45 years ago, Scanners's sparked a controversy and put David Cronenberg on the map

You're a scanner, which you don't realize. And that has been the source of all your agony.

During the late 1970s, a young David Cronenberg was able to procure financing from the Canadian government for his body horror feature debut, Shivers. “It took me four years to get Shivers made, and I got $13,000 for it,” Cronenberg told CBC, chronicling the challenges surrounding his controversial debut, which was perceived as a “horrific, perverse” entry during release for its depiction of graphic sexuality and gore.

This kernel of controversy went on to become a full-blown streak marking the director’s illustrious career, with everything from Crash to Eastern Promises sparking outrage and intense debate over their polarizing themes, which include the fetishization of violence and the brutal realities of organized crime. But Cronenberg doesn’t indulge in sensationalism for the sake of it. He’s interested in the visceral connection between bodies and identities, where transcending the limits of the flesh often becomes a metaphor for salvation or ruination.

And after releasing a string of projects following Shivers (including the frightfully resonant 1979 body horror, The Brood), Cronenberg made his most ambitious offering at the time: Scanners, a gruesome sci-fi horror about individuals with Mutant-like abilities, released 45 years ago on Jan. 14, 1981.

Scanners was originally supposed to start with a notorious head explosion scene, but preview audiences reacted so negatively to this extreme opener that it was pushed to the 10-minute mark. The scene in question is set after we learn that private military company ConSec is researching “scanners,” a group of super-powered individuals with powerful telepathic abilities. Cronenberg quickly cuts to a ConSec conference, where scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) volunteers to demonstrate his abilities onstage. As the presenter warns about the painful side effects of being scanned, the speech is interrupted as Revok unceremoniously blows his head into smithereens. A shocking explosion of blood and viscera immediately greets the screen, becoming the sole talking point about Scanners during its theatrical release.

The merits of Scanners venture beyond this iconic shot, which is, without a doubt, a stunning achievement from a practical effects standpoint. But this moment of condensed shock value helped Cronenberg achieve mainstream recognition and international success, which quickly pushed his films into commercially-viable territory. Instead of using this as an opening to make crowdpleasers, Cronenberg gravitated towards thematically bolder films with bigger budgets, leading to genre classics like The Fly, Videodrome, and Dead Ringers. Between The Brood and 1999’s Existenz, Cronenberg had already cemented his trademark sensibilities, including his love for uncomfortable, boundary-pushing horror and a willingness to weave profound philosophy into his provocative narratives.

Scanners didn’t just put Cronenberg on the map. It marked a shift in his perspective on body horror, which became more distinctly cerebral over the years (as evidenced by the post-human themes in Crimes of the Future and the connection between grief and voyeurism in The Shrouds). At its core, Scanners is an espionage thriller that leans into the anxieties of a social outcast, mixing the paranoia inherent in fictional stories about government conspiracies and cover-ups. (The similarities to X-Men could’ve been the result of cultural osmosis, as the themes of transhumanism and consequent xenophobia can be traced back to the late ‘60s, especially in the works of H.G. Wells and the sci-fi tropes explored in popular genre shows like The Twilight Zone.)

In Scanners, we are supposed to root for Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), the troubled scanner hired to take down the unpredictable Revok, who wants to create a telepathic army to take over the world. Both Vale and Revok are socially isolated and have no support systems in place, but they take dramatically different moral routes in a film that shuns binary judgment.

It’s tempting to throw words like “prescient” around, but Scanners doesn’t consciously anticipate the pitfalls of technological abuse or the dangers of a hyper-connected world. Instead, it illustrates that among 230-odd scanners, extremists like Revok who are willing to push human evolution to its limits will always exist. At the same time, men like Revok aren’t created in a vacuum. He is the result of inhumane corporate experimentation and a world willing to exploit people like him in the name of scientific advancement.

Scanners ends with a tense psychic duel between the two men, which Vale wins after merging with his brother-turned-opponent. Even then, the lingering sentiment isn’t triumph. Vale’s supposed victory feels pyrrhic. There’s an angry cynicism to Scanners, as it doesn’t end with the world being saved or with Vale playing savior to his telepathic brethren. Every scanner is still exposed to the overstimulating mental chatter of millions (not unlike the never-ending deluge of social media discourse, which ends up shaping our role within the collective consciousness).

Scanners isn’t Cronenberg’s most thematically polished film, but it serves as a gateway to his fascination with technologically-reliant identities and bodily metamorphosis. As Vale telepathically assimilates Revok, the world inches closer towards a reality that considers psychic mutation as an inevitable stage of human evolution.