Scanners – What’s on Shudder, A Horror Movie Review by Kit Whitfield.
Directed by David Cronenberg, 1981
Yes, Scanners is on Shudder! So let’s talk about it. And you know what? Let’s not talk about the exploding head.
Wait, hang on. Let’s talk about that first and get it out of the way, because even if you’ve never seen Scanners you probably know this: Scanners is the exploding head movie. If you’re horror buff enough to be reading this website the chances are you’ll have seen it splash open in one of those scary-movie-moment clipshows or celebrations of special effects. It was a coup de theatre in 1981 and it still holds up: they filled up a model head with messy stuff and fired a bullet into it, and the moment is so brilliantly edited that it’s aged superbly.
But while we’re at it, let’s also admire the plotting of it. Previously this has been a quiet, eerie film, all half-empty malls and derelict spaces. We’ve wandered in lost, and the world is upsetting, but not, well, gory.
Here’s what we see:
A homeless man with a laser stare (Steven Lack, playing the character Cameron Vale) scavenges leftovers from a food court. He doesn’t try to bother anyone, he’s just looking for something to eat, but when a respectable patron sneers at him . . . he does something to her. He looks at her. She falls to the floor and convulses. He seems to want to make it stop, but he can barely puppet his own body, never mind help hers.

Mysterious men capture him, strap him to a bed, and tell him he’s ‘a scanner . . . That has been the source of all your agony.’ They then add a little extra agony him by filling the room with strangers whose thoughts he can hear until he freaks out under the eye of a recording camera – until an injection of something makes the voices quiet.
It’s a feral film happening on the fringes of society, and nothing makes sense except that people seem an inexplicable danger to each other. There’s horror somewhere, but it’s impossible to see.
And then we’re in a lecture hall, and everyone there seems to be coping a lot better. It’s all clinical and businesslike. They’re researching that mysterious word ‘scanner’, so maybe we’re going to get some answers. Nothing too bad seems likely to happen: we’ve already seen the outer reaches and the worst that happened there was someone had a seizure.
Then boom. Exploding head. We were not ready for this. There are no rules left in this world and we are not safe anywhere.
That’s where Scanners really gets you.

It’s a film where you’re never safe because you’re not even sure what safety would look like. And by the end, you probably still aren’t sure.
There’s a line in Cronenberg’s 1999 eXistenZ that I can’t help suspecting is either a manifesto or, since Cronenberg definitely doesn’t lack a sense of humour, the man poking a little fun at himself. Adrift in the plot, the hero remarks to the heroine:
We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.
And that’s really a very good description of your archetypal Cronenberg plot. The heroine of eXistenZ shrugs it off as being true to life, but here’s an interesting question: what kind of life? Because the answer, I think, depends on which Cronenberg film you’re in. The puzzle-box escapism of eXistenZ is not the sensation-seeking rapacity of Videodrome, which is not the hopeless yearning of The Fly, which is not, which is not. When you don’t understand what’s ranged against you, it becomes a kind of Rorscharch test. What do you want, and what are you afraid of? A lot of Cronenberg’s films are the same kind of unformed universe inflicting different answers on its protagonist-victims, varying according to what answers they might give.

So what, watching Scanners, do you want, and what are you afraid of?
Well, Cronenberg is famous for body horror: for the ‘new flesh’ that won’t stay in its place. The new flesh breaks the boundaries of social taboos and skin with equal abandon. It mutates, and sometimes it mutates your desires so you no longer know if it’s your old self having these new feelings at all. It seeps and pulsates with ambivalence. And it is, above all, unruly.
But what if your unruliness is invisible?
All right, I’m going to veer into a personal perspective here, but we might as well; there’s been decades to say impersonal things about Scanners and it’s anyway a movie that gets under your skin and pokes at the soft parts. And while it’s obviously not the only interpretation you can put on Scanners, it’s amazing how legible it becomes if you look through the lens of neurodivergence.
I’m not going to give a full history, but I come from a spicy family. That shapes you; by now, if I meet you and we strike up an immediate rapport . . . well, let’s just say that either you or your loved ones might want to take a few online quizzes. I first saw Scanners many years ago before I knew this was an issue, and it was a strange film – compelling, yes, but mysterious. Now?
The hero of a movie walks on screen. He doesn’t want trouble, but somehow he can’t be around people. ‘Normal’ social interaction just doesn’t work for him: he quickly gets overstimulated, and when he’s overstimulated he has a meltdown. When that happens he can’t control it even if he wants to. He hurts people accidentally, he suffers horrendously for reasons he can’t understand.
And then into his life steps a mysterious doctor
With a diagnosis that explains everything, and maybe even a medicine that could cure him! This is exciting!

But it’s not that simple, because the medicine is political. Opinions on how to use it vary violently. Power and resources are held by institutions, and the people that run those institutions don’t care about the scanners themselves. Only how they and their problems affect the non-scanner world. The scanner community is scarred by years of fear and bitterness and riven with factions. The plot of Scanners follows Cameron as he knocks around from scanner to scanner. Some of whom are militant, but it’s not clear to him which militants are right and which are wrong, and he hardly knows how to talk to any of them. Of course he doesn’t: coping with his scanning has been his whole life. That’s the only thing he’s had room for in his head.
‘You’re barely human,’ he’s told, and that’s the worst thing of all.
Because it’s true he’s not ‘normal’, and it’s ‘normal’ people who get to draw the lines around what is and isn’t human. But who gave them that right? ‘Normal’ people give it to themselves, and the people outside the lines aren’t consulted. The woman who says that to him is a scanner too; that’s how bad things are, that even scanners have shaky ideas about who’s human and who isn’t. But what she’s really identifying is the simple fact that Cameron is, well, socially awkward. He’s kind of a weird guy to talk to: whatever murderous conspiracy is happening around him he fixes you with that hawkish, slightly exotropic gaze and uses the same deadpan voice and he doesn’t seem to have any opinions.
But he isn’t inhuman.
His problem is that he’s been so subsumed by his disability – because that’s what it’s always been for him – that he never got the chance to develop a personality. How are you supposed to develop a sense of self when the world keeps jamming your signals? Cameron wasn’t just a scanner; he was an undiagnosed, untreated scanner. He didn’t want to have a meltdown; he didn’t want to starve; that was his life.
But now people know something about him he’s only just found out about himself, and they want things from him.

Cronenbergian forces can be indecipherable at the best of times. But here they’re all the more confusing because we’re seeing them through the reactions of a man for whom deciphering even ordinary social interactions is a new skill. He was too busy trying not to be himself, because there wasn’t a place in the world for selves like him. Other people’s selves kept pressing in on him, and his own self kept bursting out too dramatically. Scanning, when you don’t know what it is, tangles everything up.
It’s a superpower! It’s a curse! If you spend your time in the neurodivergent community, you hear those a lot.
Cameron is an unsettling protagonist. He isn’t just new to the world of scanners; he’s new to the world of people. He seems passive at first, more disturbed by a room full of people doing nothing than a car chase with guns. Drifting between one ally and the next and apparently influenced by whoever spoke to him last. When your mind is unruly, you don’t get to form your own objectives. They get dropped on you by other people, people who have the space to come up with plans while your only objective has been to hold yourself together.
But then you start to figure out who you are. And then you get to decide what to do about it.
Michael Ironside as the scanner expansionist Darryl Revok is the film’s famous monster. Of course, and Lack’s performance is an eerie one. He’s all observation without communication, a pair of eyes in a face that doesn’t know what expression to make. But it has a rightness to it. Scanners is a movie in which we get to watch a man figure out who he is from the ground up. By the end, we’re probably a little scared of him too, because any world with this much power in it is unlikely to hold a happy ending.
Early on, a head explodes, and in the climax scene, lots of flesh goes haywire in lots of ways.
But I don’t think these special effects would be so remembered. Excellent though they are, if they weren’t part of a story in which that violation has been happening silently, within the bounds of the skull, the whole time. For scanners living in a world that has no place for them things have always been this extreme. We just occasionally get to see it in fleshly form. The whole story is a kind of anguish; the body horror scenes are the scream arising from it.
Really, in Scanners, what I think we want is a world where people can be accommodated. And we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t make one. Think how much rage we’d create. Imagine if it came for us full-force.

I’m being dramatic enough here that I should probably wind in my neck long enough to say that I don’t mean neurodivergence is one long endless head-bursting disaster. Neurodivergent people are pretty normal, on the whole. And if you don’t think so then you probably need to adjust your ideas of ‘normal’. A neurodivergent person who’s safe to be who they are is probably pretty happy, and certainly not up to humanity-warping conspiracy antics. (At least, if they are then I guess I haven’t been invited to that particular party. Drop me a message, guys! I have ideas!)
But fiction puts emotional truths in dramatic forms. A scanner is a person who doesn’t fit into a factory-issue life. And there is an emotional truth to the idea that if you have a self that the world doesn’t see and make space for, it will boil under your skin.
Kit Whitfield

Kit Whitfield writes dark folk fantasy, most recently the Gyrford series: In The Heart of Hidden Things and All The Hollow Of The Sky, both of which were longlisted for BSFA Awards. Featuring fairy-smiths who forge the cold iron that repel malign spirits, belligerent bramble bushes, versifying pigs and a fiery dog that eats landlords. She lives in a London in a neurodiverse family and tries to grow pot plants.
In the Heart of Hidden Things (The Gyrford series) by Kit Whitfield

Jedediah’s father walked out of his life forty years ago. Now he’s back. He won’t apologise, he doesn’t explain – and, impossibly, he hasn’t aged a day.
If you asked the folks of Gyrford, they’d tell you Jedediah Smith looked up to his father. After all, Corbie Mackem was the Sarsen Shepherd: the man who saved the Smith clan from Ab, the terrifyingly well-meaning fey who blighted a whole generation with unwanted gifts.
Corbie was a good fairy-smith. And if he wasn’t a good father, well, that isn’t something Jedediah likes to talk about. Especially since no one knows where Corbie’s body lies: the day of his son’s wedding, forty-odd years ago, he set off to travel and was never seen again.
These days Jedediah is a respectable elder, more concerned with his wayward grandson John than with his long-buried past, and he has other problems on his mind. There’s the preparations for Saint Clement’s Day, and the odd fact that birds all over the county have taken to hiding themselves, and the misbehaviour of Left-Lop the pig – which has grown vegetation all over its back, escaped its farm and taken to making personal remarks at folks in alarmingly alliterative verse.
But then disaster strikes. Ab is back. And Corbie, thought long dead, returns to Gyrford – younger than his son . . .
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