‘I’m gonna suck your brain dry…’
For many years, David Cronenberg’s seminal sci/fi horror classic was merely another film that scared me in the video shop with it’s visceral image of Michael Ironside – veins bulging and eyes popping out of his head – staring at me like a demented nightmare. That image stayed with me, along with the cover of The Evil Dead and A Nightmare on Elm Street, seared into my brain and often returning to me with a blood curdling scream just as I was about to drop off to sleep. The latter two became horror staples in my formative years, but somehow, it has taken me another two decades or so to finally get round to Scanners…
Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) is the head of an underground group of superhumans -known as scanners – who have the ability to inflict great pain and damage using their mind. Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) also has this ability, and is recruited to help destroy the shady cabal of scanners once and for all.
Scanners is bookended by two incredible scenes that both boast Michael Ironside using his abilities to destroy something. Master director David Cronenberg has a great time with the special effects here, and it is these two scenes, more than any other, that have ensured that Scanners lives on in notoriety. There is much more going on here than exploding heads, however. Ironside himself is perfectly intimidating as the wonderfully evil Revok, and the rest of the cast do well to pull everything together without ever allowing Cronenberg’s vision to succumb to silliness or melodrama. Instead, the outlandish storyline is delivered in a matter of fact way which helps to ensnare the viewer in its tangled web of shady government agencies and vigilantes roaming the streets with shotguns.
Cronenberg is known for his love of body horror, and while he is more restrained here than usual, the moments in which he does let loose are some of the film’s most iconic moments. The Canadian horror legend was on a roll by this point with Scanners the second film in a sequence that also took in The Brood, Videodrome and The Fly. When also taking into account early effort Rabid and his Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone, it is clear that I was perhaps harsh in declaring Cronenberg as being merely the 8th best horror director of all time, based on Scanners, there is an argument that he should be pushing top five.
As with so many Cronenberg efforts, Scanners is bold, innovative and unique, and any horror fan worth his salt should have seen it. Just don’t leave it 25 years like I did.