"Scanners" (1981)

David Cronenberg has a knack for crafting images that are instantly and ghastly memorable, surreal and unsettling. He doesn’t use special effects to merely put you in awe but to get under your skin, to get at something more fundamental and hard to shake. In Scanners this moment comes early in the film in the film’s infamous exploding head scene. It’s disturbing but Cronenberg plays it beyond realism, emphasizing the excess and gruesomeness., which serves to make it even more macabre. Scanners is a film about identity, conformity and even mental health, but, above all, it’s a film about the body under stress. It is body horror, which is one of the more distressing and creepy forms of horror. This is largely due to the fact that the horror on display isn’t an outside force but an internal one and one that leads the body to go under contortions and damage no one really wants to witness. In the film, “scanners” are individuals with telekinetic powers who have become social outcasts and basket cases due to their abilities overwhelming them. ConSec is a corporation looking to turn these scanners into super soldiers, but they’re running into the problem of an underground scanner group attempting to dismantle the company and their research. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a young, uninformed scanner, is sent to infiltrate this organization led by an exceedingly powerful rogue scanner (a delightfully committed Michael Ironside). Nothing quite lives up to the head-splosion moment, but really what could? It serves a purpose, getting us invested in the weird and wonderful world of Scanners where such perverse incidences are, gloriously and consistently, a natural occurrence. 

Grade: B