“I’m gonna suck your brain dry…”

On the anniversary of David Cronenberg’s mind-blowing ‘Scanners,’ the telekinetically charged conspiracy thriller has never seemed more relevant.

A director like David Cronenberg is someone who doesn’t need to worry about repeating himself. As the filmmaker was coming out of the ‘70s, he had just finished work on films about brainwashing apartment slugs, armpit vampires, and killer monster children, but the 1980s marked a very exciting, formative time for Cronenberg. His first film in the ‘80s, Scanners, is a bonkers conspiracy thriller that’s full of bewildering psychic powers and stunning effects that literally blow minds. Cronenberg’s Scanners marks a larger scale of storytelling for the director, but one of the most noticeable things about Scanners as it nearly hits its 40th anniversary is how modern of a movie it is. It’s nearly four decades later and Scanners still feels like an incredibly contemporary story. This helped Scanners gain acceptance upon its release, but it’s also why the film holds up so well today. There have been efforts to reboot Scanners, both as a film and television series, and it’s because it presents such a simple, effective story. It’s basically Cronenberg’s take on X-Men, but if every character was Charles Xavier and super paranoid. On Scanners’ anniversary, we take a look back on why the film was such a significant step in Cronenberg’s career and how it remains relevant even today.

David Cronenberg wouldn’t create Scanners until he already had a few feature films under his belt, but the movie’s production started all the way back in the 1970s when the idea first gestated to Cronenberg via a script called The Sensitives. This psychic-centric script later evolved into a broader story called Telepathy 2000 that he tried to grab B-movie savant Roger Corman’s interest with, before it finally settled into the political thriller form of 1981’s Scanners. The film also acts as an update and pseudo-sequel of sorts to the director’s faux documentary Stereo, which also looks at psychic powers. Scanners picks up and expands upon many of Stereo’s ideas and even borrows a few concepts from the piece of work (like the concept of drilling into the skull to excavate memories). While Stereo scratches the surface of a fascinating subject, Scanners goes all in and approaches the idea from many grand angles.

Scanners examines a small sect of individuals known as “scanners” who are gifted with heavily advanced psychic abilities, like telekinesis and telepathy. At the center of all of this is a security and weapons corporation called ConSec who wants to exploit scanners and use them to change the world. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is a scanner that ConSec hires to try to take down Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), a scanner who has gone rogue and, hungry with power, wants to use his scanner abilities for equally nefarious purposes. As these opposing psychic forces grow closer together, the body count increases and it’s implied that society is irrevocably changed by the results of this scanner assassination mission. Jennifer O’Neill and Patrick McGoohan also round out the cast as Kim Obrist and Dr. Paul Ruth, and even though everyone gives accomplished performances, this is really Ironside’s film to shine. He gives a delightfully unhinged, commanding performance that feels akin to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in The Master. He’s the perfect antagonist here who manages to be genuinely intimidating.

What’s so impressive about Scanners is that even though it’s still relatively early in Cronenberg’s career, it nicely features pieces of each of his previous movies and feels like a culmination of everything that he has to offer. At the same time, just like Cronenberg is so interested in Kafka-esque stories of transformation, he takes something like a 1970s conspiracy thriller and injects it with science fiction and supernatural elements where psychic assassins and brain explosions take the place of smoking guns and shadowy informants. It’s an incredibly creative idea that helps make Scanners not only feel like a very fresh horror and science fiction film from the early ’80s, but it’s also why it’s still so immensely watchable nearly four decades later. Cronenberg creates a shrewd chimera of social anxiety, political paranoia, and supernatural horror that makes it a stand out piece of cinema and another impressive notch in his filmography. The director gets to indulge in classic action tropes like car chases and shootouts, but then pivots towards surreal ideas about the mind’s evolution and humanity’s apex. This is a considerable amount to tackle in what’s ostensibly the director’s first true science fiction film, as well as one of Cronenberg’s last big efforts as a splashy exploitation filmmaker before he started to become more “mainstream.”

Scanners is a film that turns the human mind into a weapon as it looks at the horror behind something like psychokinesis and how the human race may be evolving towards something dangerous instead of something productive. X-Men comics really helped popularize this idea in the 1960s, especially with Professor X, but in terms of feature films, Brian De Palma’s Carrie in 1976 and The Fury in 1978 really ignited the public consciousness in these areas. Even the Friday the 13th franchise would resort to psychokinetic battles with a Carrie White surrogate in 1988’s Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. All of these films play around with psychic powers, but on a much smaller, human scale. Cronenberg’s Scanners is one of the first that makes this simultaneously personal and societal as it looks towards the future as well as digs into the secret societies that are responsible for this step forward for mankind (and borrows another page from X-Men). It treats psychic abilities and their regulation like they’re some kind of industry that the government controls. Extraordinary powers are turned into taxable exports.

The fact that the whole scanners phenomenon within the film is a result of the human race’s continued exposure for decades to Ephemerol lends even more credence to how Scanners commodifies the supernatural. These brain powers aren’t the result of genetic abnormalities or exposure to some kind of Terrigen Mist bomb, but rather a side effect from America’s overexposure to pharmaceuticals. It’s an incredibly appropriate origin story for how psychic abilities will go on to destroy America. There’s even subterfuge between the two evil corporations, ConSec and Biocarbon Amalgamate, as their schemes begin to overlap on each other in a reflection of the naturally duplicitous nature of corporate America and how it just continues to consume itself.

Yet in spite of all of this nihilistic gloom, Scanners goes out on a decidedly positive ending, especially as far as Cronenberg’s films are concerned. It’s evidence that as bleak as this prognosis of America may be, it’s something that may not be past the point of saving. The fact that Cronenberg’s following films would tackle subject matter that looks at the transformation and perversion of the self rather than that of society is perhaps an important distinction. Mankind at large may be safe, but the individual is still in danger and at risk of corruption if something isn’t done quickly.

Scanners’ conclusion perfectly encapsulates this idea as Vale melds together with his greatest enemy into one benevolent, twisted abstraction. The following films in the Scanners series—none of which have Cronenberg’s involvement in any capacity—explore what that corrupted self looks like in greater detail, albeit in much broader terms. At one point, in response to what Revok and ConSec are trying to do to the scanners, Kim Obrist tells Cameron Vale; “We’re the dream. He’s the nightmare.” That message is even more applicable to Scanners’ extended universe.

Howard Shore consistently turns out great work, but he really got his start through David Cronenberg and his work on Scanners is particularly memorable. Shore creates a nightmarish, moody score that’s heavy on the synth and feels like an angry riff on Bernard Herrmann in many ways. Additionally, Cronenberg also cleverly mixes science with the human body through the film’s sound design during the “scanning” process. As these psychic effects are in play, an atonal noise—not unlike feedback or white noise—begins to dominate the audio and overpowers everything else, including the characters’ cries for help. It’s as if they go through the same level of dissonance that a piece of technology does before it malfunctions. Scanners’ sound design captures the essence of the movie in a remarkable way. Later on during Vale’s takedown of ConSec’s Ripe Program, shots of his pulsing head are interspersed with the inner components of a computer. Brains temporarily become tech before the former destroys the latter.

At the time Cronenberg stated that Scanners was one of his most difficult films to make, largely due to how ill prepared he and his team were. When shooting started, not all of sets had been fully built and the script was also far from finished. In fact, Cronenberg spent most production mornings writing scenes before he’d then scout for acceptable filming locations in the afternoons, before finally moving into filming. In Cronenberg on Cronenberg, the director also recounts how production immediately got off to a troubled, almost cursed start when the crew witnessed a fatal car accident on their first day.

On top of these obstacles, the ambitious effects in the film were another hurdle in some respects. Scanners’ most iconic scene is the head explosion that occurs courtesy of a scanners’ immense psychic abilities. Supervised by makeup and effects wizard Dick Smith, the head explosions in the movie look fantastic, especially for 1981. Their construction involves a plaster skull that’s covered with a gelatinous exterior that’s comprised of scraps of latex, wax, random stringy detritus, as well as “leftover burgers.” It involved a lot of trial and error before settling on this cocktail of ingredients, but even then the explosives themselves failed to go off correctly and create the necessary look that Cronenberg was after. Finally, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller allegedly cleared the set and shot the back of the dummy’s head off with a shotgun to create the effect that ends up in the movie. It’s a glorious level of DIY-level guerrilla independent filmmaking that’s just not seen as much today.

The infamous exploding head scene was supposed to be what kicked off the movie, but apparently test audiences had such a hard time focusing on the events of the film after witnessing such an extreme sight. Accordingly, the scene was moved ten minutes into the film in order to give the movie’s actual story some breathing room before all-out chaos is unleashed. What’s also significant about this head explosion scene is that it’s right in line with the other impressive, gratuitous practical effects from the late ’70s and early ’80s, whether it’s the chestburster from Alien, the devouring mist from John Carpenter’s The Fog, or the unbelievable transformation sequences that are featured in An American Werewolf in London or The Howling.

What’s important is that all of these moments have a degree of levity baked into them, with many of them often taking the implied humor to literal places. Scanners goes the opposite route and instead lets the spectacle speak for itself rather than attempt to defuse it in any way. It’s supposed to catch the audience off guard as much as the people in the lecture hall that are witnessing the demonstration. It’s the beginning of Cronenberg playing around with that kind of reflexivity, which would become even more pronounced in later works of his like Naked Lunch and eXistenZ.

If Scanners‘ notorious head explosion sequence from the movie hasn’t permanently been burned into some synapse of your brain, the film also featured an extremely memorable TV spot that capitalized on the terror that the sequence caused in audiences. This guaranteed that anyone who even saw an ad for Scanners would be frightened by it. Ads like this are now a lost art, but Scanners elegantly used this structure to drum up anticipation for the movie in a way that helped Scanners become Cronenberg’s first major box-office success.

As much as Scanners and its effects still hold up, there are certainly moments that come across as sillier than intended. The psychic showdown in the barn wherein many scanners are throwing their heads in the direction of their target certainly feels like the major inspiration for South Park’s “psychic detectives” parody. In addition to exploding heads, Scanners also indulges in veins that become engorged and jut out of the human body, or individuals that simply burst into flames as a result of psychic energy. The final psychic war between Vale and Revok is a glorious demonstration of unnerving practical effects. The places that this fight and the other psychic battles in Scanners go to feel very reminiscent of the horrific side of superheroes that wouldn’t get properly explored in film and television until decades later (many moments in Scanners immediately conjure up Noah Hawley’s mind-trip of a series, Legion).

Scanners also nicely compliments the middle stage of Cronenberg’s career, which is fascinated by the repercussions from the changes by scientists. These films move from a large, social place to an increasingly more inward realm. After Cronenberg’s first few films Shivers and Rabid took a look at how the work of scientists can lead to a breakdown of all of society, Scanners, as well as the films that surround it like The Brood and Videodrome, look at how the way that scientists play God can lead to much more personal horrors, which in the case of Scanners means learning that you’re someone else’s puppet. Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood all posit their scientific advancements as deadly aberrations, whereas Scanners is the first of Cronenberg’s films that views these scientific abnormalities as sources of power and strength, albeit dangerous ones. It shows a careful, important evolution in the filmography of David Cronenberg.

If there’s any sort of subtextual message within Scanners, it’s that Cronenberg strangely seems to use the film as a cautionary parable about the dangers of the counterculture becoming the overwhelming voice in society. Very pointedly, Cronenberg makes all of the scanners out to be rebellious youth, hippie-esque iconoclasts, or radical political figures who want to shake up the system. Cronenberg paints the fact that it’s these individuals who are now calling the shots and gaining control of society as a very dangerous idea. This is a theme that Cronenberg would also explore to some degree in the more recent Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars, but it feels the most polished and important to Cronenberg within Scanners. Scanners may powerfully end with Vale becoming one with Revok and technically being more complete than ever, but it’s at this period in time that Cronenberg evolves, much like those that have grown accustomed to Ephemerol. His next films like Videodrome, Dead Zone, and The Fly all shift their focus and look at the dissolution of the self in frightening ways.

Scanners was largely praised upon its release by both critics and audiences. It didn’t win over everyone (most notably, Roger Ebert was not a fan, although he appreciated the special effects), but it continued Cronenberg’s rise throughout the ’80s. The movie was also popular enough to spawn a number of sequels and off-shoot films, making it the only movie from Cronenberg’s filmography to get the franchise treatment. Perhaps most importantly, Scanners’ success allowed Cronenberg to make films outside of Canada, tackle bigger productions and therefore bigger risks, and move into a more mainstream stage of his career, which would both help and hinder the director’s creative aspirations.

There’s a scene within Scanners when Cameron Vale reaches Kim Obrist’s reclusive scanner cell and he learns of a particular scanner who copes with their psychic abilities through art. He creates morbid sculptures, some of his own head, as a means of therapy. In a way, one could argue that Scanners is Cronenberg’s own way of exorcising his own similar demons. He needs to create this disturbing effigy as a way to find peace and move on, which he does as he progresses into the next stage of his career. 39 year later, David Cronenberg’s Scanners is still as entertaining and thought provoking as it’s ever been. Nobody should have to scan your mind to make you check out this classic.