Scanners is a 1981 science-fiction action horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jennifer O'Neill, Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan. In the film, "scanners" are people with unusual telepathic and telekinetic powers. ConSec corporation searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. The film's plot concerns the attempt by Darryl Revok, a renegade scanner, to wage a war against ConSec. Another scanner, Cameron Vale, is dispatched by ConSec to stop Revok. Scanners are people with the ability to read ("scan") other people's thoughts (telepathy), and the power to cause things to happen simply by thinking about them (telekinesis). ConSec, a purveyor of weaponry and security systems, searches out and captures scanners, ostensibly to protect the public from them, but actually to use them for its own nefarious purposes. Most scanners are unhappy people, condemned to "hearing" an unstoppable flood of strangers' thoughts. Cameron Vale (Lack) has uncommonly powerful scanning abilities but cannot handle the pressure and has withdrawn completely from society. A homeless derelict, he lives in a shopping mall.