There are 4 billion people on earth. 237 are Scanners. They have the most terrifying powers ever created... and they are winning.

Their thoughts can kill!

10 Seconds: The Pain Begins. 15 Seconds: You Can't Breathe. 20 Seconds: You Explode.


The title of this David Cronenberg sci-fi horror film refers to a group of people who have telekinetic powers that allow them to read minds and give them the ability to make other people's heads explode. The children of a group of women who took an experimental tranquilizer during their pregnancies, the scanners are now adults and have become outcasts from society. But Darryl (Michael Ironside) decides to create an army of scanners to take over the world. The only person who can stop him is his brother Cameron (Stephen Lack), who wants to forget that he was ever a scanner. Winner of the International Fantasy Film Award at the 1983 Fantasporto Film Festival, Scanners was followed by a pair of sequels, neither of which involved Cronenberg.

Scanners is a 1981 Canadian science-fiction horror action film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jennifer O'Neill, Stephen Lack, and Patrick McGoohan. In the film, "scanners" are people with unusual telepathic and telekinetic powers. ConSec corporation searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. The film's plot concerns the attempt by Darryl Revok, a renegade scanner, to wage a war against ConSec. Another scanner, Cameron Vale, is dispatched by ConSec to stop Revok.


Scanners maintains a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes,[4] with positive reviews from Chicago Reader, the Austin Chronicle, and TV Guide.
Film critic Roger Ebert gave Scanners two out of four stars and wrote, "Scanners is so lockstep that we are basically reduced to watching the special effects, which are good but curiously abstract, because we don't much care about the people they're happening around".[5] In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Had Mr. Cronenberg settled simply for horror, as John Carpenter did in his classic Halloween (though not in his not-so-classic The Fog), Scanners might have been a Grand Guignol treat. Instead he insists on turning the film into a mystery, and mystery demands eventual explanations that, when they come in Scanners, underline the movie's essential foolishness".

Release Date: January 14, 1981

Distrib: Avco Embassy
$41,756,500
Boxoffice: $14,225,876 2013: