Scanners
Scanners is a 1981 film from Canada, directed by David Cronenberg, running 103 minutes. reelscum files it under body horror.
- Year
- 1981 · 1980s films
- Country
- Canada
- Runtime
- 103 min
- Director
- David Cronenberg
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (15/100)
- Banned in
- UK
Defined in the glossary: Body horror
On the Section 3 seizure list, chiefly on the strength of its exploding-head set piece.
The exploding head made Cronenberg bankable. The film around it is smarter than that scene.
Cronenberg's most commercial early film, famous for the moment a telepath makes another man's head explode in the first reel, an effect achieved by shooting a latex head packed with dog food and leftovers. Around that notorious scene is a paranoid conspiracy thriller about psychics weaponised by a shadowy corporation.
Michael Ironside is a superb villain, and the film's ideas about corporate control of the mind are sharper than its reputation as the head-explosion movie suggests.
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Written about
- Cult films and the audiences that make them
Cult status arrives after release, through late-night television, midnight bookings and VHS trade, as The Brainiac, Walking Tall and Patrick each show.
Filed alongside
Videodrome
Long live the new flesh. Cronenberg's prophecy about media, the body, and a chest that opens.
The Brood
Cronenberg turns a divorce into monsters. Rage made flesh, and it is about his own custody battle.
Shivers
Cronenberg's debut. A phallic parasite turns a luxury apartment tower into an orgy of the infected.
From Beyond
Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs do Lovecraft again. A machine that lets you see what should stay unseen.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Sixty-seven minutes of industrial nightmare. Nothing else looks like it.
Rabid
Cronenberg gives Marilyn Chambers a blood-feeding stinger. Montreal falls apart around her.
Basket Case
$35,000, shot on 42nd Street, and completely charming. The best kind of cheap.
Society
A teen suspects his rich family are not human. The finale proves it, wetly.
Cemetery Man
A cemetery caretaker shoots the returning dead and falls in love repeatedly. Beautiful and deranged.
Frankenhooker
A man rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the parts of exploded sex workers. Exactly that stupid, and great.
Tokyo Gore Police
The Japanese splatter movement at full arterial pressure, from the man who built it.
Brain Damage
A parasite gives a young man euphoric highs in exchange for feeding it brains. Addiction as horror.