My Cultural Diet

David Cronenberg’s film about psychics is arguably most (in)famous for its “exploding head” sequence, which has lost none of its visceral power in the last 40+ years. But there’s more going on with Scanners than just body horror, although Cronenberg certainly uses that to solid effect. A homeless man named Vale (Stephen Lack) is taken in by an unorthodox scientist who claims he can help Vale control the voices in his head, voices that he hears because he’s a “scanner” who possesses powerful telepathic abilities. Vale finds himself caught up in an underground war between rival scanner factions, and that’s to say nothing of the corporate espionage aspect. Scanners maintains an icy tone throughout thanks to Mark Irwin’s cinematography, which makes the corporate settings all the more dehumanizing (and fascinating). The film occasionally goes into some ridiculous territory, such as when psychic warfare suddenly becomes cyber warfare — but it came out in 1981, when computers still had a certain magical patina, so who’s to say telepaths can’t hack into mainframes? Scanners also stars Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner) as the aforementioned scientist while Michael Ironside steals every scene he’s in as Revok, the megalomaniacal scanner leader. Scanners inspired several sequels, though Cronenberg wasn’t involved in any of them, and a modern remake was once planned. However, Scanners is successful thanks to its ’80s setting, something that would be challenging to capture in a modern version.

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