Fans of legendary director David Cronenberg love to talk about gross body horror. It’s what made The Fly (1986) arresting and Videodrome (1983) provocative. In all the obsession around Cronenberg’s oeuvre, it sometimes feels as though his talent as a science fiction artist is overlooked. But if you rewatch the early Cronenberg film Scanners, released 45 years ago today, what you’ll find is a sci-fi masterpiece.
Stories of the regulation and weaponization of telepaths are nearly as old as sci-fi itself. In 1953, Best Novel at the first Hugo Awards went to Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, a story where telepathy is common enough to have made murder nearly impossible. In 1957, Harlan Ellison’s short story “Deeper Than Darkness” explored telepaths and telekinetic folks being arrested and weaponized by the military. It was one of sci-fi’s most interesting tropes well before the X-Men arrived in 1963, but before Scanners, it’s hard to say that a movie or TV show had a convincing telepathic drama set in the real world.
