Scanners (1981)
Directed by David Cronenberg
A scientist trains a man with an advanced telepathic ability called 'scanning' to stop a dangerous Scanner with extraordinary psychic powers from waging war against non-Scanners.
5 connections found
View:
5 films that influenced Scanners
What critics say influenced Scanners
In fact, it’s hard to believe that Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) doesn’t owe more than a little debt to this film.
…plot not that far removed from Brian De Palma’s 1978 hit The Fury.
Thus, their mind-power sparring takes on the grisly physical manifestation of popping veins and spurting blood, courtesy of make-up effects maestro Dick Smith (The Exorcist), who was brought in late to the production when they decided to reshoot the ending.
The ideas in Scanners were actually quite old, deriving from one of Cronenberg’s student features (1969’s Stereo), a futuristic script he had written called Telepathy 2000 that had briefly interested Roger Corman in the early ’70s, and a script called The Sensitives that he had set aside in order to make The Brood.
The set includes Cronenberg's very first feature film, Stereo (1969), a new documentary on the visual effects, new interviews with the actors, and an old television interview with Cronenberg.
Until, that is, you account for its packaging as a telepathic double feature with the early experimental feature Stereo (69), a wonderful bit of sardonic Burroughsian pseudo-science so comprehensively prophetic of the Cronenbergian that it reads like a Rosetta Stone of the New Flesh.
The "Canadian Academy for Erotic Enquiry" is the stage for this sustained abstract jest, where telepathy is the ongoing concern: Scanners is already sketched as Mlodzik lifts his floppy mop in front of the mirror and massages his forehead, seeking the best spot to drill.
It helped that he gave audiences more than one reason to show up, offering increasingly elaborate (and explicit) visual effects with each film while anchoring the unforgettable visuals to resonant philosophical conceits, from Shivers’ sexual paranoia to The Brood’s brutal divorce metaphors.
A tale of telepaths at war with each other and the corporate machine that engineered them, Scanners consolidates the ruling problematic of the Cronenberg project from the sex slugs of Shivers to the financial abstractions of Cosmopolis: what are the effects of signals on an organism?
Advertisement
This was the fourth film by David Cronenberg , a Canadian who gathered a cult following for such superior low-budget chillers as “ They Came from Within / Shivers ” and “ The Brood .”
It helped that he gave audiences more than one reason to show up, offering increasingly elaborate (and explicit) visual effects with each film while anchoring the unforgettable visuals to resonant philosophical conceits, from Shivers’ sexual paranoia to The Brood’s brutal divorce metaphors.
I don’t find it shocking today—certainly not in the way that Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) retains its shock—and it lacks the kind of single iconic image of the exploding head of Scanners (1981), but it has a quality of its own.