SCANNERS
MIND BLOWING
AS DAVID CRONENBERG’S HEAD-EXPLODING SF THRILLER MARKS ITS 40TH ANNIVERSARY, WE SPEAK TO ACTOR STEPHEN LACK AND CINEMATOGRAPHER MARK IRWIN
WORDS: OLIVER PFEIFFER
IF THERE’S ONE IMAGE SYNONYMOUS WITH THE career of writer/director David Cronenberg it’s arguably the head-explosion from 1981’s science fiction horror
Scanners.
The bloody culmination to a hostile meeting of minds between two “scanners” (superhumans born with mind-reading and manipulating abilities), it perfectly exemplifies the filmmaker’s obsession with victims of scientific or medical experiments gone terribly wrong.
After the psychosexual extremes of Cronenberg’s earlier Canadian-made shockers Shivers, Rabid and The Brood, Scanners, with its sci-fi conspiracy thriller edge, was also a conscious attempt by the former “king of venereal horror” to veer a little closer towards commercial filmmaking. “I guess it was kind of experimental in a way, to take these scenes and run with them,” director of photography Mark Irwin, who shot all the Cronenberg films from The Brood to The Fly, tells SFX. “It’s not hard to make a head-trip now, but back in those days this was a reach. That was David’s comfort zone: to make people uncomfortable.”
For the basic premise of a telepathic race hell-bent on world domination, Cronenberg drew from a chapter involving psychic “Senders” in William S Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch (later adapted by the director into the 1991 film). Due to the tricky Canadian film-financing situation of the times, the filmmaker was given the green light a mere fortnight before the hectic two-month production commenced. “I knew if I could survive Scanners I could survive anything!” he would later say, admitting that he started filming without a completed script and spent lunch breaks writing scenes to be shot later that day, fine-tuning the script in the evenings.