Why Scanners' Crew Resorted To A Shotgun For That Famous Head Exploding Scene
Writer/director David Cronenberg is well known for his science fiction and horror films, with grotesque gore gags and body horror prevalent throughout much of his work. This is the man who brought us the nightmarish Brundlefly mutant in "The Fly" and the freaky surgery sex of "Crimes of the Future," but one of his most impressively shocking moments came early in his career: the head explosion in the 1981 movie "Scanners." In the film, 237 people have become "scanners," or beings capable of immense telepathic and psychokinetic powers. Early on in the film, powerful scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) uses his powers to explode the head of a rival scanner (Louis Del Grande), and it is truly grotesque. Gore shoots in all directions as the scanner's head explodes, his face trapped forever in a moment of surprise. It's gross, it's gory, and it's glorious. It was also surprisingly simple to create.
In a video interview with TIFF for David Cronenberg: Virtual Exhibition, makeup artist Stephan Dupuis, editor Ronald Sanders, and cinematographer Mark Irwin discussed the movie magic that went into making the gruesome head explosion. They revealed that while they tried all kinds of different techniques to make it happen, the simplest ended up being the most effective.
Scanners used a shotgun to explode a head
Dupuis revealed that they had several different fake heads that they tried blowing up with different methods, including a plaster head, a wax head, and the gelatin head that ended up in the final film. They filled the heads with "shell macaroni and vermicelli" and fake blood before blowing them up, according to Irwin, but the problem was that every time they used a squib (a tiny explosive), there was a visible spark. Since the explosion was supposed to be purely the effect of Revok's mind powers, a spark or smoke would ruin the effect. Dupuis explained:
"When it exploded with the explosives there was a massive amount of smoke. And it looked more like the Death Star than, you know, a human head exploding."
So instead of explosives inside of the fake head, they opted for something a bit different: the explosive power of a shotgun blast from below. Shotguns are extremely powerful forces of destruction, especially at close range, so it was a dangerous but effective idea. Dupuis and Irwin shared that effects coordinator Gary Zeller crawled underneath the dummy version of Louis Del Grande, pointed a double-barrel shotgun to the back of the head, and pulled the trigger. The result can be seen in the film, and it's horrifying.
Old school movie magic
While the effect is really freaking cool, it was also pretty dangerous, as Dupuis pointed out, explaining that they all "headed for the hills" except for the camera guys. That doesn't seem safe at all, but it was a different era. In fact, when the "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" gang wanted to recreate the effect for their episode "The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell," the folks in charge at FX informed them that they were under no circumstances allowed to use a shotgun. It was just too dangerous, and that's saying something given the various stunts the gang have pulled over the years. Then again, safety standards have changed and the wild days of the 1970s and early 1980s are long gone — I seriously doubt anyone could get away with using real human skeletons as props these days.
Despite being truly disgusting, the exploding head in "Scanners" is only one of the grossest moments in David Cronenberg's filmography. He's a boundary-pushing director who's always been willing to get weird (and a little dangerous) in the name of art, cementing him as an all-time horror legend.