Scanners

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. In the film, "scanners" are psychics with unusual telepathic and telekinetic powers. ConSec, a purveyor of weaponry and security systems, searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. The film's plot concerns the attempt by Darryl Revok (Ironside), a renegade scanner, to wage a war against ConSec. Another scanner, Cameron Vale (Lack), is dispatched by ConSec to stop Revok. Scanners premiered in January 1981 to lukewarm reviews from critics but became one of the first films produced in Canada to successfully compete with American films at the international box office. It brought Cronenberg and his controversial style of body horror attention from mainstream film audiences for the first time and has since been reevaluated as a cult classic. It is particularly well known for a scene that depicts Revok psychically causing a rival scanner's head to explode. Plot Cameron Vale is a vagrant suffering from voices manifesting in his head. 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 explains that Vale is one of 237 super-powered individuals known as "scanners" capable of telepathy, empathy, biokinesis, technopathy and psychokinesis. Ruth injects Vale with a drug called "ephemerol," which restores his sanity by temporarily inhibiting his scanning abilities, and teaches him to control them. ConSec is recruiting scanners to stop a malevolent underground ring of scanners led by Darryl Revok, a former mental patient who was driven mad from hearing uncontrollable streams of thoughts.