Scanners

The exploding head effect was achieved by filling the actor's latex head with dog food, leftover lunch, fake blood and rabbit liver, then firing at it from behind with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

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David Cronenberg once described Scanners as the most frustrating film he had made up to that point. The production was rushed: to secure a tax write-off on the financing, shooting had to begin without a finished script and be completed in roughly two months, forcing Cronenberg to write and shoot simultaneously. Cronenberg also spoke about difficulties with the leads, particularly Patrick McGoohan and Jennifer O'Neill, and the hostility between them.

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Production photographs exist of shots in which Cameron's head explodes in a shower of sparks during the final duel between Cameron and Revok. It appears this climax was filmed, but David Cronenberg chose not to include it in the final cut.

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William S. Burroughs's 1959 novel 'Naked Lunch' contains a section about an enemy telepath organization, the "Senders," bent on world domination, which was a clear literary inspiration for this film. David Cronenberg would later direct the film version of Naked Lunch (1991).

DEEPER MEANING · SOURCED

In the accident scene in the record store, a blimp hanging from the ceiling is prominently visible, placed there for RSO (Robert Stigwood Organization), the record company that paid for the placement. By the time the film was released, RSO had gone bankrupt.

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Stephen Lack, who played Cameron Vale, became a successful and prolific painter.

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In February 2007 it was announced that Darren Lynn Bousman would direct a remake of the film, to be released by The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films. David S. Goyer was to write the screenplay. The film was scheduled for release on 17 October 2008, but the date came and went without further announcement, and all parties involved have since moved on to other projects. In a 2013 interview, Bousman recalled that he would not make the film without David Cronenberg's approval, which was never given.

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For the scene in which Darryl is set on fire and his head rises upward, Michael Ironside wore a pair of false eyes that Dustin Hoffman had worn in Little Big Man (1970).

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David Cronenberg moved the head explosion to the beginning of the film for latecomers to the cinema.

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A very early treatment from 1976 titled "Telepathy 2000" was set in the future, opened with the protagonist (named Harley Quinn) telepathically raping a woman on the subway, and unfolded as a spy film. In this version, a company called Cytodyne Amalgamate was raising evil Scanners to take over the world, and the US Government used good Scanners to stop them.

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Stephen Lack kept the exploding fake head.

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The drug Ephemerol bears an eerie resemblance to a real-life scandal of the late 1950s, when women who took thalidomide during pregnancy (marketed to relieve morning sickness) began giving birth to children suffering from phocomelia (shortened, flipper-like limbs) or other physical deformations.

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Michael Ironside was initially hired for part of one or two scenes and was paid 5,300 Canadian dollars.

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The issue of Life magazine that Revok shows Vale during their argument at the end of the film is dated 22 July 1946. The propeller is a real subject. Revok opens it to pages 38-39, but the close-up is of pages 48-49. The Ephemerol advertisement is pasted over a Bendix Radio ad on page 49.

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It was shot between 30 October 1979 and 23 December 1979, and first released in January 1981.

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The exploding head sequence was created by special makeup artist and foam latex specialist Chris Walas, who would go on to work with David Cronenberg on the creature effects for The Fly (1986). As cinematographer Mark Irwin recalled in the 2014 short documentary The Scanners Way: Create the Special Effects in 'Scanners', "The problem with pyrotechnics is that a firecracker can blow something up but it produces a spark. And if you want that kind of 'mental pressure,' you don't want to see that there's an ignition, and we just couldn't quite achieve that." Special makeup artist Stephan Dupuis confirmed this. He recalled for TIFF, "When [the head] exploded with the explosive, a huge amount of smoke came out. It looked more like the Death Star than a human head." As effects coordinator Gary Zeller recalled, "The effect wasn't originally seen as a standout piece. The initial approach was quite simple. That is: make a head, fill it with air and give it a pneumatic discharge." "We had a head that looked like a balloon, which looked very ridiculous," he remembers. Dupuis explained that variations continued: "We made a plaster head. Of course it looked like a plaster head. Of course it didn't work. Then we made a wax one. That looked exactly like an exploding wax head. Despite a lot of blood and gore," they eventually found a method that looked convincing. Walas recalls, "We took a life cast of Del Grande (Louis Del Grande) and made a positive gelatin in the mold." This was then fitted with a plaster "skull" that served as both structural support and container for all the gunk seen on screen. "It was filled with various materials and sealed with wax," Walas explained. The head was packed with surplus material such as latex scraps and stray wax from the lab. There were also gelatin "brain" pieces and, in Dupuis's words, "a handful of corn syrup blood" and "leftover burgers." Walas notes they sought "a lot of fibrous things that we thought would fly better in the air." Michael Ironside was said to be in frame. As recounted in Mental Saboteur (2014), when the actor learned from the special effects team what the plan was (namely that he would be close to an explosion), he saw an opportunity. As Ironside put it, he pointed out to the team that the plexiglas enclosures around the camera could cause debris to ricochet. So I said, "I'll tell you what I'll do, but I want this much money and I want an insurance policy of this size. And that made them decide quickly to do it on their own." The speaker's hands, which look tight and firm on the table, are casts of Walas's hands. He notes that the rings were an eleventh-hour print made to match Del Grande's jewelry, and he remembers they were made from an undertaker's candle and the gold wrapping of a cigarette pack. The original plan for the sequence was to shoot it in a Concordia University lecture hall. The effects team reportedly set up all the elements and, in Walas's words, realized in a very understated way that it "could create a lot of mess," so the sequence was later shot in late December in a government-allocated warehouse on the Montreal waterfront. Or, as Irwin put it on the day of shooting, "basically outside," no one could get the Del Grande dummy to explode properly. So at one point Zeller boldly declared he was "talking nonsense" and they moved to Plan B: a double-barreled pump-action shotgun. In Irwin's account, Zeller told the crew to walk in front of the coverage cameras and everyone else to get into their trucks and close the windows. He then lay down on the ground behind the dummy, aimed his shotgun at the back of its neck and fired. Regarding the choice of ammunition, Zeller said, "We settled on kosher salt. Just large salt crystals that aren't too reflective, so they didn't read very well on camera. And then we blew the head off, everything was shot everywhere and it looked magnificent. If you want to blow up a head, I recommend using kosher salt. But don't do this at home," When the producers saw the dailies of the head explosion, they were reportedly both horrified and excited, shouting "perfect! We're in trouble!" To avoid an X rating, the sequence was reshot three times. But as Irwin recalled, "It was never as good as what was shot at first." This was partly because, depending on whom you ask, the reshoots were actively sabotaged, among other things. This is the original kosher salt mixture we see in the final film.

BEHIND THE SCENES · SOURCED

Darryl refers to Cameron as his "kid" brother. In real life, Michael Ironside, who played Darryl, is four years younger than Stephen Lack, who played Cameron. Darryl is 35 years old, while Ironside was a little under 30 during filming.

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This may be the first film in which telepathic activity results in the medium's nose starting to bleed.

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Robert A. Silverman, who plays the artist/scanner Benjamin Pierce, also appears in David Cronenberg's Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Naked Lunch (1991) and eXistenZ (1999). Silverman would also act alongside Cronenberg in Jason X (2001).

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Jennifer O'Neill, who receives the most billing, does not appear until the 37th minute.

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Very shortly after the film's worldwide release, it was licensed for distribution in the former Yugoslavia under the Serbo-Croatian title "Kontrolori" (Controllers), which led to a hit song of the same name by the Belgrade synth pop trio Beograd whose lyrics were loosely based on the film's theme.

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Some of the pieces in Benjamin Pierce's art gallery are very similar to, though not a tribute to, the final appearance of the doctor and nurse in The Masks (1964), an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959).

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The name of the character Kim Obrist, played by Jennifer O'Neill, was taken from Kim Obrist, an assistant to the film's producer Claude Héroux.

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The film can be considered part of the late 1970s to early 1980s cycle of films dealing with telekinesis and psychokinesis. Among the pictures, among others, are Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), The Sender (1982), Firestarter (1984), Scanners (1981), The Medusa Touch (1978), Ruby (1977), Jennifer (1978), Patrick (1978), The Dead Zone (1983), The Kirlian Witness (1978), and the parodies Zapped! (1982) and Modern Problems (1981).

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Patrick McGoohan worked on the film for two weeks.

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Stephen Lack began filming four days after completing the shoot for Head On (1980).

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There are at least two references to Alfred Hitchcock films: The Birds (1963), in the explosion and fire at the gas station, and Psycho (1960), in Dr. Ruth's internal monologue just before her death, which recalls Norman Bates's behavior. Both were Cronenberg's homage to the master, who had died before filming began.

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Scanners (1981) first drew mainstream film audiences' attention to David Cronenberg and his controversial body horror style, and it has since been reevaluated as a cult classic. A scene showing Revok psychically causing a rival scanner's head to graphically explode is particularly well known.

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The film is part of spine number 712 of the Criterion Collection.

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The film features cast members from other early 1980s Canadian horror films, such as Michael Ironside (Visiting Hours (1982)), Lawrence Dane (Happy Birthday to Me (1981)), Robert A. Silverman (Robert A. Silverman), Anthony Sherwood (Terror Train (1980)), and Neil Affleck and Thomas Kovacs (My Bloody Valentine (1981)).

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The novel of the same name was written by Leon Whiteson, who was born and raised in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He lived in Toronto and Los Angeles and was an architecture critic. In addition to his credit, he had other novels and non-fiction books.

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The scene in the doctor's waiting room near the end of the film was shot on the first day of filming.

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This was William Hope's first film role. He plays an uncredited Hazmat Suit Worker.

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This was Canadian radio host Dean Hagopian's first English-language acting role.

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The film bears similarities to the X-Men comic book: Dr. Ruth resembles Professor Charles Xavier, and Darryl Revok resembles Magneto.

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The character Benjamin Pierce laughs in the same way as Benjamin Pierce in M*A*S*H (1972), played by Alan Alda.

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Italian censorship visa # 77405 was issued on January 29, 1982.

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