When the “Scanners” crew tried to visualize the protagonist’s (literally) mind-blowing power, they went through a long sequence of trial and error before finding the method that worked.
“They filled the head with shell macaroni and vermicelli and all blood,” the film’s director of photography Mark Irwin said in a 2016 behind-the-scenes segment for TIFF Originals. “It was great. But they couldn’t — we did this test and, every time we put a squib in there, you’d see the spark.”
Just like the “Sunny” team, the “Scanners” crew also found pyrotechnics ineffective. They created “a massive amount of smoke,” said special effects makeup artist Stephen Dupuis, adding that the resulting shot “looked more like the Death Star than, you know, a human head exploding.”
Many different attempts were made using a variety of effects and dummies of various materials. “Probably the one where it sort of vaporized would’ve been the most realistic, but it didn’t look very good,” added the film’s editor Ronald Sanders, a frequent collaborator of Cronenberg’s.
Finally, Gary Zeller of the special effects department decided that enough was enough. He took a double-barrel shotgun in hand, crawled underneath the dummy, and pointed the gun at the back of its head.
“We all headed for the hills except for the camera guys,” Dupuis recalled. “And he just shot it, and it just like — it was fantastic. It’s just like, the image was mind-boggling. You see the teeth, the eyeballs just shooting out and everything. All in like perfect detail. So, there you go.”