Scanners (1981) on Netflix
Cameron Vale hears voices no one else can hear until a psychologist tells him he is a scanner, one of 237 psychics. ConSec sends him after Darryl Revok, a renegade scanner.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.7/1068,448 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes70%
Trailer
Plot summary
In a mall food court, Cameron Vale, a vagrant who hears voices he cannot silence, causes a woman nearby to have a seizure. Men he does not know seize him and bring him before Dr. Paul Ruth, a psychologist at ConSec, a private military company that sells weaponry and security systems. Ruth explains that Vale is one of 237 scanners, psychics who can read minds and injure people with their thoughts, and that the voices are the minds of strangers he cannot shut out. A drug called ephemerol temporarily blocks the ability, and Ruth trains Vale to master it. At a ConSec marketing demonstration, an attendee named Darryl Revok turns his power on the company's operative and wrecks the event. Revok is collecting scanners to dominate non-scanners, and Ruth urges Vale to infiltrate the renegade's group.
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Cast
- Lee Brokeras Security One
- Mavor Mooreas Trevellyan
- Adam Ludwigas Arno Crostic
- Murray Cruchleyas Programmer 1 (as Lee Murray)
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Scanners (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the exploding head, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller had the crew roll cameras and take cover inside their trucks, then crouched behind the dummy and shot it in the back of the head with a shotgun.
- The exploding head was a gelatin-encased plaster skull packed with leftover burgers, latex scraps, wax and stringy material, chosen by trial and error so the debris would fly better.
- Scanners was rushed into production without a finished script or constructed sets so its backers could claim a 100-percent Capital Cost Allowance tax shield for investors passed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1974.
- Cronenberg called the first day of shooting the most disastrous of his career: there was nothing to shoot, and a truck driver distracted by watching the crew hit a car, killing two women inside it.
- Scanners began as a series of ideas rather than a script and had only two weeks of pre-production; Cronenberg wrote scenes in the mornings before filming each day.
- Cronenberg said Scanners had the longest post-production of any film he had made, with nine months of editing and reshoots before it was finished.
- The ConSec headquarters exterior was the Future Complex in Vaudreuil-Dorion, built in 1972 by the pharmaceutical company Roche Holding; the lecture scene was actually shot in its 158-seat auditorium, not at Concordia University.
- The film's fictional drug ephemerol mirrors the real thalidomide scandal: the West German medication, prescribed for morning sickness, caused severe birth defects in children born in Western Europe and Canada.
