of fiction right now talking about how fragile your memories are — and how, if they go, what's left may or may not be recognizeably "you."

The shambling hordes:

And then there's the fact that we're seeing a proliferation of zombie movies, which are all about people who are falling apart physically and have lost all of their personality and sense of identity. As someone who's lost a few close relatives to Alzheimer's, slowly and horribly, it's easy for me to recognize how zombies are a metaphor for this dissolution of the self. People with Alzheimer's are still conscious and aware, they still move around and seem to respond to stimuli, but as disease progresses they get less and less capable of reasoning or having any kind of meaningful interaction with anyone around them. It's heart breaking and horrible — the person you knew is still there, but no longer really him- or herself.

As I pointed out a while ago, the zombie movie which comes closest to depicting the awfulness of losing a parent to Alzheimer's is Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also sometimes called Braindead:

Quasi-zombie movie I Am Legend even makes the link clearer by showing that the "zombies" still have vestiges of humanity and are capable of caring about each other. In the movie's original ending, Robert Neville is able to get through to the zombies and help them remember they used to be people — he comes up with a cure for their condition, and is able to get through to them. Because their real problem isn't that they're feral or mindless — it's that they've forgotten themselves.

The movie Fido also plays with this fairly explictly, by having the main character's dad become a docile, enslaved zombie by the end. He's still recognizeably the same old dad, but the biggest change is that he's lost most of his mind.

Obviously, a huge part of the zombie fad simply comes from the fact that they're a cool way to have an apocalyptic scenario — they're unstoppable and nasty, and if they bite you, you're screwed. They have many of the hallmarks of a good monster: loud, relentless, biting, overwhelming. But at the same time, as the zombie genre continues to expand and diversify, people are using zombies as metaphors for a bunch of different things — and one of those things, clearly, is having a loved one disappear, inexorably into the mists of forgetting.

So if it's true that we're only just seeing the beginning of the onslaught of dementia in our rapidly aging societies, you can expect to see more fantastical and science-fictional stories that attempt to capture the madness of it all. As Caine says, no monster can ever be as scary as Alzheimer's... but some monsters can help us come to terms with it.

Thanks to Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Capt. Snowdon, Lynae Straw, Michael Wilson, Martina de la Cruz, Nivair H. Gabriel and anyone else I missed.

Red Planet:

This almost went into the list of "By the year 2027" monologues, but then it turns into Carrie Anne Moss lecturing us about how she's the greatest space badass, and introducing her team. "Here's Chimp. He wears cool glasses, and he's great with a thruster. Here's Zpork, who's a hothead. But he keeps it cool in a tight spot. And then there's Borf. I don't know why he's on the team."

Dark City

Supposedly the studio forced director Alex Proyas to add this monologue, where Keifer Sutherland tries to explain the enitire movie to us. It's sort of noir-esque and does set a nice gloomy tone.

Spy Kids 3: Game Over

Another noir one, this time very tongue-in-cheek, from the third (and worst) installment in the Robert Rodriguez superspy series.

Pitch Black:

Because you demanded it, this awesome monologue which combines noirish pain with animal cunning. Riddick is such a badass, he can speechify even in cryosleep.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

Just a short monologue... Spike is musing about a boy who wanted to play games. And then he gets jolted out of it.

20th Century Boys

This recent (and awesome) Japanese film starts with an introspective monologue about being a young person and thinking that rock'n'roll can change the world. Which, by the way, it can't.

The Postman:

It's a post-apocalyptic movie, starring Kevin Costner and directed by The Cost as well. So you already know it's going to be great. But in case you had lingering doubts, here's a cloying voiceover by his unborn daughter. Hey look, a lion! Let's have the movie be about him instead!

Abraxas

Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura is being tortured by a robot who's asking him stupid questions. But he still has time to talk to you, the viewer, about what it's like to be him.

Body Snatchers

The Abel Ferrara version of this classic film starts out with a little girl in the backseat of a car, musing about the nature of fate, and how you never know when your parents are going to be turned into pod people.

Trancers

This is the greatest thing ever. A wonderfully noirish monologue by a future cop who thinks he's succeeded in cutting off the head of a criminal cult. He thinks.

In Knowing, Nicolas Cage plays a professor whose son digs up a time capsule that was buried at his elementary school in 1959. The capsule contains a sheet of paper full of numbers, which appear to be purely random. But Cage deduces that each number refers to a major disaster, including the date and the number of people killed. And he begins to suspect that he and his son have an important role to play in the apocalypse, which is coming soon.

Knowing opens March 20, and a couple of the film's biggest disaster set-pieces will be shown off at New York Comic-Con.

We're attracted to stories where little details and clues turn out to be the key to everything, says Proyas. "The devil's in the details." He says he was intrigued by the film's basic premise, that someone could have buried information "like a message in a bottle," years and years ago, with a code that predicts disasters with total accuracy. "It feels like an urban myth," and has an immediate appeal, he says. "It touches on something in our psyche that resonates in some way. It feels true." And it feels instinctively creepy, even when you hear just the bare-bones summary. "That's certainly the way the film functions in the first third to a half," before it takes a sharp turn in another direction, says Proyas.

The movie's latest trailer hints at a much broader picture, with some spooky scenes of scary white men in the forest (referred to as the "whispering ones,") and some scary apocalyptic moments as well. Even though his film features Nic Cage unraveling clues and trying to figure out secrets from the past, Proyas said it's the "absolute polar opposite" of Cage's National Treasure movies. (He adds that he's enjoyed those films, but his couldn't be more different.)

According to Proyas, his film mixes huge wide-screen action sequences with quieter moments to create an unpredictable blend. He says he was originally attracted to this movie because

I could see a story taking shape... that would the audience on a very unexpected and emotionally resonant ride, and that's what got me. The hook of a story where I thought I could see where it was going, but then suddenly it's not going in that direction. It's going in a far more interesting direction.

The biggest challenge of creating Knowing was keeping all of those twists and turns, and the huge set-pieces, going while still preserving the core of the film.

Proyas has talked before about how he felt pressured to crank up the pace of his earlier film Dark City, and it wasn't until the recent release of the director's cut on DVD that he was able to restore some of the quieter moments that lent the film a lot of its depth.

In the case of Knowing, Proyas stuck to the idea that

the spine of this story is a very intimate personal drama, a story between a father and a son, and they are the vehicle that carries us through this escalating series of events that evolve into quite an epic scope by the end of the story. That is quite a challenge, but also why the film is so effective. It does give you a very solid grounding, a very solid path through this story. And so what was challenging was also ultimately the key to why I think the film will hold an audience. It gives us a human face to all this stuff.

Cage's character is trying to protect his son from the consequences of the knowledge inside the time capsule, but Proyas hinted that some of his efforts may end up backfiring.

There are tons of post-apocalyptic stories and movies coming out, but Knowing is part of a rising tide of pre-apocalyptic tales (similar to the original Terminator films) in which people know an apocalypse is coming. Proyas says the fear of a coming apocalypse seems to be part of the zeitgeist right now. "We're all concerned about where things are heading." Back in the 1950s, genre films tended to focus on the spectre of nuclear armageddon. But now, annihilation could come from so many different directions, it's hard to know which type of destruction to be scared of.

At the same time, the 1950s was a more optimistic time. Proyas' film includes some scenes from the 50s, when the fateful time capsule is being buried, and everyone is talking brightly about the promise of a shining future, with the proverbial flying cars and personal rocket ships.

The movie's biggest set piece is the giant sequence where a plane crashes into the highway, and Cage rushes to rescue survivors from the burning aircraft. Proyas filmed the whole thing as one continuous two-minute take, and it was the hardest part of the film to realize, he says:

I really wanted to put the audience in the scene. I think we're becoming so blase about slick visual effects. I'm trying to make them not seem like visual effects. The way we did that, in that instance, is [that] in one shot we create this entire scenario, where Nic sees a jet airliner crash into a field, and he runs into the maelstrom and tries to rescue people. It was a very challenging sequence to create, becuase it was this combination, on a major scale, of stunts, people on fire, exploding fuselages — real mechanical effects — and also CG augumentation to that. And I had my leading man running through this situation for this continuous amount of time. Oh, and it was raining, as well.

When you're editing a film in post-production, sometimes the studio will ask for "alternate coverage" of a scene for television broadcast. But in this case, there's no alternate, less gruesome version of the jet crash sequence, because it's literally one camera following Nicholas Cage through the carnage. And after all that, Proyas nearly didn't get the scene at all:

When you put all the stunt sequences, all the effort on the one lens running through the situation, and there is no backup plan, that is where all sorts of things can go wrong. We set it up for two days. We spent two days shooting it, even though it was one continous shot. I think we did three takes over the two days. After we blew everything up, we had to reset it, which would take half a day. On the first couple of takes, because it was raining, the lens fogged halfway through the shot — which was the most depressing, disappointing thing, because you couldn't see a thing. It was just fogged out. So we were literally on our last take with the sun going down. I knew I was only going to get one more shot at it. I was actually calling the studio from the set, saying we're not going to get this, we're going to need to come back the next day, which would have cost $300,000 or something. And I hung up. And I was told everything was ready. And I yelled action, and somehow miraculously we got it, just at the end of the day.

Before Proyas got involved with Knowing, writer/director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) was lined up to make the film. I asked Proyas if any of Kelly's vision of the film survived in the final version, and he said not at all.

Finally, I had to ask Proyas about comments he's made in interviews before about wanting to make a big space opera film. He was one of the people bidding to make a movie version of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and he lost out to Roland Emmerich. But he's also said several times that he'd like to make a film of Alfred Bester's Stars My Destination. I asked him if he might still make a big space opera film, and he replied:

I hope so. I keep trying. I like Stars My Destination, and and that may happen sometime in the future. Who knows?

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The main character of this well-known novel can't get enough of Substance D, a psychoactive drug that's also known as Slow Death. It turns out that even his dealer works for the government and has been part of a police operation all along — and even more surprisingly, he finds Substance D grow fields at his rehab clinic. Dick never reveals the true source of the dangerous drug, but his hints on the subject are the staples of conspiracy theory fiction: evil Communists, evil aliens, evil government, or evil corporations.

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

Drug use and conspiracy theory stories go hand-in-hand, it seems. Morrison wrote The Invisibles after an incredible hallucinogenic experience in Kathmandu — one he originally attributed to alien abduction. He later learned to just blame the drugs, and so The Invisibles became the most psychadelic comic ever, filled with swearing, bright colors, and wild characters. The protagonist of the first volume, Dane McGowan, is plucked from his life as a petty thief and sent to a corrupt juvenile detention center. After his rescue, the vast conspiracies surrounding everything in his life begin to reveal themselves, and he teams up with the eclectic Invisibles to discover more and more about the vast suffering of humanity.

Dark City, written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer

In 1998, a revolutionary sci-fi film noir hit cinema screens. It began with a man waking up at a murder scene in a city that never sees daylight, a man who's unable to remember who he is or how he got there. As he's trying to find answers, he discovers that the world is not at all what it seems, and that a group of mysterious figures called the Strangers are controlling human reality. There's a conspiracy for ya. Luckily, this man possesses the ability to change reality, or "tune," as well, and so puts up a good fight so he can escape to a better world with his wife.

The Matrix, written by Andy and Larry Wachowski

A year after Dark City's release came The Matrix, which was far more successful — the stories are similar, but there's a lot more gunplay and leather in the Wachowski brothers' version. The Matrix certainly offered us a very good reason to be paranoid: It's possible that aliens have invaded, subjugating all of humanity by convincing us that our lives are progressing as normal. The chilling reality, that humans are harvested for energy and fed with the dead matter of their own species, is one of the scariest sequences in film. Plus, the simulated reality that most humans believe is nothing more than a computer program, and the stewards of that program are stony-faced agents who have all the power. That is, until a cute computer hacker shows up to save us all.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Often thought of as a sequel to her also fabulous dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a scathing criticism of current society. She portrays the 21st century as a world dominated by international corporations who subjugate their employees, a world where even children watch live executions on the internet, a world where humanities and the arts are vilified in favor of fields like biotechnology and engineering. The Crakers, human-like creatures who also inhabit this world, have a mysterious origin — and at the end of the book, Atwood reveals that they were created by a giant corporation's genetic engineering experiment. In the end, the creator of the Crakers also launches a genetically engineered virus that kills almost all of the humans; it's quite a formidable cautionary tale about the dangers of corporations with too much power.

Dreadful Sanctuary by Eric Frank Russell

1948 saw the release of perhaps the first major conspiracy novel in science fiction, Russell's Dreadful Sanctuary. In his story, a secret society keeps the rest of humankind from discovering or contacting alien life. After several failed missions to space, it seems that Earth is being quarantined by the universal community; in fact, however, the secret society is simply spreading that illusion to control the population. Dreadful Sanctuary was originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, but Russell rewrote it to publish it as a paperback novel in 1967 — just two years before humans successfully reached the moon. Thank goodness no one's stopping us from space exploration in real life ... or are they?

Whether it's Communists, Russians, our own government, or an extraterrestrial one, fears of hidden and powerful villains will probably never end. As ridiculous as conspiracy theory stories may sound sometimes, they're necessary for a society that wants to give its average, ordinary members some level of control. After all, nobody likes totalitarianism, except perhaps totalitarian leaders.

Says one:

We're not talking about the movie's merit's as a whole, just the design aspects. Bad movies can have fantastic artistic direction. Just thinking of a . . . Event Horizon: Not a good movie, but the design on the ship based around the design of a gothic cathedral, it's engines, the black hole drive, were very pretty . . . Equilibrium: Here's it's mainly costuming. The tunic coats, the uniforms that at once had the look of the matrix and yet were still utilitarian . . . The Fountain: The space sequences were made using a form of "fluid painting" giving space an amazingly different look.

The other fans know exactly what makes their eyes pop, and are happy to list examples of the usual suspects:

Sci-fi has the great advantage in that the design for movies of that genre is limited only ot the designer's imagination.

2001
Metropolis
Ghost in the Shell
Bladerunner
Fifth Element for Gaultier's costumes
Gattaca too

But the Fountain was especially beautiful to look at, yes

Let's not forget "Sunshine". I loved the huge shield in front of the spaceship.

As far as science fiction design goes there is always Dark City. I love the way the city looks in that movie, especially how every age seems to be blended into one time, loosely the 50's but not exactly. Just really well done and the design elements were almost gothic and steampunk...but then not. Hard to describe I guess, just like the movie.

i think star wars deserves to go in there even if those new movies were a godawful abortion

In design terms, there's a lot I like about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film adaptation. The Heart of Gold has a lovely, molded plastic retro futurism thang going on, and looks inherently humorous without feeling like a 'novelty' spacecraft. It also looks like exactly the sort of ship a narcissistic space hooligan like Zaphod would tool around in, and a perfect contrast to the clunky grey boxes the Vogons use. Which were, incidentally, PERFECT for the Vogons.

Beautiful SF Movie Design

Dark City appeared one year before The Matrix, in 1998, and The Thirteenth Floor went up against the Keanu Reeves whoa-fest in 1999. The Matrix ultimately won that battle, but is it really the best of the bunch?

• 
  
• Dark City: John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a strange city with no memories, and finds himself being sought by the police for a crime he may or may not have committed. He starts being investigated by a detective (William Hurt), and along the way he comes into contact with a strange Doctor Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) who offers him help, and eventually he discovers that he's living in a false reality. A group of humanoid alien parasites called The Strangers have been manipulating reality in an attempt to study humans and find out what makes them tick, so to speak. They stop the city, including the humans, every night at midnight at alter their world, injecting new fake memories and changing the landscape around them.
• 
  
• The Thirteenth Floor: This one is a bit of a brainbender, and we'll do our best to whittle it down to the basics. Basically, at some point in the not-so-distant future, mankind has invented the ability to create perfect virtual reality simulations, complete with sentient artificial intelligent inhabitants. The CEO of the company, Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl) visits Los Angeles in 1937 through the VR and is leaves a note for someone at a bar. When he travels back to the apparent future in the 1990s, he is murdered in cold blood after waking up.

  Enter Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko) who awakes one morning to find himself covered in blood, and later becomes a suspect for his boss Fuller's murder, chased by a 1990s detective (Dennis Haysbert). Now, here's where it all goes sideways. Hall starts entering the 1937 VR in an attempt to find out why Fuller was murdered, and inside that VR he "inhabits" a man named Douglas Ferguson. So, you have Craig Bierko, later joined by Vincent D'onofrio and Gretchen Mol hopping from the 1990s to 1937, trying to unravel the murder.

  But then it gets weirder.

• 
  
• The Matrix: After reading about Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor, The Matrix should sound pretty familiar. Loner hacker Neo begins getting strange messages, and soon finds out that he's living inside of a false reality. His real body exists in a cocoon-like pop while armies of sentient machines harvest the bioelectric energy of his and millions of other bodies in a desolate world bathed in perpetual darkness.

  Neo is pulled out of his false existence by the prophecy-spouting Morpheus, and soon discovers that he has the ability to fight both the machines and their VR counterparts who operate inside the simulated "matrix," which is presented as the present-day world we live in. Through a computer interface, Neo is able to have new memories and abilities implanted directly into his brain, which affect what he can do inside the matrix. Through Morpheus' coaxing, he discovers that he has innate abilities that might allow him to give humanity the upper hand.

  Throughout the film, Neo is pursued by a black-suited "Agent Smith," who looks like he stepped right out of the FBI/CIA rank and file. He might not be real, but he's represents both a threat to Neo's freedom as Mr. Anderson in the beginning of the film, and a dark end for humankind once we see who he represents.

  By the end of the film, he's realized his abilities and turns tables on the machines in an effort to free humanity from being slaves, although he is unable to save them from the two painful sequels that followed.

• 
  

While The Matrix may have been the big winner at the box office, The Thirteenth Floor really shows off the bizarre possibilities of virtual reality, while Dark City does a great job showing how injected memories could work. A couple of squirts from a syringe and you're a completely new man.

However, they all boil down to a basic gumshoe plot at bottom of the barrel. In Dark City, the hero gets pursued by William Hurt, who has a conscience and eventually helps him out, where The Thirteenth Floor features Dennis Haysbert as the badge with a heart who knows something else is up, and in The Matrix the agents/Feds are initially using Neo/Mr. Anderson as leverage in an attempt to find Morpheus in association with "dangerous crimes" he has committed.

In our opinion,The Matrix is the weakest of the bunch, and these other two films deserve a much closer look, although we'd give our left arm to never see a Darker City or a The Fourteenth Floor.