In 1986, not long after the success of his surrealist masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven decided to eschew the slasher formula that had earned him a legion of fans, and instead adapted a little-known story of a child prodigy—with a robot friend—who reanimates the corpse of his murdered female next-door neighbor (and romantic interest) using a computer chip (CPU). The result is disastrous, as his half-cyborg creation then enacts revenge upon her enemies, including her abusive father. Today, the largely ignored Deadly Friend (1986) appears to be an anomaly in the oeuvre of a filmmaker known for hugely successful, low-budget horror-slasher films—including their reinvention (the Scream projects) or expansion (for example, The Hills Have Eyes [1977] being reimagined as Mind Ripper [Joe Gayton, 1995] and then remade under its original title by Alexandre Aja in 2006). Due in part to studio interference, Craven's final version of Deadly Friend was far from his original vision of a PG-rated “macabre love story with a twist,” with it instead featuring jarring nightmare scenes and gory violence, whose insertions clash with the vestiges of the film's (still intact) original child-like tone, causing it to depart farther from the character-driven elements of the novel Friend (1985) by Diana Henstell. Even with the film's troubles, however, it would be a mistake to disregard its representation of the individual's and society's relationship to technology within a horror context, especially in lieu of today's global reliance on information and communication technologies, as well as the growing criticisms of the darker side of digital culture and technology companies.

Deadly Friend retains the novel's Frankenstein-meets-early-cyberpunk-imaginings that are wholly of their time in the 1980s. Its interpretations of robotics, the cyborg, and what today we may call transhumanism (a philosophical movement interested in the melding of the human and machine for the purpose of physical and spiritual extension or evolution) are examples of that decade's vision of a future society engaged with technological innovation inspired by new, accessible computing power. This widespread interest resulted in pop culture fantasies of cyberspace and human advancement, bringing with it centuries-old concerns over science, spirituality, dualism, and disembodiment—struggles we are again rethinking with the necessary rise of a new form of telepresence in reaction to the deadly global pandemic of 2020.