Coma (1978)
Coma is an American mystery medical thriller film from 1978 directed by Michael Crichton. It is based on the novel of the same name by Robin Cook. Starring Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Elizabeth Ashley, Richard Widmark, and Rip Torn. Among the actors in smaller roles are Tom Selleck, Lois Chiles, and Ed Harris.
Plot
A young doctor at a hospital, Susan Wheeler (played by Geneviève Bujold), 
starts noticing a pattern of strange occurrences with patients. Healthy patients are suddenly developing complications and ending up in comas.
She starts investigating and what she reveals is astonishing.
Notable scenes
The ending.
Making of Coma
Two versions of all scenes of the coma patients in the coma clinic were filmed. One version had them semi-naked whilst the other, for television screenings, had them covered-up.
Ed Harris’s feature film debut.
Michael Crichton: , “This is a story that contains many elements of reality: the fear people have of surgery, the fear of dying at the hands of your doctor, phobias about hospitals. Those are very real fears, and so to exaggerate them would not be much fun. My idea was to put the picture together in such a way that the fears are put in a safe prospective, and can be enjoyed as scares, without awakening deeper and more real anxieties.”
No music score in the film is heard until the forty-five minute mark.
Background artists played the coma patients being suspended by wires in the coma clinic. They underwent such great a physical strain that they could only be filmed in six minute bursts.
The building used for the exteriors of the evil medical facility is actually the former Xerox headquarters and sales office in Lexington, Massachusetts, located about 10 minutes from downtown Boston
Surgery patient Sean Murphy, also seen later in the Jefferson Institute, was actor Tom Selleck. Selleck would later work with this film’s director Michael Crichton on Runaway (1984).
The word coma is derived from the Greek word “koma”, which translates as “deep sleep”.
Other trivia
The name of the experimental clinic is The Jefferson Institute, whilst the name of the hospital is the Boston Memorial Hospital. The latter closely resembles the real life Massachusetts General Hospital, though the location used for it was the Boston City Hospital.
Approximately twelve years later, actor-producer Michael Douglas produced a film in the same mixed genre as Coma (1978). This was Joel Schumacher’s sci-fi horror medical thriller Flatliners (1990).
The reverberated, dramatic piano chord that plays during the sporadic lulls when the main character is being chased through the hospital by the killer, would be “borrowed” (i.e. very imitated) in the original Friday the 13th the next year.
The film cast includes one Oscar winner: Michael Douglas; and four Oscar nominees: Geneviève Bujold, Ed Harris, Rip Torn and Richard Widmark.
Our view on Coma
In Coma Michael Crichton (writer of Jurassic Park and director of Westworld) directed a fine medical horror / thriller adapted by a story of Robin Cook. The story undolds in a Boston Hospital with people falling in to Coma‘s. With early appearances of Michael Douglas, Tom Selleck and Ed Harris. Exploitflix must see!
