Graphic of an exploding head from Scanners

The Science of Cronenberg: Transcript 01

DAVID CRONENBERG: So the Korean War was in my head. Even though I didn’t politically quite understand it. And the soldiers that would come over those snow fields would be Chinese, not Korean really. Which was accurate. I mean, the Chinese did fight for the North Koreans. So that loomed large. And then the A-Bomb. The idea that there would be a nuclear war. And we did those exercises where you duck under your desk. It was like—“what?!” Because that would protect you in the event of an A-Bomb attack. And the idea of bomb shelters was huge. And in Science Fiction. That’s the other thing of course—Sci-Fi was absorbing all of these things of course, and I read Sci-Fi as well.