When movie fans think of Scanners, the immediate association is its spectacular exploding-head scene. In fact, when anyone thinks of spectacular exploding head scenes… Scanners is always on top of the pile, right next to Dawn of the Dead and Maniac.
But while the work of special effects legend Dick Smith deserves much applause (in addition to Scanners, his credits include The Exorcist and Death Becomes Her), there is more to David Cronenberg’s 1981 thriller than one gloriously gory splatter. Even characters who keep their heads suffer horrible pain, and as the tension rises in the story, a sense of chaotic unease permeates the movie’s world, racing toward a final act that offers some catharsis but little closure.
Scanners marked Cronenberg’s first big shift toward wider recognition, and his fame further expanded with his subsequent 1980s releases: Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, and Dead Ringers. The head scene comes fairly early in act one; it’s an important moment that establishes not just how far Scanners is willing to go, but also what the people possessing the titular psychic powers are capable of.
The movie sets up opposing forces in Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), who knows he’s not normal but initially doesn’t understand why, and Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), who’s all too eager to weaponize his abilities.
While Scanners builds to an epic mental battle between these two characters (it’s not quite as gasp-inducing as the head explosion, but it’s packed full of Cronenberg’s trademark body horror), we learn more about how the phenomenon of “scanning” came to be.
In contrast to Stephen King’s Carrie and The Institute, where the kids are just born gifted, Scanners goes the Firestarter route, later picked up by the King-influenced Stranger Things. Scanners aren’t a product of nature; they’re created, thanks to an experimental drug called “ephemerol” that has a curious effect on unborn children. It can also temporarily subdue telepathy. When Vale first tries it, his mind is suddenly, blissfully free of exhausting mental cross-chatter.
Scanners is further different from other stories of this type in that it focuses on adult psychics, not kids like Stranger Things’ Eleven or the teens of The Fury. It’s also free of any sort of government menace; instead, its villains emerge from a private military company as well as a shady drug lab and include a deeply unethical doctor, Dr. Ruth (played by The Prisoner’s Patrick McGoohan) and a turncoat security chief, Keller (Lawrence Dane).
Scanners’ main baddie, however, is Revok; he’s the one who makes that head explode, after all, and he provides far more fascinating conflict than the institutions eager to exploit him. His goal is simple: world domination, and he has a real “join me or die” feeling about that.
Vale and other more benevolent Scanners—including Kim, played by Jennifer O’Neill, star of The Psychic; we also meet a sculptor whose highly symbolic work includes a giant head you can climb inside—do their best to stop him. But the viewer is left wondering what positive applications mind control powers might actually have.
There’s certainly a wish-fulfillment element; even if he doesn’t mean it, Vale’s remote takedown of a random woman who views him with disdain is equal parts alarming and satisfying.
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