Enthusiasts of the legendary director love to discuss visceral body horror. It’s what made (1986) compelling and (1983) thought-provoking. Amid the fixation on Cronenberg’s body of work, his prowess as a science fiction creator often seems overshadowed. Yet revisiting Cronenberg’s early film Scanners, released 45 years ago today, reveals a science fiction masterpiece.
Tales of telepaths being regulated and weaponized are nearly as old as science fiction itself. In 1953, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man won the first Hugo Award for Best Novel—a story where telepathy is so prevalent that murder has become nearly unthinkable. In 1957, the short story “Deeper Than Darkness” explored telepaths and telekinetics being detained and weaponized by the military. This was one of sci-fi’s most intriguing tropes long before the X-Men debuted in 1963, but prior to Scanners, no film or TV show had delivered a believable real-world telepathic drama.
This is the triumph of Scanners. The film opens in a bustling shopping mall, where Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a homeless man, triggers a seizure in a woman who is speaking cruelly about him. Later, Vale claims she was “doing it to herself,” suggesting that the telepaths in this story—the scanners—can only turn a person’s own inner thoughts against them.
We soon learn of a private weapons corporation called ConSec, where a lone scientist, Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), is trying to prove that scanners can be controlled. He takes Vale under his wing, seemingly aiming to help, yet simultaneously, a sadistic scanner named Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) has just caused a man’s head to explode and is believed to have formed an underground scanner group. Vale’s task, whether he wants it or not, is to infiltrate Revok’s group and bring the scanners under control.
Funding challenges forced Cronenberg to begin filming Scanners without a completed script, a striking fact given the film’s exceptional plotting. Legends like Bester and Ellison would have gone to great lengths to craft a telepath story this strong; in fact, reading a random Ellison or Bester tale and then watching Scanners feels like viewing a perfect adaptation of their vision.
The New Wave of science fiction spanned 1965 to 1980, but Scanners feels like the ultimate New Wave creation. Film enthusiasts focus on Cronenberg’s groundbreaking use of body horror, but Scanners is striking because it feels like New Wave sci-fi brought to life, uncut and unfiltered. The twist ending of Scanners even involves a mind duel, similar to Harlan Ellison’s 1993 story “Mefisto in Onyx.”
For fans of genre cinema, watching Scanners is akin to witnessing two generations of sci-fi icons intersect. Ironside would later gain fame for sci-fi classics like Total Recall and Starship Troopers, and even appears in X-Men: First Class, perhaps as a nod to his familiarity with telekinesis. Meanwhile, McGoohan, known for the mind-bending sci-fi series The Prisoner, portrays the type of figure he once opposed in the show and seems aware of the meta aspect of his casting.
Scanners acts as a Rosetta Stone for sci-fi and horror: its style foreshadows Cronenberg’s later horror works, while its cast and writing offer windows into the broader world of science fiction. It’s more than just a great movie; even as heads explode, you’re gaining insight.