| Scanners | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | David Cronenberg |
| Written by | David Cronenberg |
| Produced by | Claude Héroux |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Mark Irwin |
| Edited by | Ronald Sanders |
| Music by | Howard Shore |
Production company | Filmplan International |
| Distributed by |
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Release dates |
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Running time | 103 minutes[2] |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Budget | CAD$4.1 million |
| Box office | $6.3 million[3] / $14.2 million[4] |
Scanners is a 1981 Canadianscience fictionhorror film written and directed byDavid Cronenberg. The film stars includeStephen Lack,Jennifer O'Neill,Michael Ironside,Lawrence Dane andPatrick McGoohan. In the film, "scanners" arepsychics with unusualtelepathic andtelekinetic powers. ConSec, a purveyor of weaponry and security systems, searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. The film's plot concerns the attempt by Darryl Revok (Ironside), a renegade scanner, to wage a war against ConSec. Another scanner, Cameron Vale (Lack), is dispatched by ConSec to stop Revok.
Scanners premiered in January 1981 to lukewarm reviews from critics but became one of the first films produced in Canada to successfully compete with American films at the international box office.[5][6][4][7] It brought Cronenberg and his controversial style ofbody horror attention to mainstream film audiences for the first time and has since been reevaluated as acult classic.[8][9] It is particularly well known for a scene that depicts Revok psychically causing a rival scanner's head to graphically explode.
After Cameron Vale, a vagrant suffering from voices manifesting in his head, causes a rude woman to have aseizure with his telepathic abilities, he is captured and brought to Dr. Paul Ruth, who explains that Vale is one of 237 super-powered individuals known asscanners who are capable of psychic powers. He then injects Vale with a drug, ephemerol, which restores his sanity by temporarily inhibiting his scanning abilities, and teaches him to control his powers.
Darryl Revok, a powerful scanner, is a former mental patient who was driven insane from hearing uncontrollable streams of thoughts. At a marketing event for theprivate military company ConSec, Revok volunteers in a demonstration about scanning, but he explodes the head of the ConSec scanner. He seeks to convince other scanners to help him in his quest for domination, and to kill opposing scanners. ConSec's new security head Braedon Keller advocates shutting down the company's scanner research program, especially since it has no scanners after the tragic incident. Dr. Ruth disagrees with Keller, believing that scanners are the next stage of human evolution. Dr. Ruth argues that the assassination demonstrates how dangerous Revok is. Ruth convinces Vale to help infiltrate Revok's group.
Unknown to Ruth, Keller is working for Revok and informs him of Ruth's infiltration plan. Revok dispatches assassins to follow Vale as he visits an unaffiliated scanner, Benjamin Pierce, a successful yet reclusive sculptor who copes with his abilities through his art. Revok's assassins murder Pierce, but Vale defeats the assassins with his powers and reads Pierce's dying thoughts, learning of another group of scanners, led by Kim Obrist, who oppose Revok's group. Vale tracks down Obrist and attends a meeting, but Revok's assassins strike again; only Vale and Obrist survive.
Vale learns of a pharmaceutical company, Biocarbon Amalgamate. He discovers it manufactures ephemerol and that Revok is distributing the drug utilizing a computerized ConSec plan, codenamed Ripe. He and Obrist go to ConSec to investigate, where Ruth admits that he founded Biocarbon Amalgamate but has no direct connection to it anymore and claims no knowledge of Revok's involvement there. He encourages Vale to cyberpathically scan the computer system to find out more.
Keller kills Ruth, while Vale and Obrist escape. Vale cyberpathically hacks into the computer network using atelephone booth and downloads ephemerol shipment information directly into his mind. Keller is killed when the computer explodes during his attempt to intercept Vale. Vale and Obrist visit Dr. Frame, someone who is receiving the drug. Obrist encounters a pregnant woman and realizes the woman's fetus has scanned her. Vale confronts Dr. Frame and learns that Revok's plan is to prescribe ephemerol to pregnant women, turning their children into scanners. Revok's group captures Vale and Obrist and take them to the Biocarbon Amalgamate plant.
Revok reveals to Vale that they are both sons of Dr. Ruth, who developed ephemerol as a sedative for pregnant women. Ruth learned about the drug'sside effect during his wife's pregnancies, and he made them the most powerful scanners in the world by administering a prototype dosage prior to abandoning them. Revok plans to create and lead a new generation of scanners to take over the world, but Vale refuses to join him. Vale accuses Revok of acting like his father, which enrages Revok. The brothers engage in a telepathic duel, which incinerates Vale's body. However, when Obrist encounters Revok, she discovers that Vale somehow has managed to swap minds with Revok; the latter dying in the former's body during the duel.
William Hope,Christopher Britton, andLeon Herbert have uncredited appearances as Bicarbon Amalgamate employees.Neil Affleck has a minor role as a medical student.
Scanners was based on David Cronenberg's scriptsThe Sensitives andTelepathy 2000, which he planned to pitch toRoger Corman before beginning work onThe Brood.[10] Corman was shown the script, but did nothing with it.[11] Cronenberg has calledScanners one of his most difficult films to make; most Canadian film productions of the 1970s and the early 1980s were funded through a 100-percentCapital Cost Allowancetax shield for investors passed by Prime MinisterPierre Trudeau in 1974, and the film was rushed into production without a finished script or constructed sets to claim the subsidies.[12][9][13]
Victor Snolicki, Dick Schouten, andPierre David of Vision 4, a company taking advantage of Canada's tax shelter policies, aided Cronenberg in the film's financing.[14] Vision 4 dissolved after Schouten's death and reorganized into Filmplan International.[15]
The film's first draft was not a script, but instead a series of ideas.[16] The film was given two weeks of pre-production while a script was not yet written.[11] According to Cronenberg, he would spend mornings prior to filming writing scenes.[9] The film was initially titledThe Sensitives, but it was altered as Cronenberg felt "it was too wimpy" whileScanners "was very strong".[17] Cronenberg stated that the drug aspect of the film might have been influenced byBlue Sunshine.[18] StarJennifer O'Neill was given a script with all of the violence edited out and cried after seeing the uncensored script.[19]
The film was shot in Montreal from October 30 to December 23, 1979, on a budget of $4,100,000 (equivalent to $16,830,500 in 2025).[20] Cronenberg stated that "the first day was the most disastrous shooting day I've ever had" as "there was nothing to shoot" and a distracted truck driver watching the film crew hit a car, killing two women inside it.[21]
The "Future Complex" building in Vaudreuil-Dorion, erected in 1972 by the pharmaceutical company Roche Holding, provided the exterior of 'ConSec' headquarters.[22][23][24] Although many sources state that the lecture scene was filmed at Concordia University,[25][26][27] it was actually shot in the 158-seat auditorium of the "Future Complex" building.[28][29] The head explosion portion of the scene was filmed in a warehouse on Montreal’s waterfront.[26][27]
The Charles J. Des Baillets Water Treatment Plant doubled as the 'Bicarbon Amalgamate' compound.[23] The sequence of Revok (Michael Ironside) hijacking a car and causing another to crash were shot onRue de la Commune. Additional scenes were filmed in theYorkville neighborhood.[30] However, since the United States dominated the film industry and Canadian films were being marketed for international audiences, the film downplays its Canadian origin in favor of a generic "North American" setting.[31] The only indicators of its location are a scene of Revok and Keller meeting at theYorkdale station of theToronto subway and some visiblebilingual signs.
Cronenberg stated that "Scanners had the longest post-production of any film I've ever done" due to its nine months of editing and reshoots.[11]
Make-up artistDick Smith (The Exorcist,Amadeus) provided prosthetics for the climactic scanner duel and the iconic exploding head effect.[32][33][34][35]Chris Walas, working atLucasfilm at the time and later providing effects work forThe Fly andNaked Lunch, also worked on the exploding head effect.[36] Cronenberg later said in 2006 thatScanners was his most difficult film to shoot due to its special effects and complex story.[18]
The iconic head explosion scene was produced by trial and error, with the producers eventually deciding on a gelatin-encassed plaster skull packed with "leftover burgers" as well as "latex scraps, some wax, and just bits and bobs and a lot of stringy stuff that we figured would fly through the air a little better". When other explosive techniques failed to give the desired effect, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller told the crew to roll cameras and get inside their trucks with doors and windows closed; he then crouched down behind the dummy and shot it in the back of the head with a shotgun.[37]
The exploding head scene was filmed four times, but Cronenberg accepted the first shot and did not remain to watch the three others, opting to instead take a nap in his Winnebago. The scene depicting the exploding head was trimmed down to allow for a R-rating from theMPAA. Cronenberg originally intended for the scene to be the film's opening, but placed it later in the film after test screenings.[36]
The film was distributed byNew World Pictures in Canada, Les Films Mutuels in Quebec, andAvco Embassy Pictures in the United States.Scanners was released in the United States on January 14, and in Canada on January 16, 1981.[20]
A novelization by Leon Whiteson,David Cronenberg's Scanners, was also released in 1981.[38] The film was released onVHS in 1982.[39]
The film grossed $2,758,147 from 387 theatres in its opening weekend.[40] It grossed domestically a total of $14,225,876 at the box-office.[4] Cronenberg stated that it was his first film to benumber one at the box office.[16]
OnRotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 68% based on44 reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Scanners is a dark sci-fi story with special effects that'll make your head explode."[41] OnMetacritic it has a weighted average score of 60 out of 100 based on reviews from 8 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[42]Film professor Charles Derry, in his overview of the horror genreDark Dreams, citedScanners as "an especially important masterwork" and calling it thePsycho of its day.[43] In a contemporary review forAres Magazine, Christopher John commented that "Scanners is top-notch entertainment. It is haunting, exciting, shocking and literate – an unusual combination to discover in a film these days."[44]
Some reviews were less positive. Film criticRoger Ebert gaveScanners two out of four stars and wrote,"Scanners is so lockstep that we are basically reduced to watching the special effects, which are good but curiously abstract, because we don't much care about the people they're happening around".[5] In his review forThe New York Times,Vincent Canby wrote, "Had Mr. Cronenberg settled simply for horror, asJohn Carpenter did in his classicHalloween (though not in his not-so-classicThe Fog),Scanners might have been aGrand Guignol treat. Instead he insists on turning the film into a mystery, and mystery demands eventual explanations that, when they come inScanners, underline the movie's essential foolishness".[6]John Simon ofNational Review describedScanners as trash.[45]
A reassessment ofScanners in the 2012 issue ofCineAction looks at the film in light of Cronenberg's use of allegory and parables in much of his work. The argument is made that Cronenberg uses iconic imagery that refers directly and indirectly to the thirty-something Scanners as 1960spolitical radicals,counterculture hippies, and as nascentYoung Urban Professionals. As a result, the film can be seen "as an oblique reflection on what might happen when the counterculture becomes the dominant culture".[46]Kim Newman noted in an essay forThe Criterion Collection that at the same time the film rejects the conservative values of the 1980s and the nostalgia for the 1950s present in contemporary science-fiction films such asE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial andBack to the Future.[47] The film's fictional drug ephemerol also mirrors the real-lifethalidomide scandal, in which the popularWest German medicationthalidomide caused severebirth defects in children born to mothers prescribed the drug formorning sickness in Western Europe and Canada.[8]
AlthoughScanners was not nominated for any major awards, it did receive some recognition. TheAcademy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films gave the film itsSaturn Award in 1981 for "Best International Film", and, in addition, the "Best Make-Up" award went to Dick Smith in a tie withAltered States. The film had also been nominated for "Best Special Effects".
Scanners also won "Best International Fantasy Film" fromFantasporto in 1983, and was nominated for eightGenie Awards in 1982, but did not win any.[48]
Mondo released theHoward Shore score forScanners, alongsideThe Brood, onvinyl; it features cover art by Sam Wolfe Conelly.[49]
Scanners spawned sequels and a series of spin-offs; aremake was announced in 2007, but as of 2022[update] had not gone into production.[50] Cronenberg was not involved in the sequels as he was both uninterested and would not make money off the characters or story he wrote.[51]
In February 2007,Darren Lynn Bousman (director ofSaw II,Saw III, andSaw IV) was announced as director of a remake of the film, to be released byThe Weinstein Company andDimension Films.David S. Goyer was assigned to script the film. The film was planned for release on October 17, 2008, but the date came and went without further announcements and all of the parties involved have since moved on to other projects,[50] which wasn't made with because Cronenberg didn't give his approval.[52]
Attempts to make a series include Dimension in 2011,[53] Media Res andBron Studios in 2017,[54] andHBO, Media Res Studio, and Wayward Films in 2022.[55]
The first attempt came in 2007, when Darren Lynn Bousman was meant to reboot it, but it fell through because David Cronenberg didn't give his blessing (and they wouldn't more forward without it).
