scanners

what the film does

cameron vale is a vagrant who hears voices in his head. after causing a woman in a mall food court to have a seizure with his mind alone, he is captured by agents of consec, a private military corporation, and delivered to dr. paul ruth. ruth explains that vale is one of 237 people known as scanners, psychics with telepathic and telekinetic abilities. the voices he hears are other people’s thoughts bleeding through. ruth injects vale with ephemerol, a drug that temporarily suppresses scanning, and teaches him to control his power.

consec holds a public demonstration where a company scanner reads an audience member’s thoughts. darryl revok, a rogue scanner played by michael ironside, volunteers to be scanned. revok counter-scans the consec operative and makes his head explode on stage. revok has been driven insane by his uncontrollable scanning and is recruiting other scanners for a war against non-scanners. he kills any scanner who refuses to join him.

vale tracks down other scanners to infiltrate revok’s network. he finds kim obrist, a scanner leading a resistance group. revok’s assassins kill most of them. vale discovers that revok runs a pharmaceutical front called biocarbon amalgamate that manufactures ephemerol. revok plans to prescribe the drug to pregnant women, turning their unborn children into scanners and creating an army from birth.

vale and revok face off in a telepathic duel. vale’s body is incinerated, but during the battle he swaps minds with revok. when obrist finds revok’s body, she realizes vale is now looking out through revok’s eyes. the final revelation: vale and revok are both sons of dr. ruth, who used them as test subjects for ephemerol in the womb and made them the most powerful scanners alive.

why it is in the canon

scanners is cronenberg’s first film to reach a mainstream audience, and the exploding head scene is one of those rare practical-effects moments that still works exactly as intended. it is not a cheap shock. it sets the stakes: scanning is not mind-reading party tricks, it is a weapon. the film treats telepathy as a physical process, a kind of biological warfare waged inside the nervous system. bodies bulge, veins stand out, faces distort under psychic attack. the special effects by dick smith (the exorcist) are brutal and tactile.

michael ironside’s revok is the real engine. he is not a cackling villain. he is a scanner who was experimented on as a child, abandoned, and left to fend for himself inside a head full of everyone else’s thoughts. his plan is monstrous but his logic is clear: if scanners are the next stage of human evolution, why should they serve the people who made them and threw them away? the film never fully answers that question.

howard shore’s score is a character in itself, industrial, pulsing, all synth and tension. the canadian winter locations (montreal, mostly) give the film a cold institutional feel that separates it from the sunny california sci-fi of the same era. scanners is cronenberg before the fly and dead ringers, still working in the b-movie register but already building the visual and thematic vocabulary that would define his career. dvd.