James Gunn‘s Superman is currently living its best life at the summer box office, and while I count myself among the millions who enjoyed the film, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t trigger a bit of PTSD from my childhood. As a child of the ’80s, my first exposure to Superman was naturally the four Christopher Reeve films. I loved them all, especially Superman III — I admit my taste as a kid wasn’t great — with one glaring exception: the part where a supercomputer turns a woman into a creepy robot.
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I remember hunkering down in front of a 19-inch CRT TV as a child and popping a freshly rented VHS of Superman III into the VCR. Even at a young age, I could tell that this movie was quite a bit sillier than the others — at one point, Superman fights Clark Kent in a junkyard — which is why I was shocked when the movie took a dark turn into Cronenberg levels of body horror. For anyone unfamiliar with the scene I’m referring to, let me explain.
Lex Luthor stand-in, Ross Webster, hires Richard Pryor’s Gus Gorman to build him a supercomputer so large that it can only be housed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Near the end of the movie, the computer sucks Webster’s sister, Vera, into it and proceeds to turn her into a cyborg. The sister’s screams, coupled with the violent way she was wrapped in wires and covered in random metal bits, were too much for my pre-teen mind to handle, and to this day, the scene gives me nightmares.
The idea of being violated against your will is one of the scariest scenarios a human being can imagine. A close second is being forced to change and become something you don’t want to be. Put them together and add in a close-up of Vera’s closed eyelids right before they fly open, revealing two cloudy white orbs, and you can begin to see why this scene still haunts me.
The “Creepy Computer Lady” Scene in Superman III Traumatized an Entire Generation
And it’s not just me. In the decades since I first watched the grotesque metamorphosis, other Xennials have come forward to share their childhood experiences with Superman III‘s creepy computer lady. Through social media posts and YouTube essays, children of the 1980s and ’90s have reflected on this shared generational trauma in an effort to understand what made this scene such effective nightmare fuel.
Perhaps it’s because the previous 1 hour and 40 minutes leading up to the scene did such a good job of lulling us into a false sense of security. Maybe the abrupt tonal shift I mentioned earlier was potent enough to scar our still-developing brains. Whatever the reason, the five minutes or so when that evil cyborg woman is wreaking havoc is up there with Artax sinking into the Swamp Sadness and the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal as one of the most emotionally scarring rites of passage every ’80s kid was forced to endure.
I recently discovered that the nameless supercomputer that gave birth to Robo-Vera was originally intended to be built by Brainiac before Richard Donner left the franchise. The initial treatment for Superman III would have seen Brainiac constructing a large “personality machine” with which to manipulate The Man of Steel’s emotions. There would have been no Vera, no cyborg transformation, and as a result, no out-of-place horror scenes. Somewhere out there is an alternate dimension where this was the movie I saw as a child, leaving me happy, healthy, and guaranteeing me a lifetime of mental stability.
Instead, I got a Trojan horse body horror sequence hidden in a goofy PG comedy where Superman straightens the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Life can be cruel sometimes.
If you were also affected by this traumatic scene, please let me know in the comments.
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Image Courtesy of Madhouse
