9 Under-rated Horror Masterpieces By Directors You Love

David Cronenberg is an ideas guy. His films are preoccupied with philosophical questions about the meaning of bodies, the limits of experience, and the squishy, fleshy nature of human consciousness.

This might make for a fun seminar, if you like that sort of thing. But it doesn't necessarily make for great movies, and his cinematic output is, to say the least, pretty uneven. Whilst he's had big thumping hits like The Fly, Videodrome and Eastern Promises, he's also made some turgid, dreary garbage.

The received wisdom about Scanners is that it’s a tedious, silly stinker only worth watching for one shot of an exploding head that takes place in the first fifteen minutes. Now, it can't be denied that this effect is the best shock moment of this delirious paranormal sci-fi horror, but there's much more to Scanners than one bursting bonce.

Like Cronenberg's best films, Scanners focuses on the machinations of a secret, sinister organisation with terrible powers and it raises troubling questions about the relationship between technology and the human mind. Not to mention, it has an extraordinarily bloody and gross effects finale to boot.