Scanners (1981) is a voluminous buffet of strangely named characters but lets stop off at that beguiling and mysterious mistress of the furtive nosebleed, Kim Obrist. She serves a dual role in the movie; on the one hand, she’s a grounded telepath who helps the lead character (Cameron Vale as played by the deeply strange-looking Stephen Lack) come to terms with his unsettling talent. On the other, she’s the only significant female in a film rammed to the gills with dour blokes. And as played by the serene and very lovely Jennifer O’Neil, Kim out-dours the surly lot of them with nary a twitch of a smile the whole way through.
Yes, Kim feels the cold chill of the Cronenbergian winter and dresses accordingly with a wide assortment of woolly hats, scarves and fully quilted coats. All the better to defend herself against the plethora of body-horrible intrusions that threaten her safe passage through the movie. And it must be catching because everyone else wraps up real warm including Lack (did I mention he looks strange?) and a brooding, rather distracted Patrick McGoohan who wears exactly the same suit he wore in The Prisoner. And the last series of Danger Man. And Columbo. I guess it saved on wardrobe costs.
As well as Cronenberg and Tom Jones (I’ll get to him), Jennifer O’Neil also worked for that master of deranged extremity Lucio Fulci as his star in Sette Note in Nero/The Psychic (1977), an elegant and extremely well photographed chiller that, along with Don’t Torture A Duckling (1973), demonstrates how much better he could be when he wasn’t dicking about with cardboard actors and buckets of sheep entrails. Not that those movies aren’t brilliant fun, but you get my drift.
O’Neill is a disarming and highly under-rated presence who, with a fair wind, can pull you right into the emotion of a script. Her trademark poise is very well utilised by Fulci, less so by Cronenberg. Its one of those rather hilarious falacies of Cronenberg’s career that he’s become an “actor’s Director”. Bullshit, frankly. He certainly got lucky with James Woods in Videodrome and Jeff Goldblum in The Fly but his long and painful descent into pretentious rubbish is directly linked to his indulgence of “pet” actors including Jeremy Irons, Ralph Fieenes and Viggo Mortenssen in a series of deeply anal movies that a bunch of suits in Canada seem to keep paying for. I do have a kooky theory on this phenomenon involving Cronenberg threatening these (clearly insane) money-men with a version of Marilyn Chambers’ armpit phallus from Rabid, but that’s for another time. The point is that it’s hard to make a great actor look bad but David Cronenberg is fighting the good fight. He certainly did his best to knock the wind out of Jennfer O’Neill’s sails with some very flatly directed scenes opposite Mr Lack but he can’t quite manage it because she’s the embodiment of that old cliche “never less than watchable”. As I’m sure her nine (to date) husbands would concur.
Jennifer O’ Neill is also Tom Jones’ co-star in The London Bridge Special, one of the most bizarre TV shows on the 70s. Made to celebrate the completion of the brick-by-brick reconstruction of the former London Bridge in Arizona State Park in 1972, it also featured The Carpenters, Kirk Douglas and disperate (look it up) bunch of other celebs seemingly force-marched into the desert to take part. Jennifer spends most of her time fending off an on-heat Tom Jones and, it has to said, fails to project much of the aforesaid poise or stillness during various cheesy song and dance routines she has to perform. It’s certainly a big jump from this to her Scanners ice maiden routine, although a double-bill would make for a very elcectic evening in, should you be that way inclined.
So I Googled “Obrist” to see if Cronenberg was having a bit of sport with us and coding some secret meaning into the name and all I found was a few random Scandinavians and a technology company. Of course, the company could have been named after the character, gotta be unlikely though. Mind you, there’s a cafe in Snaresbrook named after a character from Dawn of the Dead so what do I know.
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The Man in the Elegant Room 
In the credits for “Scanners”, Kim Obrist is also listed as assistant to producer Claude Heroux. I am guessing that this is where the character name came from.