Back in September, news broke that Scanners, David Cronenberg’s cult classic sci-fi horror film, is now set for a series adaptation at HBO. While this seminal work has been lined up for film and TV remakes several times over the years, this iteration seems to be moving full steam ahead. And the timing is no coincidence; Cronenberg returned to the big screen this year with Crimes of the Future, his first feature film in eight years.
While the film was met with somewhat mixed reviews and a dismal box office return, its Cannes reception signified an evergreen appreciation of the director’s signature blend of extreme violence and philosophical musings on technology, sex, and modern society. The main subject of Crimes is the idea of surgical body modification as the next step in enthralling, psycho-sexual gratification. It’s more titillating than TV and more immersive than VR. In this ghastly future, humans connect their bodies to high-tech surgical devices, unlocking a perverse form of euphoria that only literally invasive technology can provide.
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Cronenberg has been fascinated with this specific nexus of technology, sex, and human nature for decades. The Fly (1986), often considered to be his masterwork, portrayed a horrifically flawed attempt at the synthesis of flesh and technology through Dr. Seth Brundle’s experiments in teleportation. Films like Videodrome and Existenz continued on these themes, showing the ways in which normal citizens had begun casually fusing their anatomies with the artificial. He zeroed in on the addictive natures of television and virtual reality, blowing up those fears to visceral, psycho-sexual proportions. And as time has progressed, these eerily-prescient tales of human folly ring like cautionary tales for what was to come. And while Scanners didn’t exactly predict the proliferation of telepathy among the general public, it did explore this specific crossroads in a formative era for genre films. Furthermore, the film proved to be a definitive moment in Cronenberg’s career, and showed Hollywood that audiences were interested in extreme horror with intellectual undercurrents.
A History of Violence
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Cronenberg got his start with the ultra-low budget films Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), but it wasn’t until the Canadian government instilled a tax shelter program for filmmakers that he was able to get legitimate financing for his films. Towards the end of a given year, wealthy individuals could contribute money to various local film productions as a way of getting a tax break. That financing would arrive in the fall, and the productions would only have until the end of the year to spend it. Fast Company (1979), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), and Videodrome (1983) were all made this way: greenlit, produced, and shot within the span of a few months.
Scanners was a particularly brutal turnaround: “There were literally two weeks pre-production… Two weeks. Without a script,” Cronenberg said in Chris Rodley’s Cronenberg on Cronenberg. But unlike previous attempts, Scanners was Cronenberg’s first major financial success, earning just over $14 million at the box office against a budget of $4 million. His 1986 film The Fly would soon blow that success out of the water, but Scanners broke the seal.
The film centers on Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack): a disheveled man in his mid-30’s, who learns that his unwieldy psychic ability is shared by a group of underground men and women. Under the care of Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), an experimental psychopharmacologist, Cameron learns to control – and strengthen – his so-called ”scanning” power. Dr. Ruth’s employer, a shadowy research organization called ConSec, has been funding this scanner training program, under which they’ve been able to identify and assist over 200 such scanners. This scanning ability is explained in plain scientific terms; a “derangement of the synapses,” as Ruth calls it. The doctor even has a medication to suppress the psychotic urge to scan – a tranquilizer called Ephemerol.
Scanners can link their nervous system with that of another being, for the purposes of either communication or inflicting pain. Cameron soon learns that the other scanners have been surreptitiously swayed to the dark side by a nefarious scanner named Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside). Before long, it’s a battle of good vs. evil as Cameron and a group of benevolent scanners race to mobilize their effort and combat Revok’s crew.
Telepathy and Techno-Horror
While there are some exciting car chases and gunfights along the way, the central pull of the film are the several scenes in which the scanners show off their telepathic abilities. Telepathy and general psychic abilities were becoming a popular trope in movies at the time, and it’s hard not to draw parallels to popular films of the time. The Shining (1980) had just been released the year prior, and featured iconic scenes in which Danny Torrance uses his telepathic ability to communicate.
Star Wars (1977) also serves as an important precursor to Scanners. When Dr. Ruth dies, Cameron can sense it, in the same way that Obi-Wan Kenobi senses that Princess Leia’s home planet Alderaan has been destroyed by the Death Star. The way in which Obi-Wan uses his Jedi mind tricks to turn away stormtroopers is also not unlike how Revok scans ConSec officers, forcing them to kill themselves. Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) is perhaps the biggest point of comparison, as the film’s success essentially created the dangerous telepath trope. In the explosive finale, Carrie uses her power to trigger a violent chain reaction that kills a handful of prom-goers.
The idea of using telepathy as a weapon had been somewhat established, and Cronenberg took it a step further by leaning into the visceral and intellectual components. The now iconic scene in which Revok battles against another scanner, causing his opponent’s head to explode into a bloody mist, blended sci-fi with body horror in an unprecedented way. Scanners also fused the genres by integrating telepathy with technology. Late in the film, Cameron uses a payphone to jack into ConSec’s computer system in an attempt to steal information.
The ConSec team surges the motherboard, which Cameron then shoots back at them, resulting in an explosion that kills a handful of ConSec goons. The finale of the film, however, is perhaps the most visceral. As Cameron and Revok face off, the veins in their bodies bulge and explode in a shocking display. In classic Cronenbergian fashion, the scene mines the human body for horror.
Low Budget, High Concept
The success of Scanners, along with Halloween (1979) and Friday the 13th (1980), showed the market viability of low budget horror at the beginning of the decade. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), as well as the success of Stephen King adaptations like the aforementioned Carrie and The Shining helped usher in a heyday for horror films. The market viability of horror became so rock solid that the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) franchises could churn out new installments almost every year. While that budget tier of scary movies proliferated, a separate wave of direct-to-video horror films began hitting video stores nationwide due to new advances in VHS players and accessibility of movie rental stores. Cronenberg had no interest in creating sequels, but other filmmakers took the reins and created a direct-to-video Scanners franchise, including two sequels and a spin-off series of films in the ’90s.
Scanners’ release in 1981 proved to be perfect timing in that sense, sitting at the precipice of the horror and home video booms. But the film’s legacy isn’t all about luck. The film’s signature blend of visceral, anatomical practical effects and heady techno-philosophy is its real claim to fame. By rooting the horror of the film both in technology and human anatomy, Cronenberg was able to popularize a specific strain of genre film that delighted on a spectacular level while also offering food for thought. He didn’t just set up his own career, he sent shock waves out into the zeitgeist, showing both audiences and filmmakers the horrific possibilities of technology. And in every era since then, clever filmmakers have found ways to mine the technology of the day for close-to-home scares.
