45 Years Ago, David Cronenberg Secretly Mastered A Sci-Fi Subgenre
The Canadian is more than just body horror.
Fans of legendary director David Cronenberg love to talk about gross body horror. It’s what made The Fly (1986) arresting and Videodrome (1983) provocative. In all the obsession around Cronenberg’s oeuvre, it sometimes feels as though his talent as a science fiction artist is overlooked. But if you rewatch the early Cronenberg film Scanners, released 45 years ago today, what you’ll find is a sci-fi masterpiece.
Stories of the regulation and weaponization of telepaths are nearly as old as sci-fi itself. In 1953, Best Novel at the first Hugo Awards went to Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, a story where telepathy is common enough to have made murder nearly impossible. In 1957, Harlan Ellison’s short story “Deeper Than Darkness” explored telepaths and telekinetic folks being arrested and weaponized by the military. It was one of sci-fi’s most interesting tropes well before the X-Men arrived in 1963, but before Scanners, it’s hard to say that a movie or TV show had a convincing telepathic drama set in the real world.
That is the triumph of Scanners. We start in a busy shopping mall, where a homeless man, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), causes a woman to have a seizure because she’s saying horrible things about him. Later, Vale claims she was “doing it to herself,” implying that the telepaths in this story — the scanners — can only really use what's inside a person 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 picks up Vale and seemingly wants to help him, but, at the same time, a sadistic scanner named Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) has just made a man’s head explode and is believed to have formed a scanner underground. Vale’s job, whether he likes it or not, is to infiltrate Revok’s group and bring the scanners under control.
Funding issues forced Cronenberg to start filming Scanners without a completed script, which is shocking given the film’s fantastic plotting. Legends like Bester and Ellison would have murdered someone with their own minds to write a telepath script this good, and in fact, if you read a random Ellison or Bester story and then watch Scanners, it feels like you’re watching a perfect adaptation of what they were going for.
Scanning can really take it out of you.
Sci-fi’s New Wave lasted from 1965 to 1980, but Scanners feels like the most New Wave product ever. Cinephiles are fixated on Cornenberg’s revolutionary use of body horror, but Scanners is shocking because it feels like New Wave sci-fi come to life, uncensored and unfiltered. The twist ending of Scanners even involves a mind duel, not unlike the Harlan Ellison story “Mefisto in Onyx,” which would arrive in 1993.
For fans of genre cinema, watching Scanners is like watching two generations of sci-fi royalty interact. Ironside would later be known for sci-fi classics like Total Recall and Starship Troopers, and is even present in X-Men: First Class, perhaps as a nod to the fact that he, too, knows something about telekinesis. Meanwhile, McGoohan, famous for the mind-bending sci-fi series The Prisoner, plays the kind of figure that he fought against in the series, and seems aware that his casting is somewhat metafictional.
Scanners is like a Rosetta Stone for sci-fi and horror: the style predicts Cronenberg’s later horror works, but the cast and writing feel like windows into the larger world of science fiction. It isn’t just a great movie; even as the heads are exploding, you’re getting an education.
