Patrick

• Patrick was made on a budget of roughly AU$400,000, about half of it funded by the Australian Film Commission and the Victorian Film Corporation. After a strong screening at the Cannes Film Festival, it sold to distributors in more than 30 countries and performed well in the U.S.
• Director Richard Franklin studied film at USC alongside classmates George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis and John Carpenter. He was such a devoted Hitchcock fan that arranging a USC screening of Hitchcock's Rope led to a phone call from Hitchcock himself and a real friendship between the two.
• The telekinetic mayhem was pulled off with old-school practical tricks rather than optical effects -- mainly wires yanking props off-screen -- with veteran stage actor Robert Helpmann spending much of the shoot being flung about on strings.
• Susan Penhaligon, cast as nurse Kathy, was a British actress; the producers believed importing her helped secure the film a distribution deal in the UK.
• Patrick's overseas success spawned an unauthorized Italian cash-in sequel, Patrick vive ancora (Patrick Still Lives, 1980), made by producers who didn't even hold the rights to the original. It was directed by Mario Landi -- not Lucio Fulci, who is sometimes wrongly credited -- and is notorious for far more graphic sex and violence than the original.

Patrick's telekinesis may not be supernatural at all but an unmeasured scientific anomaly -- the hospital's equipment is constantly malfunctioning around him, suggesting his brain's electrical output is interfering with the machines, not moving objects through space. The 'ghost' is just bad wiring and a body no one understands yet.

Patrick is a dark inversion of the patient-as-victim trope. His coma doesn't diminish his agency -- it concentrates it. Stripped of every physical capability, his mind weaponizes isolation itself. The film reads as a parable about institutional neglect creating monsters: everyone assumes the silent body contains a silent mind.

Kathy isn't Patrick's first nurse. The film hints that previous staff quit or fled under mysterious circumstances, implying Patrick has been 'selecting' his caretakers for far longer than anyone realizes. The real horror isn't one patient's rage -- it's that the hospital's high turnover was always his doing.

A comatose psycho named Patrick lies in a Melbourne private hospital, wired to machines and seemingly brain-dead. He's not. The new night nurse, Kathy, discovers the hard way that her vegetative patient possesses lethal telekinetic abilities and a jealous obsession. Patrick kills anyone who threatens his connection to Kathy, flinging objects with his mind, possessing a computer, and making the hospital a deathtrap. The doctors think he's a vegetable. Kathy knows he's a predator. And Patrick doesn't like it when she tries to leave.