trHAFTEf,If

01,I / / XCREATURES LIKE THATtr

0a: DR. RU TH
u3: CONSEC
Utt: NFREAK S OF NATURET
u5: PSYCHI C SPARRIN6
uE: "I"IY AR T KEEPS IIE SANEtr
u?: 6ROUP SCAN
OA: BIOC AR BON ANAL6AIlATE
03: THE RI PE PRO6RAII
l,U: SELF. D ESTRUCT
Ll,: BRO THE RHOOD
l,a: NUE'VE u,0Nr
l,l : COLOR BARS

trAfT
KIN OBRIST \ JENNIFER O'NEILL
CAllERON VALE \ STEPHEN LACK
DR. PAUL RUTH \ PATRICK IlC6OOHAN
BRAEDON KELLER \ LAIlJRENCE DANE
DARRYL REVOK \ NlCHAEL IRONSIDE
BENJAllIN PIERCE \ ROBERT SILVERIlAN
FIRST SCANNER \ LOUIS DEL 6RANDE

trREtrIT-r
IdRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY \ DAVID CRONENBER6
PRODUCED BY \ CTAUDE HEROUX
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS \ VICTOR SOLNICKI. PIERRE DAVID
DIRECTOR OF PHOTO6RAPHY \ IlARK IRIJIN. CSC
MUSIC BY \ HOLJARD SHORE
EDITOR \ RONALD SANDERS, CFE
ART DIRECTOR \ CAROL SPIER
SPECIAL EFFECTS \ 6ARY ZELLER
IlICRO EFFECTS \ DENNIS PIKE
CONSULTANT FOR SPECIAL IlAKEUP EFFECTS \ DICK SllITH
 MINg
ANg
MATTEFT
BY KIIl NELJTlAN

ln 1981, David Cronenberg's Scanners was known as "the one with the
exploding head." As originally intended, the film would have opened with
this scene, but it so shocked preview audiences that they found it hard
afterward to pay attention to the (admittedly complex) plot. Even edged
back a quarter of an hour into the narrative, after we've met down-and-out
telepath hero Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) and the fatherly yet mysterious
scientist Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), the detonating cranium was the
talking point of the picture. A generation on, it's still an often remembered
and excerpted moment, whether pulled out of the context of Scanners as
an lnternet GIE highlighted in one of those 100 ScarylShockinglRepulsivel
Surprising Moments of the Movies TV specials, or assessed as a key
moment in Cronenberg's evolving, transgressive worldview. Few other film-
makers are as willing to put brains on the screen-literally and in the sense
of displaying an obvious intelligence not always associated with midbudget
science fiction and horror cinema.

Of course, the film endures because it has a lot more going for it than one
spectacularly gruesome shock. Scanners was Cronenberg's fifth commer-
cial film-following the science-fiction horror movies Shivers (1"975), Rabid
(1977), and The Brood (1979) and the drag-racing action film Fast Company
(1979)-and seventh feature, taking the semiunderground science-fiction
art-house efforts Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970) into
account. From the first, he had specialized in conceptually and physically
shocking material. One strain of horror depends on things unseen or half
hinted at, but the chilly Canadian preferred the sort of monstrosities that
had to be seen to be believed-like the aphrodisiac mind-controlling slugs
of Shivers, the penile armpit vampire tentacle of Rabid, and the deformed
dwarf homunculi of Ihe Brood. There's a clinical, forensic approach in these
films, which carries over into Scanners-the exploding-head effect occurs in
what seems to be an academic setting, during a lecture delivered by a "psy-
chic anomaly" (Louis Del Grande) to a roomful of executives, scientists, and
experts. lt's prefaced by a warning: "l must remind you that the scanning
experience is usually a painful one . . . sometimes resulting in nosebleeds,
earaches, stomach cramps, nausea. Sometimes other symptoms of a similar
nature." Though that's no preparation for what happens.

It was obvious to even the most casual cinemagoer that genre movies of the
late 1970s and early 1980s were becoming more fantastically grisly. The
skull sliced by a helicopter blade in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the crea-
ture that explodes out of John Hurt's chest in Alien (7979) were remarkable
effects achievements but also coups de cin6ma. Not only could the movies
now technically show anything, but filmmakers in the horror and science
fiction genres were ruthless and seemingly demented enough to want to
show the sorts of things that had been only implied earlier. The Scanners
exploding head was in this tradition, on a par with the groundbreaking
werewolf transformations in Ihe Howling and An American Werewolf in
London (both 1981) or the spider-legged severed head of The Thing lhe
next year. But there is one crucial difference: Filmmakers like George A.
Romero, Ridley Scott, Joe Dante, John Landis, and John Carpenter stage
their set pieces like conjuring tricks or sick jokes, anticipating a huge,
astonished, appalled reaction from audiences but also the relief of laughter
 - , na -'trl

\
(

that comes from a knowing line or a black-comic joke. With Cronenberg,

the shocks escalate-there's no punctuating laughter. ln The Howling, a
werewolf digs a bullet out of his brain while snarling, "l'll show you a piece
of my mindl" Scanners refrains from such levity, and Cronenberg's jokes are
absurdist or conceptual rather than comic relief.

With Cronenberg, even more than with his confrontational genre auteur
peers, there was a sense that he was as out of control as any "psychic
anomaly" and would deliver shocks beyond the capacity of even hardened
horror fans to get their unexploded but straining heads around. Scanners
was, in many ways, a synthesis of Cronenberg's works to date, and almost
a sequel to Stereq back-referencing a key incident in the earlier movie in
which a telepath tries to get rid of the voices in his brain by drilling a hole
between his eyes. However, rather than an elliptical, whimsical, black-and-
white mock documentary, as Stereo-a student art film-was, Scanners
takes the form of an espionage-action film, with conspiracy elements and
a streak of visionary science-fictional transhumanism. lt's a literal mutation
of 1970s paranoid thrillers like Ihe Parallax View (197$ andThree Days
of the Condor (197il, tossing psychic abilities into the mix of assassins,
cover-ups, and compromised spies.

Stories of humans born with psychic powers who represent a possible

next step in evolution had been around for decades. lmportant novels on
the theme include A. E. van Vogt's S/an (1940) and Theodore Sturgeon's
More Than Human (1953). Nigel Kneale's TV serial Quaternass and the
Pit (1958-59, filmed 1967) inverted the premise, suggesting that psychic
abilities like telekinesis were throwbacks to a strain of humanity tinkered
with by alien invaders in prehistory. Episodes of The Twilight Zone ('A Penny
for Your Thoughts," 1961) and The Outer Limlts ("The Man with the
Power," 1963) featured psychic prodigies-usually meek little men trans-
formed into superbeings along the lines of the protagonist of H. G. Wells's
fantasy "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." Marvel Comics' Professor X
debuted in 1963, pressing his fingers to his temples as lines radiated from
his bald head to signify his telepathic contact with the physical mutants of
the X-Men. Byron Haskin's film Ihe Power (1968), from the 1956 novel by
Frank M. Robinson, introduced the psychic superman theme to the cinema.
Scientists at a research center realize that one of their num-
ber (Michael Rennie) is an enormously powerful superman
with ambitions to rule normal humanity. The put-upon hero
(George Hamilton) ultimately realizes that he, too, is a next-
level human, and the film climaxes, like Scanners, with a
psychic duel between good and bad mutants.

The success of Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976), from the

novel by Stephen King, made the dangerous ESP user
a recurrent figure in horror/science-fiction cinema, and
De Palma's The Fury (1978), from the novel by John Farris,
is a key precedent for Scanners, both in its genre mix and in its deployment
of psychically wrought carnage for shock value. King followed the telekinetic
Carrie with the pyrokinetics of Firestarter, whose title character would be
played by Drew Barrymore in the 1984 film, another story that links psychic
powers with espionage and conspiracy. There was some real-life basis for this:
there had been all sorts of rumors-and trashy paperbacks-about Soviet
ESP experiments and their application to spying and warfare, which even-
tually inspired a U.S. program that would have some of its peculiar history
told in Jon Ronson's nonfiction study Ihe Men Who Stare at Goats (2004),
made into a film in 2009. ln Scanners, Cronenberg evokes this shadowy area
of paranormal research, as well as contemporary scandals involving botched
drug testing, the less-than-ethical behavior of some sectors of the pharmaceu-
tical industry and the rise of private security and espionage outfits.

Cronenberg's script establishes a world in which scanners, a type of tele-

path, have been around since the trial use of Ephemerol, a drug prescribed
as an analgesic for pregnant women, in the late 1940s. The film sketches in
several factions of the scanner underground, headed by the fiendish Revok
(Michael lronside) and the sensitive Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill), plus such
lone freaks as the mind-reading sculptor Benjamin Pierce (Robert Silverman),
who lives inside a giant padded model of his own head. As Cameron Vale
works his way along a chain of suspicious types in his search for Revok, he
becomes aware of an intricate level of conspiracy whereby the ConSec cor-
poration is unknowingly at war with its own subsidiary company, Biocarbon
Amalgamate, and as a result, a new generation of scanners is in the offing.

At heart, this is an archetypal narrative of opposing brothers and the

remote, unknowable father who has given them their gifts and set them
against each other-it's almost a version of the Thor-Loki-Odin triangle,
if not the story of Cain and Abel-but because it suggests a wider world
beyond this family struggle, Scanners is unique in Cronenberg's oeuvre,
where stories often end in apocalypses (for example, Shivers) or the con-
tinuance of a cycle of horror (The Brood), or just shut down completely,
as in the transformative suicides or sacrifices of The Dead Zone (1983),
Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), and Dead Ringers (1988). The finale
of Scanners, in fact, can be seen as an optimistic mirror of the pessimistic
finish of Dead Ringers, allowing for the mutual survival of the doppelgdnger
brothers in one melded form rather than ending in their shared death.

Scanners, alone among Cronenberg's creations, spawned a franchise,

though he has taken no creative part in it. All those films-Scanners //:
The New Order (7991), Scanners lll: The Takeover (1992), Scanner Cop
(1994), and Scanner Cop ll: Volkin's Revenge (1995)-stress exploding
heads (Scanners /// features the cinema's first underwater exploding head)
but steer away from the philosophical angles explored by Cronenberg's film.
Stereo was already an exploration of mind sharing, and Scanners picks
up on that to explore questions of identity. lt's unusual in the run of films
dealing with psychic psychopaths in exploring telepathy as well as telekine-
sis, and also touches-in its "human modem" sequencHn the fusion of
man and machine that becomes central to Videodrome and lhe Fly. Like
Emil Hobbes in Shivers, Dan Keloid in Rabid, Hal Raglan in The Brood,
Seth Brundle in The Fly, and Allegra Geller in eXistenZ (1999), Paul Ruth is
a philosopher-scientist. And like Raglan's patients and Geller's beta testers,
Ruth's human test subjects are performance artists as well as walking adver-
tisements for extreme techniques--+ven that exploding head is presented in
an auditorium, and Benjamin Pierce channels his scanning into sculpture.

Scanners was the film where Cronenberg's intellectual pursuits most obvi-
ously meshed with his love of staging shootouts, car crashes, and stalkings.
Crucial to the effectiveness of the movie are the makeup effects of Dick
Smith-a lauded veteran of the then burgeoning art form who was spurred
to invent techniques to achieve the illusions demanded by Cronenberg's
script-and the ominous music by Howard Shore, who first came to notice
for his innovative, avant-garde work for Cronenberg, before turning his hand
to more traditional scores for Martin Scorsese and Peter Jackson.

Over thirty years after its release, the once cutting-edge Scanners has picked
up an almost nostalgic charm-the green-screen dot-matrix end titles and
the room-size ConSec supercomputer that explodes when Vale syncs with its
nervous system over a phone line are yesteryear's high tech, and the circle of
humming hippie mind sharers seem even more like stranded leftovers from a
psychedelic idealism superseded and squashed by Revok's focused vision of
a future scanner supremacy. But it's a forward-looking film too. Like 2OOI:
4 Space Odyssey (1968), The Final Programme (1973), Demon Seed
(1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and Brainstorm
(1983), it embraces the transformative as well as the apocalyptic potential
of the creation of a new stage of human life. ln Return of the Jedi(1983),
a film Cronenberg passed on directing, Darth Vader is redeemed by regress-
ing from his Jedi state to become plain old Dad in death, inspiring his son
not to develop his superpowers but, in essence, to go back to the farm. The
eighties would be awash with such conservative fantasies, turning away
from conceptual breaKhrough to embrace suburban 1950s values, most
obviously in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or the perfectly titled Back to
the Future series. But Scanners closes with hero and villain combined, Vale
speaking through Revok, and the promise of continuing, endless mutation.

Long live the New Mind

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic, and broadcaster. His fiction includes the Anno Dracula
serles, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, and, most recently, An English
Ghost Story. His nonfiction includes Nightmare Movies and BFl C/assr'cs studr'es of Cat
People, Doctor Who, and Quatermass and the Pit He is a contributing editor to Sight &
Sound and Empire magazines and can also be found at www.johnnyalucard.com and on
Twitter as @AnnoDracula.
AEtrI.IT TI# TRANTFEFI
SCANNERS is presented in the dinecton's preferred aspect
ratio of 1,.?A:1,. 0n standard tl:3 televisions' the image
urill appear letterboxed. 0n widescneen televisi.ons" the
image should fiIl the screen. Supenvised by directon
David Cronenberg. this neu digital transfer was created
in PK resolution on an ARRISCAN film scanner from a 35 mm
interpositive at Vision 6lobale in llontreal i the color
grading uras done at Deluxe Tononto. Thousands of instances
of dint, debris, scrat(hesi splices' uarpsl jitter' and
flicker urere manually removed using lITl's DRS and Pixel
Farmrs PFClean' uhile Di.gital Vision's Phoenix uas used
for smaIl dirtr graini and noise nanagement.
The original monaural soundtrack t,as remastened at aq-bit
fnom the 35 mm Dialogue/llusic/Effects magnetic tnack.
Clicks" thumps' hiss. hum, and crackle uere manually
nemoved using Pno Tools HD. AudioCube's integrated
r,rorkstationr and iZotope RX 3.
Transfer supervisors: David Cr onenbergr Lee Kline \
Colorist: Chris lrlaIlace/DeIuxe Toronto \ Sca nning: Vision
61oba1e. l"lontreal
STERE0 is presented in the directorrs preferred aspect ratio
of l,.EL:1,.0n standard tl:f televisionSr the image r,rill
appear letterboxed. 0n standard and uidescreen televisions,
black bars may also be visible on the left and right to
maintain the proper screen format. This neu digital transfen
u,as created in PK resolution on a Lasergraphics film scanner
from a 35 nm composite fine-grain at Iletropolis Post in
Neur York. Digital Visionrs Phoenix was used for small dirt.
debris. scratahesr grain' and noise mand!€mehtr uhile Pixel
Farm's PFClean was used for flicker.
The original monaural soundtrack u,as remastered at Eq-bit
from an optical soundtrack print. Clicks: thumpsr hissr
hum. and crackle uere manually renoved using Pro Tools H),
AudioCubers integrated uorkstation' and iZotope RX 3.
Transfer supervison and colonist: Lee Kline
Blu-ray mastering: Radius t0, Los Angeles \ DVD mastening
6entuza. fnc.. Rochesterl NY
TFEtrIAL THANHT
Rick Bakeri Llilliam Becker. Brian Belovaracr Laura
Coxson. Sarah Finklea/Janus Filmsi PauI Bellerosel Yannick
6amache/Vision 6lobalei Joe Blascoi Julienne Boudreau/
CinEmathEque qu6b6coisei Kanen Bourer. John Rahme/Canadian
Broadcasting Corporationi 6Ienn Bradie/Everett Collectioni
Brian Carmodyi James 6. Chandleri Suzanne Charette.
Rene llalo/Groupe Laureml Ilontreali SamueI Cheneyi
Veronique Colaprete' Lauretta Dives, Jamie Vuignier/Kobal
Collectioni David Cronenbengi Bernard Dauman/B.D.P. Filrnsi
Pierre Davidi Eduin de Ia Cruzi Elijah Drenner/End Filmsi
[lerrill Dnillingsl Stephan Dupuisi Achim Forsti Sylvia
Frank. Eve Goldin, Kristen llacDonaId. Laurel llacllilIan.
llelissa Neil/TIFFi Brandon FulIer. Jesse Rogg, Logan
lrlilliams/t1ack Sennett Studios' Los Angelesi Ray Gagnoni
David 6insbergi Janet 6ormanl David 6negory/Severin Filmsi
Steve 6riffini Janet Hicksi Cortlandt HuIli Nick Ianelli,
NeIIie llirazizyan/Deluxe Torontoi llichael Ironsidei ['lark
Irurini Kani Koerper/Joe Blasco Cosmeticsi Tyson Kubotai
Stephen Lacki ['lichael Lennicki Brendan ll . Leonardi
Tim Lucasi Lisa Ilahali Casey f'loorei Kimball Neelley/
Kimaging" Los Angelesi Sean Neucombe/Captions" Inc.i
Kim Newmani Claire Pignataro/Rebury HoteI. Los Angelesi
Jenny Romero/llargaret Herrick Library. AIIPASi J. Anthony
Ruffoi Jonathan Sabai E1len Shoualteri Joyce Spectori
Claire Stiefeli Chris lrlalasi Lee lrlilliansi Jessica
Joy [disei lrlinnie ldongi 6ary Zelleri Tino Zimmerman/
Subkultur Entertainment

AtrH]W{LEgffiNTJ
THE EPHEI{EROL DIARIEScourtesy of Subkultur
Entertainment. \ Excerpt from THE B0B IlCLEAN SH0IJ
0 1541, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. AII rights
reserved. \ STERE0 courtesy of David Cronenberg.