Trailer
Plot summary
Karl Hochman works in a Cleveland computer shop, and he also steals address books to choose the people he kills. When Terry Munroe and her son Josh come in to compare software prices, a salesman runs her address book through a handheld scanner, and the page ends up as a file. Driving to her house during a storm, Karl crashes into a cemetery and is taken to a hospital, where a lightning surge sends his mind into the electrical grid as a living current. From inside the network he reaches the scanned page and turns household appliances into weapons, aiming at everyone whose names Terry wrote down.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ghost in the Machine (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In 1987, writers William Davies and William Osborne got the idea when reading about a piece of computer software called Skeleton Key, which let users invade other computer networks and retrieve all the data in them without the owners knowing, and built a premise around a serial killer with those same abilities.
- At the suggestion of director Rachel Talalay, special effects supervisor Richard Hollander and his group created the electronic serial killer's computerized environment by digitally manipulating real data taken from MRI body scans. Ted Marcoux, who plays Killer Karl, was scanned at UCLA.
- Because of the release of Wes Craven's Shocker, 20th Century Fox briefly put the film in turnaround over perceived similarities between the two, and it only resumed development at Fox after uncredited re-writes by Todd Graff.
