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Scanners is a 1981 Canadian science fiction horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O'Neill, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan. In the film, "scanners" are with unusual telepathy and psychokinesis powers. ConSec, a purveyor of weaponry and security systems, searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. The film's plot concerns the attempt by Darryl Revok (Ironside), a renegade scanner, to wage a war against ConSec. Another scanner, Cameron Vale (Lack), is dispatched by ConSec to stop Revok.
Scanners premiered in January 1981 to lukewarm reviews from critics but became one of the first films produced in Canada to successfully compete with American films at the international box office. It brought Cronenberg and his controversial style of body horror attention to mainstream film audiences for the first time and has since been reevaluated as a Cult film. It is particularly well known for a scene that depicts Revok psychically causing a rival scanner's head to graphically explode.
Ruth explains that Vale is one of 237 super-powered individuals known as scanners who are capable of telepathy, empathy, , and psychokinesis. Ruth injects Vale with a drug, ephemerol, which restores his sanity by temporarily inhibiting his scanning abilities. Dr. Ruth teaches him to control his powers.
Darryl Revok, a powerful scanner, is a former mental patient who was driven insane from hearing uncontrollable streams of thoughts. At a marketing event for the private military company ConSec, Revok volunteers in a demonstration about scanning, but he explodes the head of the ConSec scanner. He seeks to convince other scanners to help him in his quest for domination, and to kill opposing scanners.
The company's leader is embarrassed and frustrated. ConSec's new security head Braedon Keller advocates shutting down the company's scanner research program, especially since it has no scanners after the tragic incident. Dr. Ruth disagrees with Keller, believing that scanners are the next stage of human evolution. Dr. Ruth argues that the assassination demonstrates how dangerous Revok is. Ruth convinces Vale to help infiltrate Revok's group.
Unknown to Ruth, Keller is working for Revok and informs him of Ruth's infiltration plan. Revok dispatches assassins to follow Vale as he visits an unaffiliated scanner, Benjamin Pierce, a successful yet reclusive sculptor who copes with his abilities through his art. Revok's assassins murder Pierce, but Vale defeats the assassins with his biokenetic and telekinetic abilities. He reads Pierce's dying thoughts and learns of another group of scanners, led by Kim Obrist, who oppose Revok's group. Vale tracks down Obrist and attends a meeting, but Revok's assassins strike again; only Vale and Obrist survive.
Vale learns of a pharmaceutical company, Biocarbon Amalgamate. He discovers it manufactures ephemerol and that Revok is distributing the drug utilizing a computerized ConSec plan, codenamed Ripe. Vale and Obrist go to ConSec to investigate. Dr. Ruth admits that he founded Biocarbon Amalgamate but has no direct connection to it anymore. He claims no knowledge of Revok's involvement there. He encourages Vale to cyberpathically scan the computer system to learn more.
Keller attacks Obrist and kills Ruth. Vale and Obrist flee the ConSec building. Vale cyberpathically hacks into the computer network using a telephone booth and downloads ephemerol shipment information directly into his mind. Keller is killed when the computer explodes during his attempt to intercept Vale. Vale and Obrist visit Dr. Frame, someone who is receiving the drug. Obrist encounters a pregnant woman and realizes the woman's fetus has scanned her. Vale confronts Dr. Frame and learns that Revok's plan is to prescribe ephemerol to pregnant women, turning their children into scanners. Revok's group captures Vale and Obrist and take them to the Biocarbon Amalgamate plant.
Revok reveals to Vale that they are both sons of Dr. Ruth, who developed ephemerol as a sedative for pregnant women. Ruth learned about the drug's side effect during his wife's pregnancies, and he made them the most powerful scanners in the world by administering a prototype dosage prior to abandoning them.
Revok reveals to Vale that he plans to create and lead a new generation of scanners to take over the world, but Vale refuses to join him. Vale accuses Revok of acting like his father, which enrages Revok. The brothers engage in a telepathic duel, which incinerates Vale's body. However, when Obrist encounters Revok, she discovers that Vale somehow has managed to take over Revok's body during the duel.
Victor Snolicki, Dick Schouten, and Pierre David of Vision 4, a company taking advantage of Canada's tax shelter policies, aided Cronenberg in the film's financing. Vision 4 dissolved after Schouten's death and reorganized into Filmplan International.
The film was shot in Montreal from October 30 to December 23, 1979, on a budget of $4,100,000 (). Cronenberg stated that "the first day was the most disastrous shooting day I've ever had" as "there was nothing to shoot" and a distracted truck driver watching the film crew hit a car killing two women inside it.
The lecture scene was filmed at Concordia University, and the Charles J. Des Baillets Water Treatment Plant doubled as the 'Bicarbon Amalgamate' compound. The "Future Electronique" building in Vaudreuil-Dorion provided the exterior of 'ConSec' headquarters. The sequence of Revok (Michael Ironside) hijacking a car and causing another to crash were shot on Rue de la Commune. Additional scenes were filmed in the Yorkville neighborhood. However, since the United States dominated the film industry and Canadian films were being marketed for international audiences, the film downplays its Canadian origin in favor of a generic "North American" setting. The only indicators of its location are a scene of Revok and Keller meeting at the Yorkdale station of the Toronto subway and some visible bilingual signs.
Cronenberg stated that " Scanners had the longest post-production of any film I've ever done" due to its nine months of editing and reshoots.
The iconic head explosion scene was produced by trial and error, with the producers eventually deciding on a gelatin-encassed plaster skull packed with "leftover burgers" as well as "latex scraps, some wax, and just bits and bobs and a lot of stringy stuff that we figured would fly through the air a little better". When other explosive techniques failed to give the desired effect, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller told the crew to roll cameras and get inside their trucks with doors and windows closed; he then crouched down behind the dummy and shot it in the back of the head with a shotgun.
The exploding head scene was filmed four times, but Cronenberg accepted the first shot and did not remain to watch the three others, opting to instead take a nap in his Winnebago. The scene depicting the exploding head was trimmed down to allow for a R-rating from the MPAA. Cronenberg originally intended for the scene to be the film's opening, but placed it later in the film after test screenings.
A novelization by Leon Whiteson, David Cronenberg's Scanners, was also released in 1981. The film was released on VHS in 1982.
Some reviews were less positive. Film critic Roger Ebert gave Scanners two out of four stars and wrote, Scanners is so lockstep that we are basically reduced to watching the special effects, which are good but curiously abstract, because we don't much care about the people they're happening around". In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Had Mr. Cronenberg settled simply for horror, as John Carpenter did in his classic Halloween (though not in his not-so-classic The Fog), Scanners might have been a Grand Guignol treat. Instead he insists on turning the film into a mystery, and mystery demands eventual explanations that, when they come in Scanners, underline the movie's essential foolishness". John Simon of National Review described Scanners as trash.
A reassessment of Scanners in the 2012 issue of CineAction looks at the film in light of Cronenberg's use of allegory and parables in much of his work. The argument is made that Cronenberg uses iconic imagery that refers directly and indirectly to the thirty-something Scanners as 1960s New Left, counterculture hippies, and as nascent Yuppie. As a result, the film can be seen "as an oblique reflection on what might happen when the counterculture becomes the dominant culture". Kim Newman noted in an essay for The Criterion Collection that at the same time the film rejects the conservative values of the 1980s and the nostalgia for the 1950s present in contemporary science-fiction films such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Back to the Future. The film's fictional drug ephemerol also mirrors the real-life thalidomide scandal, in which the popular West Germany medication thalidomide caused severe in children born to mothers prescribed the drug for morning sickness in Western Europe and Canada.
Scanners also won "Best International Fantasy Film" from Fantasporto in 1983, and was nominated for eight Genie Awards in 1982, but did not win any. Allmovie Awards
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