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.
We also see that Scanners have the ability to hack into computers with their minds (1981 versions of computers, anyway; a pay phone is involved). Still, the jumpy, paranoid mood Cronenberg leans into throughout emphasizes that there are no winners when a human brain oversteps its capabilities.
“We were the dream, and he’s the nightmare,” Kim says with sadness after Revok gets the upper hand. But of Vale, the guy with the best chance at beating Revok, she says, “You’re barely human,” only slightly kinder than Dr. Ruth calling him “a piece of human junk” and a “freak of nature.”
The movie ends on a note of supreme unease. Revok is neutralized, but there’s a threat looming in the future. We learn in act three that Revok put in motion a plan to create an army of mutants by using ephemerol on pregnant women—and that his “soldiers” are soon to be born. We know they are operational; at one point, Kim realizes she’s being scanned by a fetus.
“We’ve won,” is Vale’s declaration of victory, but it’s a temporary triumph. The anxiety is only heightened by the fact that Vale has transposed his mind into Revok’s body: a new ability unlocked that feels like a sign of the uncontrollable chaos to come. Scanners who don’t know what they are live in agony, as Vale once did, while Scanners who are aware of what they can do are poised to be just as diabolical as Revok. Who’s to say what path all those newborn Scanners will take?
While you ponder all the ways Scanners ends on simultaneous notes of weird uplift and certain doom, nobody will mind if you go back and watch the head scene a few more times. Ironside’s contorted facial expressions as he’s willing a skull to combust are also worthy of a few rewinds.
Scanners is now streaming on HBO Max; it also arrives on Shudder October 1.
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