Scanners is a 1981 Canadian science fiction horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Stephen Lack, Jennifer O'Neill, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan.

[4][5][6][7] It brought Cronenberg and his controversial style of body horror attention to mainstream film audiences for the first time and has since been reevaluated as a cult classic.

After involuntarily causing a woman to have a seizure with his telepathy, Vale is captured by the private military company ConSec and brought to Dr. Paul Ruth.

Ruth injects Vale with a drug called "ephemerol", which restores his sanity by temporarily inhibiting his scanning abilities, and teaches him to control them.

Revok dispatches assassins to follow Vale as he visits an unaffiliated scanner named Benjamin Pierce, a successful yet reclusive sculptor who copes with his abilities through his art.

Vale learns of a pharmaceutical company, Biocarbon Amalgamate, which he soon discovers Revok is using to distribute large quantities of ephemerol under a ConSec computer program called "Ripe".

Vale cyberpathically hacks into the computer network through a telephone booth and downloads ephemerol shipment information directly into his mind.

Vale and Obrist visit a doctor on the list of ephemerol recipients and discover that it is prescribed to pregnant women, turning their children into scanners.

Ruth learned about the drug's side-effect during his wife's pregnancies, and he made them the most powerful scanners in the world by administering a prototype dosage prior to abandoning them.

Scanners was based on David Cronenberg's scripts The Sensitives and Telepathy 2000, which he planned to pitch to Roger Corman before beginning work on The Brood.

[12][9][13] Victor Snolicki, Dick Schouten, and Pierre David of Vision 4, a company taking advantage of Canada's tax shelter policies, aided Cronenberg in the film's financing.

[22] The sequence of Revok (Michael Ironside) hijacking a car and causing another to crash were shot on Rue de la Commune.

[24] The only indicators of its location are a scene of Revok and Keller meeting at the Yorkdale station of the Toronto subway and some visible bilingual signs.

[11] Make-up artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist, Amadeus) provided prosthetics for the climactic scanner duel and the iconic exploding head effect.

[30] The exploding head scene was filmed four times, but Cronenberg accepted the first shot and did not remain to watch the three others, opting to instead take a nap in his Winnebago.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Scanners is a dark sci-fi story with special effects that'll make your head explode.

[35] Film professor Charles Derry, in his overview of the horror genre Dark Dreams, cited Scanners as "an especially important masterwork" and calling it the Psycho of its day.

[4] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Had Mr. Cronenberg settled simply for horror, as John Carpenter did in his classic Halloween (though not in his not-so-classic The Fog), Scanners might have been a Grand Guignol treat.

The argument is made that Cronenberg uses iconic imagery that refers directly and indirectly to the thirty-something Scanners as 1960s political radicals, counterculture hippies, and as nascent Young Urban Professionals.

[41] Mondo released the Howard Shore score for Scanners, alongside The Brood, on vinyl; it features cover art by Sam Wolfe Conelly.