With one explosive exception: a notoriously gory and shockingly visceral setpiece in the director’s career-long mind/body discourse.Įarly in the film, we’re invited to a ConSec marketing event. Set alongside the obsessive grotesques of Cronenberg’s earlier work, Scanners is a relatively tame entry from Canada’s Baron of Blood. A ConSec doctor named Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) tasks Vale with eliminating the megalomaniacal Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside), a powerful scanner who intends to subjugate humanity, and all scanners who oppose him, with his gifts.
Scanners concerns an antisocial derelict named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), who is recruited by the mysterious ConSec research agency as one of the world’s few hundred “scanners” - individuals born with remarkable telepathic and psychokinetic abilities. As close to a standard sci-fi thriller as Cronenberg ever came, Scanners dodged the genre marketing practices that had consistently worked against him in the past to deliver his first mainstream hit. Luckily, Cronenberg’s notorious sense of calm prevailed, and Scanners was a box-office success. With only two months to wrap principal photography, Cronenberg was forced to write and shoot the film simultaneously, all while managing a hectic production with his biggest budget to-date. With director David Cronenberg hot off The Brood, the abnormal time pressures of the Canadian tax-shelter era rushed Scanners into production without a script. Much like its infamously explosive setpiece, the making of Scannerswas a real headache. This entry looks into the head explosion scene in Scanners.
Welcome to How’d They Do That? - a bi-monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off.