David Cronenberg is one of those directors whom I find perennially interesting, yet I find it hard to love most of his films.

My favourites of his are The Dead Zone and Videodrome, with The Fly and A History Of Violence not far behind. Scanners pre-dates all of those, but shares his icy Canadian sensibility, as honed in his earlier, relentlessly nasty “body horror” movies Shivers and Rabid. 

Scanners, like many of Cronenberg’s movies, is relatively high concept. The title refers to a group of psychics with telekinetic powers. These get demonstrated relatively early on in the movie in an infamous scene set in a lecture theatre where the baddie makes another man’s head explode via his thoughts alone (an effect achieved by blasting a dummy head with a shotgun). Whatever the intellectual pretensions of Scanners,  I remember its water-cooler buzz at the time was as “the movie where that guy’s head explodes!”

This US one-sheet poster demonstrates those psychic powers in action. It is available to buy here.